META: Pool Rules

[EDMLite]

Everyone who posts here cares very deeply about their work.

Most of the time, that's a good thing.

Now and then, however, that kind of passion can cause otherwise
reasonable people to forget where they are, or why they came here.

This is a place for telling stories.

Criticism of stories is okay, even encouraged. Complaints about
someone who broke the rules is still, technically, on topic -- though
in my opinion, those matters are often best resolved through an
exchange of e-mail.

Personal attacks of any kind are way out of bounds.

There are too many good stories to tell, and too few people
telling them, to waste our time doing anything else.

--Rob Rogers

[Andrew Perron]

On Wed, 20 Jun 2012 05:50:23 +0000 (UTC), EDMLite wrote:

> This is a place for telling stories.
>
> Criticism of stories is okay, even encouraged. Complaints about
> someone who broke the rules is still, technically, on topic -- though
> in my opinion, those matters are often best resolved through an
> exchange of e-mail.
>
> Personal attacks of any kind are way out of bounds.
>
> There are too many good stories to tell, and too few people
> telling them, to waste our time doing anything else.

Indeed!

With that said, while Adrian's story probably went too far, I do think the
basic idea behind it wasn't bad. Possibly, the fight scene could be
rewritten into something less insulting.

Andrew "NO .SIG MAN" "Juan" Perron, gonna go work on some non-Martin
stories now.

[Adrian J. McClure]

On Jun 20, 10:03 am, Andrew Perron <pwer...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Indeed!
>
> With that said, while Adrian's story probably went too far, I do think the
> basic idea behind it wasn't bad. Possibly, the fight scene could be
> rewritten into something less insulting.
>
> Andrew "NO .SIG MAN" "Juan" Perron, gonna go work on some non-Martin
> stories now.

Agreed on all counts. I do have an idea for how to make this work, but
I realize now that we should put what to do with Martin's legacy up
for vote first, once we've cooled down a bit. All the ideas I had
could more or less work taken in a slightly different context.

I will have to clean up his mess a bit in Spoon of Destiny, though.
I'll dispatch Googlemesh and such later today.

AJM (trying to look forward now, not back)

[Scott Eiler]

On 06/19/2012 10:50 PM, EDMLite wrote:

> This is a place for telling stories.
>
> Criticism of stories is okay, even encouraged. Complaints about
> someone who broke the rules is still, technically, on topic -- though
> in my opinion, those matters are often best resolved through an
> exchange of e-mail.
>
> Personal attacks of any kind are way out of bounds.

These are all good rules. I see from the LNH FAQ we already have all
sorts of rules about using other people's characters.

Last weekend I realized, this *is* a moderated group. (I posted
something heavily off-topic here by mistake, but Russ caught me,
thanks.) So if we want to have these as formal rules, we could actually
put a moderator to serious work, at least if we can find a new Martin to
stir up the storytelling.

[Russ Allbery]

Scott Eiler <sei...@eilertech.com> writes:

> Last weekend I realized, this *is* a moderated group. (I posted
> something heavily off-topic here by mistake, but Russ caught me,
> thanks.) So if we want to have these as formal rules, we could actually
> put a moderator to serious work, at least if we can find a new Martin to
> stir up the storytelling.

Your friendly neighborhood moderator would rather not do that. :)

Here's a bit more information about how the moderation actually works, for
those who are interested, since I've not mentioned this on the group in a
few years and we've had various turnover:

* If the post is from someone who's regularly posted here for a while and
seems to know what the group is for, *and* it has a valid keyword (as
required by the charter), it gets posted automatically with no human
intervention on my part.

* If the post is from someone I recognize but it doesn't have a keyword, I
add some keyword and then post it. This happens a lot with replies from
Google Groups when the original poster used a keyword in [], since
Google Groups unhelpfully removes that keyword automatically. (I have
no idea who thought that was a good idea.) Please note that I generally
still don't actually read the post any more than is required to figure
out what keyword to use.

* If the post is from someone I don't recognize but has a keyword, I skim
it to be sure that it looks like it's on-topic and then post it. After
a few of those (around five or so, with the actual metric being "when it
starts annoying me to manually approve them all the time"), I add that
person to the whitelisted list so that their stuff gets posted
automatically.

* If the post doesn't seem to be on-topic, I send mail back to the person
with a copy of the post, either asking more questions or rejecting it.
This happens pretty rarely (maybe three or four times a year).

* If the post is spam, I just delete it.

The primary effect of moderation here is to eliminate the spam, which is
on the order of 10-25 posts a day otherwise that y'all never see (and that
mostly I never see either, since I have a Bayesian filter that discards
most of it).

All of this takes me all of about ten minutes a week, which is good since
that's about as much time I have to spend on it. :) Nearly all the posts
go through automatically. The only reason why I caught Scott's accidental
post to the wrong group was because it didn't have a keyword.

Other than that, the main effect of moderation is to enforce the keywords.
Honestly, I'm dubious about how important that is now. Originally, there
was a concern that the group would be high-traffic and people would have a
hard time finding the stuff in the universes they care about and ignoring
the stuff in the universes they didn't care about, but I really doubt this
is an active problem for anyone at this point. But it's in the charter,
so I keep doing it, and it's also a *great* way of catching spam, even
spam that comes from forged email addresses of regulars (which happens).

If y'all want the moderation to do more social policing, well, there are a
couple of problems with that. One is that it takes a lot more time, and
it's not time that I really have or want to spend on doing that. Another
is that it puts the moderator in the center of every argument, which is
kind of stressful for the moderator and may or may not be actually healthy
for the group dynamics.

I generally figure everyone's an adult and people will sort things out
amongst themselves given some time and opportunity, and that's generally
been the case. People get upset, have public arguments, leave the group
in a huff, come back later (or not), and occasionally yell at each other,
but to me it's always seemed within the realm of fairly normal
interpersonal drama for a group of people collaborating. I don't know
that it's actually better to try to stifle all of that; I'd be worried
that it would just break out in some other way, and possibly more
unpleasantly and more passive-aggressively.

What I can do as moderator is keep people from coming in from outside and
stirring the pot just for the hell of it, which has been attempted a few
times in the past and for which I have no tolerance. But when it's an
argument between people who are all invested in the group, I think I'd
normally do more harm than good by trying to get in the middle of it.

--
Russ Allbery (ea...@eyrie.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>

[Adrian J. McClure]

And let's not forget: We'll probably need more active moderation if we
start bringing in a lot of new people.

AJM (any day now)

[Andrew Perron]

On Wed, 20 Jun 2012 21:53:02 +0000 (UTC), Russ Allbery wrote:

> This happens a lot with replies from
> Google Groups when the original poster used a keyword in [], since
> Google Groups unhelpfully removes that keyword automatically. (I have
> no idea who thought that was a good idea.)

SERIOUSLY. I would honestly rather use [KEYWORD] than KEYWORD:, but for the
sake of the Google Groups users I stick with the latter.

> The primary effect of moderation here is to eliminate the spam, which is
> on the order of 10-25 posts a day otherwise that y'all never see (and that
> mostly I never see either, since I have a Bayesian filter that discards
> most of it).

Neat!

> Other than that, the main effect of moderation is to enforce the keywords.
> Honestly, I'm dubious about how important that is now. Originally, there
> was a concern that the group would be high-traffic and people would have a
> hard time finding the stuff in the universes they care about and ignoring
> the stuff in the universes they didn't care about, but I really doubt this
> is an active problem for anyone at this point. But it's in the charter,
> so I keep doing it, and it's also a *great* way of catching spam, even
> spam that comes from forged email addresses of regulars (which happens).

I think-- *hope*-- that this'll become more important reasonably soon.

> I generally figure everyone's an adult and people will sort things out
> amongst themselves given some time and opportunity, and that's generally
> been the case. People get upset, have public arguments, leave the group
> in a huff, come back later (or not), and occasionally yell at each other,
> but to me it's always seemed within the realm of fairly normal
> interpersonal drama for a group of people collaborating. I don't know
> that it's actually better to try to stifle all of that; I'd be worried
> that it would just break out in some other way, and possibly more
> unpleasantly and more passive-aggressively.

Agreed and agreed, good sir.

> What I can do as moderator is keep people from coming in from outside and
> stirring the pot just for the hell of it, which has been attempted a few
> times in the past and for which I have no tolerance. But when it's an
> argument between people who are all invested in the group, I think I'd
> normally do more harm than good by trying to get in the middle of it.

Indeed.

Andrew "NO .SIG MAN" "Juan" Perron, we're all adults here, and honestly, if
Martingeddon is the worst we have...