You laugh. You haven't walked in my shoes, nor seen what I've seen.

(Add CPVC main steam piping @30psi to your list)

Kelly, As your moderator, when locking threads, I prefer to use the Blue locktite product. It allows disassembly with common hand tools if desired.

Robert, the policy on locking rather than deleting portions of discussions was based on academic discussion policies... There has always been a hope that this discussion board can be run as a more academic site than other railfan sites... and as such would carry more authority. This may be a false hope... and in reality its more like herding cats.

I would also say that for every thread which is locked, or more so, which the board collectively chooses to discuss how it came to be locked, there are several (many) private emails... demanding a thread be locked or removed. Sometimes we act on the request... sometimes we politely say no... There are also regular emails expressing outrage at some member's behavior (some of the outrage is legitimate, some humorous...)

There are at least three members of the board who email me before posting... they don't want to be moderated, and check and ask if I might edit comments before they post...

Every time I warn or lock a thread there will be one or two private emails telling me "I didn't do anything"... (sometimes they didn't, but more often they did... )

There are at least 4 members, who are polarizing... Some might be sarcastic... and those individuals could post that "Many Steam Locomotives are painted black" and I would get emails stating that they are the rear portion of a donkey and should be banned from the board...

For now I will continue to use my judgement and warn or lock threads as I believe is needed. In most cases this is a snap judgment... Much like an umpire at a baseball game I will make lots of snap judgments... I will listen to arguments for a different decision to a point... but at some point I may suggest that you take out a subscription to Trainorders... (this is not meant to insult trainorders, but they have a different role)

In many cases a thread gets locked not because of the primary discussion, but because of a side discussion... and in those cases we welcome the original discussion to restart as a new thread. Consider the action a hard restart.

Your generally friendly moderator since 2004...
Randy

Randy, for what it's worth, I appreciate the effort. I have an idea how much work this takes, work you don't get paid for and I'm sure is a giant pain in the backside, but someone's gotta do it if it's gonna be a forum anyone will want to come to...

Many steam locomotives are painted black.

[dives for the foxhole]

What about those "self-locking" threads.....they're easier to work with than the blue stuff and less messy.....

Mark Jordan stood up to support me and the Tube issue, I will pay it forward;

I very much cried foul in respect to the note that was posted about my company in respect to pending litigation of others. I used the term "Fowl" as I viewed the comment as CS (Chicken $#@!, or FOWL, in my view).

I feel like I can take a lot. I put up with the rumors, I shrug most of them off. My company has a very clearly posted book on the morals and ethics of our company (I am happy to send you one upon request, PM me). I draw the line when it comes to criticism of me or my company when an off sided comment is made that accuses me of wrong doing or intentional wrong doing or supporting a cause that I do not believe in. I will also admit that the poster that posted the comments about my company was sent a number of PM's by me and I was in no way, kind, considerate, polite or even reasonable and I did inform said posted that I was perfectly capable of fighting legal battles and the first one would be against those who make such comments about me.

I support our country and our Constitution and the right to free and open press. I support it to the point that the comments made can degrade me (or others) and cause un-rightful or unlawful harm to me or my business or the "good will" that is present with all or either position. I love a healthy debate. I am willing to answer any question. A question is never formed in an accusatory comment that was FOWL (foul).

The Moderators have been more than fair, unbiased and reasonable in their approach to all comments.

If any of you have a reasonable question for me that I have failed to answer, post it or PM me and I will get back to you.

Thank you,

There's the problem right there. You're fighting online abuse with a really old playbook.

Abuse is an arms race. You evolve, they evade, you adjust, they adapt. Especially for trolls. They also love flipping your own rules around against you. Meanwhile we as a society gain more understanding of what motivates these disturbed people and we change tactics to suit. The rules must evolve with present day threats, just as "delete individual posts" has evolved, as well it should


Well that's even worse... you've adopted a ruleset that isn't even informed by your own history. No, you need to be much, much more agile than that, and fight the war being fought on your turf today.

The ruleset for professional academics works in a context of "be seen being a jerk-hat, be passed up for promotion". Here you need a ruleset that forces random people on the Internet to an academic standard. I don't see how you can do that with kid gloves; the only option I see is hold high content standards. Nothing motivates a writer like his words facing capital punishment.


That is just the background noise of public debate. But you partly brought it on yourself, because this board does not feel like there's a firm hand on the moderation rudder, the sense or order here isn't clear or sharply enforced. A rule of thumb you might use is "would this make it into the L&RP slush pile?"

Even harder to enforce rules upon monkey C when monkey Du has gotten away with it for so long...


And what they all have in common is... you don't owe them a forum! However they do owe you conduct which serves the purpose of the forum. And like you say, they have many other choices of forum in which they could vanity-post. In fact, there are forums specifically for vanity posting. Whether this is one of them is the moderator's call.

[out of sequence]

Well we are dealing with railfans and some of them have mental issues of one kind or another. Trolls are not without their mental issues. And of course the Internet is dissociative anyway, hard to realize there's a human behind those screens.


My tendency would be toward deleting both. Neither serves the purpose of the forum.

I actually agree with Mr. MacDowell's sentiment that the playbook used to moderate this forum is very old, and easily exploitable.