For the love of all that is good and graceful, stop deleting/screening comments without mod permission. We have had a rash of people breaking the rules, being given a warning and then immediately deleting their comments, thus breaking the rules again in the process. This is incredibly frustrating for us moderators and gives us more work for absolutely no reason.
We have gotten a lot of new people lately who apparently do not read the rules before participating. I implore all members, new and old, to take a bit of their time to familiarize themselves with the rules listed in the userinfo. In the meantime, I am going to be discussing a harsher punishment with the other mods for people who do what I described above, as it is getting entirely out of hand when we are handing out double to triple warnings left and right from people deleting their comments after being told to stop flaming/using hard to read fonts/going off-topic/etc.
"I didn't know it was against the rules" is not an excuse. They're right there on the info page.
Again, DON'T DELETE YOUR COMMENTS! We have to warn people for this almost every day, especially lately, and that is honestly ridiculous. It is only polite to familiarize yourself with a community's rules before participating in it, so please do so.
We have gotten a lot of new people lately who apparently do not read the rules before participating. I implore all members, new and old, to take a bit of their time to familiarize themselves with the rules listed in the userinfo. In the meantime, I am going to be discussing a harsher punishment with the other mods for people who do what I described above, as it is getting entirely out of hand when we are handing out double to triple warnings left and right from people deleting their comments after being told to stop flaming/using hard to read fonts/going off-topic/etc.
"I didn't know it was against the rules" is not an excuse. They're right there on the info page.
Again, DON'T DELETE YOUR COMMENTS! We have to warn people for this almost every day, especially lately, and that is honestly ridiculous. It is only polite to familiarize yourself with a community's rules before participating in it, so please do so.
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artists_beware- Commissioner & Artist, Warning & Kudos Community
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The rules are so easily accessible that there's no excuse for stumbling in without reading them and then promptly breaking them, TWICE in a row. And it's been happening a lot lately.
It's not that it's a bad suggestion, it's just not practical for us. We're volunteers and we already put a large amount of time into AB.
I just don't see the benefit being worth all the trouble. We've already done it before, and all it did was make extra work.
The majority of members in A_B don't even comment; it is just a few who jump in without reading the rules (and the occasional experienced member who goes a bit overboard and forgets). It is for these folks that we are making the addendum to the 'punishment' scale.
A user signs up and starts breaking rules. I may warn them in-thread just to nip it in the bud, but for the first serious violation, depending on the severity, their comments are edited or deleted, and they are sent an e-mail explaining the situation and what they can do to avoid having it happen again. this keeps disruption off the mainsite/forums and conversations on-track, and it also keeps the peanut gallery out of the mod/user interaction.
Second violation, again depending on severity of offense, the offending comments are edited/deleted and they are either temp-banned with a note they get to see when they try to log in stating why and for how long (here at LJ you'd probably have to send a note) or they're sent a final warning with sterner language letting them know that they will be banned should they persist.
Third violation, they are banned from posting altogether. They are more than welcome to get in touch with us via the sites' Contact Form if they like to discuss the ban at that point, but as for further interactions with our community, they've proven they can't handle it -- or, they've proven that they just don't check their e-mail! Either way, if they're cool about it when they get in touch we'll unban them but keep an eye out for further problems. If they're jerks about it, though, they can stay banned for all I care. :3
idk, i know LJ has other options available (i think editing comments is out, but freezing threads is a decent alternative i've seen employed here), but i have no problems handing out warnings and temp-bans for people who break the rules. if it were me, i'd say screening would be worth a warning since that's fixable, but deletion would be worth a temp-ban due to the fact that there's no getting half of the discussion back.
Trying to moderate membership or send quizzes is just a silly amount of time and effort that most of the volunteer mods could not expend
I think people would be surprised how much effort we put into AB. They can't really see it because 90% of it is in the background, but trust me, it's a lot more work than occasionally telling someone to not namecall or what have you.
This, basically. If A_B was on a private forum rather than on LJ, than I could see quizzes or something working out, as they'd be embedded into the sign up process. Otherwise, unless LJ changes up how the sign-up to comms works... yeah the plan we have is a lot better.
Type of thing, obviously it would take a bit to set up but it is possible.
Or have a hidden password....
Its a good idea, but its just not a good one for A_B.