And in all seriousness, is the issue of what constitutes an affiliate/etc being addressed? Someone else posted that they simply mentioned the tournament in the MDL thread and that was deleted. I just reviewed the LCP posting guidelines and can't tell what rule that violated.

In defense of Mr. Graves, the only reference I can find relating to his matter in the guidelines is:
" Card room employees must become authorized representatives before posting information on their place of employment. Please contact Two Plus Two Advertising for more information."

As he is not a card room employee by an reasonable understanding of that definition, it is easy to see why he would be concerned about his post being deleted. If the intent of that rule is to apply it to anyone who could possibly in any obscure way be compensated by a casino, would it be possible to reflect that in the guidelines accordingly?

Yes that's what our PMs are about. I'm not clear on what the resolution is from all the back and forth we just had but Bobo is going to explain ITT and also better define the rules in this regard, and make sure the mods are on the same page.

Since there is some sort of mod PM conversation going on that one would expect you to be part of, are you on a computer now and did you bother to ask your question via PM?

Regardless, would RG be willing to say whether or not he is being given any compensation or benefit not being given to regular tournament competitors?

There was 0 personal benefit or obligation from anyone for me to post the information regarding the tournament details. I posted the structure and answered a question.

How did you get to be 1 of the bounties? Not asking in a mod capacity, genuinely curious.

Was first alternate because I play in the room a lot (several of the bounties are strictly cash grinders that only people at MDL would know) and have a solid following from my PGC and Twitter.

nice

Any further questions I will be happy to answer in person. Simply wanted to tell people about the tournament being held at MDL in the what I assumed was the appropriate thread. There was nothing for me to gain personally by doing so.

I didn't ask if you received a benefit to post about the tournament. I asked if you received any benefit for playing in the tournament. This could be free entry, no vig on your tournament fee, a free meal, or a T-shirt.

I'm not going to be there, so I suppose anyone who will can ask him if he was intentionally answering a somewhat different question than he was asked, avoiding giving a direct answer, just like a politician, or if he just misunderstood what he was being asked.

So after some discussion, I think Randal's post was fine. I'll take the blame for the confusion on this, and not to protect anyone, but because I genuinely believe the somewhat ambiguous rules that administration (in this case, basically me) has put in place around this sort of thing played a big part in the result.

As I alluded to earlier, there are many gray areas with our policy around promotional posts, but I don't think there's an easy way of making them black and white. While we want people to feel they can share helpful info freely, we also want to ensure people aren't abusing leeway that is given, in order to promote themselves and/or their business. No one wants to read spam, we need to be fair to our advertisers, and also have some incentive for businesses to advertise here.

First sentence sounds like the right play. Second sentence describes what happened pretty well (although I might use different wording than "troll parade"), and it's a shame that things escalated so quickly. Not sure why a deleted post needed to become a huge deal immediately when civil conversation probably would've brought about a much simpler and quicker resolution.

Right. Spam is a term that means different things to different people.

Yeah, I don't know the history to this point, but BigSkip's posts and post report makes some of the complaining seem more than a little disingenuous.

Sure, you avoid direct insults, but you certainly took a number of shots at Rapini. Now, calling someone names certainly isn't my style (whether in my role as moderator or not), but I'm not here to pass judgement on someone else doing so. But going after someone in a number of posts and then crying foul when they insult you seems a little hypocritical.

Exactly.

I get that some people consider moderators to be representing 2+2 and thus should be held to a higher posting standard. But for better or worse, moderators are treated as posters who have volunteered to help out with the site, and aren't required to change the way they post in order to do so.

That said, if you feel Rapini is out of line, you'd need to take it up with Mat Sklansky.

So back to the situation at hand - Randal or Coasterbrad, feel free to repost the info. Sorry for the confusion.

If you want to focus on whether he was promoting and self-promoting, look at his posts in this thread where he refused to say whether and what his compensation is. I think we're past that now as Bobo Fett is going to be changing the rules re advertising and promotional stuff. (He's the advertising director at 2+2.)

I know that there's no self-promotion allowed and no promotional posts allowed under the current rules.

Volunteer or not is not relevant to the discussion.

If moderators get wrapped up emotionally to the point where they publicly say the things that were said, they'd be removed off of every other message board I've ever been on. If for nothing else, to protect the reputation of the site.

Personally I find the use of the term "****** pen" to be highly offensive by anyone, let alone a moderator, who is a de facto leader for these message boards, like it or not.


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When it comes to questionable advertising/promotional posts, the rule of thumb is to delete first and question later. This is because if we do the opposite, and it turns out it is inappropriate, it was sitting there a lot longer than it should've. We have to always protect the site first, and revenue-related issues are very sensitive. FWIW as soon as the issue came up in here I asked Bobo to review and respond (before I had told you to ask him if you wanted a different source).

The rule is not black and white, there is a lot of gray area that we need to make spot determinations on. Rapini and I have had to do that for years and are usually pretty good at it. This was a corner case that was gotten wrong. Bobo is going to do his best to try to clear up some of the gray area, but it will never be 100% gone.

I forgot to mention I undeleted Randal's original post.

That sounds perfectly reasonable. Why didn't someone just say that was the case? This again goes back to why I say this section of the forum is poorly moderated.

Well, in my case it was for 2 reasons:

1. It didn't seem like it would be very productive, because folks here were already very worked up, and no matter what we said someone was going to turn it around somehow. I usually choose not to engage first and see if things settle down on their own in cases like this, especially when I am not one of the primary parties engaged in the discussion.

2. I was on a plane at the time, and it was taking off.

That is all well and good, but others had numerous chances to address and they didn't.

I am sure you can see why that pattern of behavior, combined with who is (yet again) the focal point of the blow up, leads many of us to question the moderation.

You're missing something here. Promotional posts aren't allowed. Bobo Fett decided that they're OK in this instance because it was an established poster and a one-off thing.

And if I weren't OK with the decision, I'd have talked to Mat and Mason about it. I've done that before on the issue of promoting/advertising "official" versus "unofficial" 2+2 tournaments and gatherings. And I'd bet you'd be surprised regarding the position I advocated.

I don't care what the rules are with respect to advertising and promotion--my personal preference is that we have no rule except that the poster be straight with the community about his/her affiliations/biases--but my opinion runs counter to 2+2 monetizing LCP. All I ask for is clear guidance on what I should be allowing and Bobo Fett has said he'd going to provide it.

I think you are missing an understanding of what "promotional" really means.

Regarding the bolded...I just assumed the bottom.

That's fine that we disagree on what "promotional" means.

As for the "******" discussion, here are my views.

* No, I wouldn't allow it elsewhere in LCP if posted by a non-mod.
* I probably would also delete it elsewhere in LCP if posted by Rapini or Lattimer, too, but I would possible PM them about it first or instead, because in general we try not to step on each others toes.
* I would possibly not delete it if posted by someone else here in this thread.

Basically, this thread is a bit of a containment thread for people to voice their complaints about moderation and moderators. We allow more "personal attack" type posts here, especially from posters directed at us mods, but also from us mods back at the posters, when we feel so inclined. Hey, we get to defend ourselves too, I hope you understand.

Rapini has said (both publically and privately) that he doesn't care at all about people taking shots at him here. He does, obviously, sometimes hit back.

Personally, if not for the desire not to step on his toes, I would gladly delete all the "******" stuff from his original comment through every response about it, and call it a day. But then no doubt we'd get people here claiming that we were trying to whitewash history. So for these 2 reasons (primarily the first), I've left it in.

In summary, in general you should expect that we will do less normal LCP moderation here in the thread where we discuss LCP moderation.

For disclosure, if you're referring to the fuss some time ago about you using his name as a pejorative synonym for ****/AIDS/etc, I was the one complaining to venice/Garick/etc about it. Rapini himself told me he didn't care. I didn't vanity search him, I actually read that thread often.

Appreciate your perspective.

In my opinion, mods represent the brand of the business in EVERY interaction they have with customers (that's us non mods) regardless of the forum. Permitting unprofessional communication towards customers in specific instances is a business decision that 2 plus 2 has obviously made.

What gets me is what appears to be lack of personal responsibility and honest self reflection.

First post: "Who let BigSkip out of the ****** pen!?"

Followed later by: "Seriously though, I didn't call anyone a ******. Take a look at the actual post."

Do you truly believe you didn't call someone a ******?

When you sprinkle in crap like that, it makes people question the real motivation behind your moderator actions.

When you deviate from rational, respectful discourse in this manner you lose credibility which only makes the difficult moderator job that much harder.



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One last thing for me to add, there has been excellent examples of moderator respectful, rational conversation in the thread as well.

Thank you to those individuals for that.

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