Replies

Knowing full well I don't have any marbles in this game, and am also rgateful for finding this site, and the education I've gained from FR, I still believe that the Moderator situation as presently configured is untenable. You have access to approximately 3000 distinct posters a day, of which at least 10% can responsibly and artfully perform the duties necessary to moderate the threads.

When John Robinson first posted the threads asking for input on the new feature of moderators, many good Freepers strongly opposed the idea. The collective response of the naysayers criticisms has come to pass. FR needs a shot of Populism in it's Moderation functions! To that end I agree with Registered's comments, and would like to add that pulled threads should be available for anyone to read, if the thread is specifically called up through some new mechanism like a holding bin for some limited amount of time. Again, trust the forum participants, trust the populist wisdom here. Give the people a feedback mechanism to counterbalance overbearing Moderators, without you having to police every squabble.

One feature I'd like to see would be an automatic FreepMail to the author of a removed post, perhaps along with a short sentence from the mods indicating why it was pulled. Something like: "Your post #N on thread XXXX has been removed by the moderators. Reason: Obscene language. Offending post attached below."

Unless they go back and reread the thread, people are often not even aware that they *have* had a post pulled. They should be notified when it occurs so they can learn what might be over the line. The "Reason:" would be helpful in understanding why. And the "attached below" would let people save a local copy of what might have taken them a long time to compose, or look it over to see what the problem was (and/or remove the offending part and repost the benign part of the reply).

And while I've got my wish list out... I have no objection to trollish or inflammatory threads getting pulled, but several times in the past few months valuable threads have been pulled after hundreds of replies because tempers got hot, dumping lots of valuable information (i.e. the non-flame part) into the bit bucket. It'd be better if such threads were merely locked, and/or the offending posts flushed. For example, the "Agreement of the Willing" thread had a huge amount of valuable discussion and ideas, and was a papertrail of how the agreement was hammered out and who had which ideas/objections -- it'd be a big help in setting the stage for the next agreement revision "meeting". But now it's entirely unavailable due to some flames.

Whenever possible, I'd like such threads to be locked if need be but still available for reference. For most threads, it's a shame to lose the good posts just because some bad ones appear in the same thread.

Finally, on a somewhat different topic, will we ever get the ability to search not just for thread titles, but for *text* in the thread archives? There has been a vast amount of valuable information posted to FreeRepublic, but much of it is unfindable unless you can remember enough of the thread title to find it on the Search page. A few minor changes would make all of the FR archives searchable by Google -- no need to strain the FR database or server. The only downside I could see would be that it would let folks antagonistic to FR do "quote mining" for posts that could make us look bad (like they can't do that *now*, eh?), but that could be resolved by only allowing registered posters with some minimum amount of posts or time on FR to retrieve archived threads found through Google, or something along that line -- maybe make it a subscription-only service. I know *I'd* pay for it.

"When John Robinson first posted the threads asking for input on the new feature of moderators, many good Freepers strongly opposed the idea. The collective response of the naysayers criticisms has come to pass. FR needs a shot of Populism in it's Moderation functions! To that end I agree with Registered's comments, and would like to add that pulled threads should be available for anyone to read, if the thread is specifically called up through some new mechanism like a holding bin for some limited amount of time. Again, trust the forum participants, trust the populist wisdom here. Give the people a feedback mechanism to counterbalance overbearing Moderators, without you having to police every squabble."

Dittos on this ... I've seen too many interesting but leftie articles 'banned' pronto. We ought not be afraid of dissent, we ought to learn from it and overcome it.

A simple idea to counterbalance banning. Have a "star" score on articles "five stars" to "zero stars" ... and filter seeing those articles. The only people who should be banned are posters of obscenities and outright trolls. JMHO!