Forum moderation

Yes, god forbid someone expresses an opinion that differs from yours!

Hi, is this thread because of my thread? If so while I strongly disagree with dudeski I don't think he should be prevented from posting because of his viewpoint. I don't know him well enough to argue if he's done anything wrong but it seems to me he hasn't done any wrong doings.

I don't think censorship is the right policy here, and I don't think this forum has a duty to shield us from viewpoints that are not our own. Exchange of ideas is good, not bad.

As a reminder, Trisquel does have community guidelines: http://trisquel.info/en/wiki/trisquel-community-guidelines

In particular I'd like to point out #5 in the Guiding Principles. People that repeatedly disregard the Community Guidelines, especially after having this pointed out to them multiple times, should be candidates for banning.

IMO, this is not censorship - No one's free speech rights are impacted because they can say whatever they want elsewhere. Free speech doesn't mean people get to say what they want on someone else's website.

I made this issue several days ago because of other annoying users which should be banned (vPro).

http://trisquel.info/en/issues/10727

Censorship cannot pave the way to freedom.

(1) I think users/comments/propaganda that advocate non-free/proprietary software and related stuff should be seen as an opportunity to further expand and explain the values of freedom. We come across these ideas AFK too. And I don't think we have ready-made answers to each and every comment. It is a living process. So my suggestion is let them be. Those who advocate freedom can (and should) find ways to answer these claims in a democratic manner.

Forum members can politely engage in a debate and critique these views. IMHO giving the power of banning people to certain users can create further unnecessary problems.

(2) If someone violates the Code of Conduct, we already know what to do. Code of conduct includes:

*Discrimination: Don't discriminate against people based on race, gender, sex, sexual orientation, religion, disability, age, class, intelligence, or any analogous grounds.

**Language: Express yourself without hard language (e.g. cursing). Social norms differ from place to place. Hard language could deter people from visiting our site, or from getting involved in our community.

***Personal attacks: We don't tolerate personal attacks here. We encourage discussion. Disagree with others and challenge their ideas. Don't feed the trolls. Please report any flaming/flame-baiting to a moderator using the contact page.

from https://trisquel.info/en/wiki/trisquel-community-guidelines

"Censorship cannot pave the way to freedom."

Banning users that do not follow the rules is not censorship. No one's free speech rights are impacted because they can say whatever they want elsewhere. Free speech doesn't mean people get to say what they want on someone else's website.

"I think users/comments/propaganda that advocate non-free/proprietary software and related stuff should be seen as an opportunity to further expand and explain the values of freedom."

You're probably right but at the same time they shouldn't be using our own forums and mailing lists to work against our own goals.

"If someone violates the Code of Conduct, we already know what to do."

And that is? You don't really say. Clearly, banning must be appropriate in at least some cases that warrant it. The trick is finding the right line.

What about users like me, who either have or had some questions about free software? Would that be forbidden, too? I think some of this type of discussion is necessary.

For mailing list users who can't see HTML links:
http://trisquel.info/en/forum/ot-why-program-being-nonfree-reason-enough-avoid-it
https://trisquel.info/en/forum/common-arguments-nonfree-software

No wonder this site is under the NSA watch list for "evangelism"

Free software forums are notorious troll magnets. All kinds of trolls can be found ranging from paid pro-proprietary software shills to rabid BSD "freedom fighters".

Ethics are difficult and people tend to get angry when confronted with moral issues.

I'm all for discussing the themes around free software but I don't think we have to tolerate every affront and personal attack.

As probably the closest to a 'moderator' in this forum, my personal stance around these issues is to try and interfere as little as possible, since this community is really excellent at dealing with controversial themes and constructive discussion.

When situations start to get serious, or just delve into personal attacks, I first try to contact the person individually to ask for a change of attitude, and if that doesn't work as expected, more public measures are attempted (probably the strongest one is right now about to be tested, as today marks the finish of the first two-week account blocking period for a certain user, as you might have read about).

It's very important to accept criticism and different points of view, and it's very important to avoid risking open participation recurring to excessive moderation, the line for censorship lies in different places to each one's eyes.

On the other hand, this is not just any software forum, so it's reasonable to expect a sensible effort to be made to explain, particularly to those not that much in-the-know, the importance of our principles (and yes, that includes the frequently controversial naming and 'I-have-to-feed-my-children' topics) ;-)

What... the... HELL???
Who the hell you think you are akirashinigami?? You want to come here and start censoring other people, just because you don't like what they write? Lol, nice way to kill a fanbase/community/whatever you want to call us.

As someone who has suffered censorship here in this forum in the past (read https://trisquel.info/en/forum/trisque-might-have-been-compromised#comment-41407), I cannot agree with this.
If someone comes here and posts "this is how you install this proprietary software" you might object... But if someone comes here and says "I think proprietary software is good because of X" or "I dislike the way we manage free software because of Y" or even "Trisquel and the FSF are evil because of Z" you just have to accept their opinion and explain your own views and try to make sense of everything that is said so that everyone can actually learn something from the debate! You cannot just go and delete the thread or ban the user!! If you do so, you will stop having the large group of people you usually have here, and will only have a couple of guys who are probably too afraid to speak their own mind! For example, we had a debate here a few days ago about Debian (if it was free or non-free, since their main rep only gives free software, but the other reps have non.free stuff, bla bla bla). If you could just come here and delete the comments from the people who defended Debian, you would have those people:

a) leaving the forum, and moving to another where they would tell everyone "DON'T GO TO TRISQUEL, THEY ARE EVIL AND MEAN TO US";

b) launch a DDoS against Trisquel.info or even a deface (trust me, I have seen that happen, and it's really bad);

Or imagine if it was I who had that power, I would just delete any link that had "pirated" stuff in it, because I am against "piracy". Basically, I would be SOPA and PIPA, and that is exactly what you are trying to be! You want to be Big Brother here on the forum.... That is disgusting! -.-
Just shut the fuck up and learn to accept that other people have different opinions. You can't go around deleting threads and banning people. You will only make this project and this community LOSE!
Of course, given that I defend free speech, I should allow you to have your opinion, that we need you as our "holy savior". Well, have it for yourself, you have already posted it here, people rejected it, now shut the fuck up. This is my free speech, just as yours. And yes I cursed because of how stupid your idea was.

As a former victim of censorship, I vote against such a thing.

I manage one of the most popular freeware sites on the web. With our amount of traffic we get around 50,000 attempts to spam daily and a pro-rata amount of trolls, fan boys and other unwanted types in the comments sections and forum. Our volunteer moderators are under constant fire and every day I wonder why they keep logging in to endure more of the same.

The bottom line is "someone" has to accept the role of site admin, set the rules and enforce them. There will always be grey areas and users will argue black and blue to promote their own points around them. That said, it is not censorship or anything else to decide what material is allowed on your own website and/or how it should be stated. Inviting debate about it only serves to fan the flames.

IMO the best policy is immediate deletion and a ban for totally unwanted material and a PM advisory for borderline stuff followed by a ban if this is ignored.

Just having these topics on view detracts from the main purpose of having a support forum. Folks can always Faceblog or Tweet about stuff they can't post here and enjoy every second of doing so.

My thoughts on forum moderation:

1. I personally prefer minimal moderation, but occasionally some is
required (see below for more on this)...

2. Excessive and off-topic posting can "drown out" other posts which is
essentially a form of censorship itself. Occasionally there are some
users that constantly repost the same things. I think 'vPro' presented
this very well. I think after a warning a suspension or ban would be
appropriate.

3. I think we can agree to disagree on some things. However, personal
attacks etc. are unwelcome.

4. I think non-Trisquel discussions should go in the "Troll Hole", since
there is currently no other forum for such discussions. For example, the
ethics of free software is more political than technical, so maybe
that's the best forum for it. This forum is supposed to be about
Trisquel with a focus on supporting users. In other words, I'm not
suggesting that threads should necessarily be deleted, but perhaps moved
or locked if they are off-topic.

5. Moderation is obviously needed to combat spam, I don't think anyone
doubts this.

6. Regarding proprietary software, if a user posts a link or recommends
other users to give up their freedom, I hope that other users will reply
with the usual warnings - I think that's enough to help users who read
the post. However, if the sole purpose of a thread is to promote
proprietary software, I think it should be deleted. If a user
excessively recommends proprietary software, I think they should be
warned and then suspended.

Deleting threads that recommend proprietary software I guess can be seen
as a "freedom of speech vs. software freedom" issue, but I agree with
jxself that there are other places users can discuss proprietary
software so the free speech issue isn't so bad. We should defend
software freedom instead.

Andrew.

Wow, what a heated discussion. I just wanted to put some pennies in the pot if you all don't mind.

I think the reason that the Trisquel forums are having these issues is because a lot of folks, like myself, have decided to come on board Trisquel because we are looking for a more freedom-respecting way of computing.

Because Trisquel is a derivative of Ubuntu, it is a no-brainer for most people who are looking to enter into using free software over proprietary as an OS. Ubuntu lends itself to being one of the easiest distributions to set up, and from my experience Trisquel benefits greatly from that.

Because of this you will surely get many folks from all walks of software life into the fold. This means a lot of differing views of what freedom in software means. It is a debate that HAS to be made on here I feel. I understand that some people are just plain trolls, but people questioning the intent of Richard Stallman, or the fsf, or free software and the GNU in general, should be allowed to question it so as to understand the view point.

Maybe a way to help this, is to have a new area for such debate.

I second grimlok's "new area" idea.

At the edges of any debate, there are things to consider, things to ponder. It's uncomfortable there for everyone. However the struggle to express ideas clarifies them.

Even though I see RMS's points, and agree with them, I have benefited from reading all the posts.

Maybe an area called "On Free Software" or something like that?

david said:
"When situations start to get serious, or just delve into personal attacks, I first try to contact the person individually to ask for a change of attitude, and if that doesn't work as expected, more public measures are attempted (probably the strongest one is right now about to be tested, as today marks the finish of the first two-week account blocking period for a certain user, as you might have read about).
It's very important to accept criticism and different points of view, and it's very important to avoid risking open participation recurring to excessive moderation, the line for censorship lies in different places to each one's eyes.
On the other hand, this is not just any software forum, so it's reasonable to expect a sensible effort to be made to explain, particularly to those not that much in-the-know, the importance of our principles (and yes, that includes the frequently controversial naming and 'I-have-to-feed-my-children' topics) ;-)"

I think this is the right approach for these cases.

Perhaps the same tactic can be used to deal with the cases where one disrespects the guidelines.

I think that this tactic is more useful than banning a user straight away. We are all humans, and we can naturally make mistakes at various situations, like when reading a post/comment. Simply banning someone after reading his post/comment just because it's probably against the guidelines is very cruel.

We must also consider the fact that some users (like me, specially) have a native language different from the North American English or from the European English (and any other English variants) and, despite speaking it relatively well, we can make mistakes sometimes.

We can also make adaptations of this tactic, like three notices (which may or may not give a time limit for the user to justify or to correct himself), each one followed by a temporary deactivation of his account, and after this, if the user makes another mistake, another notice (with or without a time limit) and a ban.

Also, I think that it's best not to have just one moderator, but 3 or 5, which is useful because there is a possibility to get into a consensus before doing anything. Also, if these moderators are worried about attacks of any kind, it's useful to mask them as part of another group (like the administrators, members, users, but not as moderators).

Another option would be to have a page listing the notices to the user, along with the quantity of notices and account deactivations received. Each notice could have a footnote indicating how many moderators agree or disagree with such notice, there's no need for the to write comments here because, theoretically, the comments have already been made. The footnote could be like this:

“3 moderators agree with this notice, 2 don't”.

I think that the notice should not be sent to the user if a single moderator doesn't vote, this assures that all moderators must vote, and on top of that, that they'll be responsible for the vote.

The notification must reach the user somehow, that said, if the moderators don't want to be exposed by sending e-mails directly to the user, it's a good idea to place the notice in the user's profile page on this forum, and when doing so, it's a good idea not to have a footnote like “Last edited by ADFENO”.

Learning is like a group of mountains, some mountains can be hard to get on top and easy to get down and vice-versa. Sometimes we can even fall from it, and so we'll either have to start again or pass through it too fast and forget about everything we learned.

grimlok said:
"Because of this you will surely get many folks from all walks of software life into the fold. This means a lot of differing views of what freedom in software means. It is a debate that HAS to be made on here I feel. I understand that some people are just plain trolls, but people questioning the intent of Richard Stallman, or the fsf, or free software and the GNU in general, should be allowed to question it so as to understand the view point."

grimlok said:
"Maybe a way to help this, is to have a new area for such debate."

I agree.

andrew said:
"4. I think non-Trisquel discussions should go in the "Troll Hole", since there is currently no other forum for such discussions. For example, the ethics of free software is more political than technical, so maybe that's the best forum for it. This forum is supposed to be about Trisquel with a focus on supporting users. In other words, I'm not suggesting that threads should necessarily be deleted, but perhaps moved or locked if they are off-topic."

I think that the Troll Hole isn't the right place for such questions because, by doing this, we'll eventually do something which tells the involved users something like this: “Even if this question has been made by a new user, we consider it as troll intent”.

Best regards, ADFENO.
Have a nice day.

I'm a newcomer and I have no idea what threads are you talking about. But if the Trisqel community can't hold its viewpoint at home, on its own territory without bullying and censorship (you can call that moderation) than what chance does it stand outside with paid tech editors, advertising budgets and government bribery (they call it lobby)?

I never ever had anything as big as fedora forum and nothing even close to linux questions. But I have noticed that letting people free can help on the long term. Sure, bot spam doesn't help anybody. Probably it would even help you drop to the tenth page in search engines. But otherwise let people express themselves. An Ignore function is a far better choice than a moderator that can delete posts and ban users.

I have read through the comments so far. And from what I have noticed unpopular views (I wouldn't go that far to call them all trolling) multiply like Hydra's heads with so called moderation.

Guidelines? They are nice to have for nice people that do bother to read them. Enforcing guidelines is a very unfair process. And I know for sure that thread hijacking is never enforced as with quite a lot of abuse. I'm from Europe, most forums I visit are mostly american. Maybe it has something to do with the cultural differences. Because a sincere «fuck off» would most certainly bring a delete, maybe even a temporary ban, while a 10k post member hunting around a new user and calling that person all sort of names like «troll» or just pointing out obvious things that scream «idiot» without writing the word «idiot», now that guy can even make points with the community.

Of course, I'm just a newcomer and I don't delude myself I can have a contribution to the final outcome. But I can add my contribution and troll you with my opinions.

How about personal filters for users?

If somebody feel buthurt, then somebody else criticize
RMS/FLOSS/Mother_Teresa, in that case s/he needs to add the person in personal "ignore list". IMHO, this is excellent alternative for forum moderation.

I checked the community guidlines and was not able to find any part which forbids to speak against opinions of the fsf.

"The Trisquel project is part of the Free Software Movement. We support the movement's philosophy. "

Actually, people who call for banning people are much more violating the "movements philosophy".

Because of this thread, I won't endorse trisquel any longer; instead, I will warn people of the big problems the community has.
No one should join a forum in which people think that
"there is no place for the expression of these viewpoints on our forums.

These people need to go. " -"akirashinigami".

I am a strong supporter of free software and the ethics behind it; nevertheless I reached this conclusion.
Maybe this gets some members to think of the problems penetrating the community. If someone with my background steps away from trisquel this means that trisquel frightens people who already value freedom, hence I think it's very unlikely that trisquel has to power to activily gain many new members for the movement.
I don't think there will be success for the project if you go on like this.
Just my opinion.

By the way: for a freedom-loving project the hirarchy of trisquel is very badly chosen. I think an unreachable dictator who never participates in the discussions of the community and makes every dicision by himself is a bad concept. But it fits to the new developments of this thread.