Forum behavior

[pier4r]

(05-10-2018 05:51 PM)Bill (Smithville NJ) Wrote:  The Internet Archive Wayback Machine has the Forum as of Early April which does contain some of Geir Isene's earlier posts.

But it would be a messy project to try to recreate the posts here.

Bill
Smithville, NJ

To me would be already great to have the links instead of the posts. For example: I would go in the thread where the posts are missing and I would add a new reply with the link to the internet archive page.

The hard to solve points are:

- has the internet archive got all of them? I know that that project is great, but I also now that they have to be triggered on some pages, they don't have the ability to crawl the network for every new change.
- do we know which thread are affected? (I have no idea) going first for the technical ones and then all the rest, as I am the first to say that not every contribution of a user is equal to all the others (of the same user. No comparisons with other users).

[Zaphod]

Both these current threads (you know which ones) on this recent subject are doing nothing for the HP forum in my humble opinion ......

I wish there was an ‘ignore thread’ button so I could add these two to it, like the user ignore list.... every time I visit I now see them both being slowly and inexorably regurgitated

It’s all very sad , but I have no interest in rehashing what’s been hashed over and over already ... I just wish the HP forum could just move onwards and upwards from here on in

[PANAMATIK]

I just learned that all posts of a well known senior member are physically deleted and cannot be restored easily. This is a bad day in the history of this forum. It shows that forums and social media are still experiments of our days. The action of the biased moderator reminds me to "Dr. Strangelove". Where are the super moderators which control the moderators, and the super super moderators.

Every serious member in this forum took significant time to write his/her texts, most of them are profound and some of them are with humor and beauty. And even if some of them are without beauty, they were very personal statements, they have become part of the person himself. Perhaps I would like to read my old posts many years later again. My only comfort is that all information will be thrown away some time when the entropy of the universe has increased enough. But it should not have happened this way.

Please provide a mechanism, that moderators are less almighty.

Bernhard

[SlideRule]

ALL

My 2¢ contribution from Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Plese enjoy!
SlideRule

[Dave Hicks]

(05-10-2018 03:28 PM)Claudio L. Wrote:  I think the only person that should be "on vacation" here is Dave. He had so much fire to put out lately he'd go on vacation to Hawaii now if he could, would be easy to recognize him, the only one with an umbrella and a drink, chilling with his feet dipped in lava, feeling totally refreshed.

Edit: I see more new posts... Come on, people... let's put this to rest and give Dave the break he deserves...

Thank you! There are times when people ask me how I doing or why I'm looking disturbed or grumpy and my usual answer to this is because there's a big flare up on my web forum. And the replies to that are typically in the range of: "What's a web forum?" to: "You mean you let random people say things on your website? Is that wise?" or: "Does that have any relevance to reality?" Well, those help me keep things in perspective.

Honestly though, I've got to point out that Den (who is now d b) has been on the front lines more than I have. Someone said his heart is in the right place, and sometimes I think that's a problem for a moderator. He has a lot of heart, feels a need to protect newbies and lost post count "shy" posters etc. I think in one of the GPL threads he felt a little protective of a newbie whereas I tended towards the assumption that the newbie had signed up just to be a troll. No way of knowing who was right really.

That said, let's move on to Thomas. Gene sent me this timeline as he recalls it:

Quote:1 – Thomas had requested that his account be deleted due to the SM / GPL threads and the bad behavior of some posters (which I agreed with).

2 – I responded to Thomas with the following on 4/22/18:

“You are a valued contributor to the forum and we would all be worse off if you leave. Please don't leave the forum entirely. For me personally if no other reason?”

3 – Thomas responded with this reply on 4/23/18:

“Gene, with all due respect, I stand by what I said… Do me a favor and delete my account. Seriously.”

4 – Also on 4/23/18, I responded with this:

“Hi Thomas. I didn't see a way to delete your account. I ended up "banning" you but only did it for a month. I hope you will reconsider after that time. Please take care and best wishes to you. Sorry about all this.”

5 – Thomas replied with this on 4/23/18:

“I'd rather have my account deleted, just to make it clear that the people engaging in misinformation and slander aren't going to get a response from me.”

6 – Therefore, I banned his account since it could not be deleted.

7 – On 4/24/18, Thomas emailed me:

“Gene, Could you reverse that ban? It seems like the conversation is heading back to saner territory, so I won't be leaving after all.”

8 – on 4/30/18, I unbanned Thomas and emailed this:

“I un-banned you earlier today. My apologies (for not sending you an email about it) as I thought for sure it would send you a notification. That's my ignorance in being a brand new moderator. I don't know the ins-and-outs yet.”

9 – Thomas came back and posted a couple of times about the GPL, etc. again, and was upset.

10 – Thomas emailed me again on 5/2/18:

“Hi Gene, Could you do me a favor and delete my MoHPC account? I'm done here. I don't mean "ban me," I'm already banned. I want my account to be gone. I want it to be clear that I'm not an MoHPC member any more. I want to wash my hands off this whole thing. If you can't delete my account, please forward this email to someone who can.

Thank you. Thomas”


11 – I did nothing as I cannot delete the account. Deleting his account would remove (I suspect) any and all of his posts which I would not want to happen. But since accounts cannot be deleted, they remain present and Thomas remains banned more or less at his own request.

That seems like a good summary. One additional detail is that the 2nd ban, was by Den, who may or may not have been aware that the first ban was by self-request.

During this initial ban event (one month Ban by Gene in response to Thomas' request permanent deletion), I also received requests from Thomas to make the Ban more permanent/deep/severe or delete whatever. I ignored em. Why? Because I've followed those requests before and they made the requestor mad - at the precise timing of when I pushed the button - see, he wanted to get the last word in - by getting banned - but I didn't get the message until after his opponent got a response in.

Here's another odd factoid for you. I can remember 3 people who wanted to be banned/deleted from this forum. All three were arguing over GPL and its correct use/interpretations. Two of the people were on opposite sides of the same thread. Wild. As I said in another thread, I have to wonder if arguments over old HP calculator manuals flare up with this kind of intensity on GPL forums.

So a day or two later, I got another request from Thomas to be let back in. Not a big surprise. Everyone that I have ever seen leave any forum and make a big deal of it has come back. Meanwhile thousands of people just stop using forums every day and never say a word.

Then during the second ban event I also received another request to make the ban more deeply seriously obvious. Thomas just doesn’t like "On vacation" but we have one label for that category (of mostly spammers) and I'm not all that concerned with someone who doesn't come here anymore being concerned about the label on his account.

But the good news is Thomas wants to come back and I've already said he is welcome in a couple of places, so he is re-unbanned. Honestly, if I was going to create a status/label just for Thomas' bans, it might be: "On a BRIEF vacation" because they don’t last very long!

[Zaphod]

Quote:But the good news is Thomas wants to come back and I've already said he is welcome in a couple of places, so he is re-unbanned.

There's excellent news right there.

[pier4r]

(05-10-2018 06:34 PM)Geir Isene Wrote:  

Urban Dictionary Wrote:Snowflake n.
A very sensitive person. Someone who is easily hurt or offended by the statements or actions of others.

Don't be a snowflake.

Some ideas.

For my feeling you (and not only you) are pushing hard to let certain words be accepted, be them part of legit nouns or not. If my feeling is right, I feel it a waste of energy really. Like someone trying to argue with a brick. Note: I don't want to say that the other side is the brick, I want to capture how silly is the action.

Moreover it starts to be inconsistent as well. On one side there is the attempt to let some words be accepted, otherwise the one rejecting them are snowflakes. On the other side offense is taken until that word is not accepted, so behaving like a snowflake.

Just accept that every private place (this forum is a private place open to everyone as far as I know) has certain rules. I don't like, no sorry, I hate stormfront. But I cannot expect to go there and be treated well if I rock the boat. I will get banned in seconds, I guess. And that's it, I have to swallow it.

Instead of putting your energy to convince the others to accept a certain type of language that in my opinion is not even needed. Why don't you focus your energy to try to involve everyone to recover the most useful contributions of yours? You better than anyone else know what is missing, and the priority for it.

Would be nice that you open another thread to coordinate the efforts and give some pointers. If you keep being fixed on some unneeded words, then maybe that content is not important for you (although could be important for someone else).

You can still argue about words later, but in my opinion the matter of recovering the content has more priority than a word that can be easily replaced without altering its meaning.

[aurelio]

(05-10-2018 07:27 PM)PANAMATIK Wrote:  I just learned that all posts of a well known senior member are physically deleted and cannot be restored easily. This is a bad day in the history of this forum. ....[omissis]
Please provide a mechanism, that moderators are less almighty.
Bernhard

just now realized, reading your words that a senior member became "junior" and most of his posts are deleted, and .....it's really not possible to come back from this "nightmare"?
I miss you Geir

I lost what recently happened and the reasons, but I wish that there was a remedy for this problem

of course I'm not agree with any word or offensive behaviour, (I respect the others and I like to be respected)

I never thought to print even any of my favourite threads... 'cause I was so far in thinking a day should happen...what happened.

[Dave Hicks]

This seems pretty settled so I'm going to cut this off here. A few points of interest:

There are backups. If we had a full melt-down, a full recovery should be straight-forward. As for pulling specific deleted things out of a backup and inserting into the DB - that gets a lot more interesting. I've done some looking and it looks probably doable, you're basically on your own with SQL, though there would be some significant learning.

I worried about investing a lot of time, because a couple of days ago I asked someone not to insult another member and he went and deleted nearly all of his posts. (Everything except the thread with the insult.) And given how things have been going with Geir, I was thinking: what if that happens again after all that work? I think he (they?) thought that if Den wasn't a moderator anymore, Walter would be welcome again or something and Geir's let me know that he's been mad at me since 2015 at least - though I didn't know until a couple of days ago.

In the background all day I've been wondering what to do about Geir and what I was subjecting Gene to in the earliest days of his moderating career. It felt very much like Den and Walter.

Tonight, I received another PM from Geir. Turns out he's leaving the forum. He instructs me to delete his account and posts. He says he read my "rant" about Thomas' ban/unban and unlike Thomas he definitely won’t ask to come back. I agree that this is probably the best course for all so I've hit the goodbye spammer button.

Meanwhile on a more pleasant topic:

I fully support Tim's campaign, and may replace this entire thread with: