So you're saying they can be "unprofessional" in defending what they do in their "professional" capacity? That seems a bit counterintuitive to me.

It depends how obnoxious the poster is. Some have lost their right to professional courtesy IMO.

Mod's are unpaid amateur volunteers, not professionals.

The irony is that this attitude is the polar opposite of the attitudes of good brick and mortar poker professionals. Some of us feel that, while the mods here are volunteers, that they should represent the values and standards of their areas of moderation. Sadly, this does not seem to be the view of the people here. It is what it is.

Thus the quotes around the words.

Bottom line, they volunteered to represent 2+2 in a professional capacity. No one is forcing them to stay. I volunteer moderate several boards and have stopped doing so when I feel I can't do the job responsibly.

As a mod, if you need to talk unprofessionally about someone, do so in a private thread. Snarky comments like "Oh great, he's posting here too." should never be allowed.

FYP

Yes, I did something like that to you ITT not too long ago. But I thought better of it and deleted it the next day. Of course rather than accept that, or at the very least ask me why that happened in the first place, you played the victim as usual, handling it passive-aggressively and making an entry in your profile about it. That kind of crap is why you don't get the same leeway as others around here.

Opinions vary on this, but I don't feel being unprofessional with someone who "deserves it" does much good either. It drops you down to their level. Troublemakers tend to have a warped sense of time. When you stoop to their level, that now retcons the entire interaction and gives them justification for their behaviour. It doesn't matter who was stupid first. When you're both stupid, the argument is lost with both the problem child and the viewing public.

This is the view held by good poker room professionals. You are firm but fair, and you are always unimpeachable. Let the problem players dig their own graves. Don't jump down and get muddy with them.

When I ran my own rake-free private games, this was also the view I took, to varying levels of success with implementation. I wasn't being paid, but I wanted a well-run comfortable game. It would seem silly to say, "well, I'm not getting paid here and you're an idiot so screw you." Obviously I wanted the game to run well, otherwise I wouldn't have volunteered to spend the time running it. Money really has little to do with it. Otherwise, why would you volunteer in the first place?

Anyway, this is just my view. Y'all are free to do what you want. I do my best to stay out of trouble out there because I too want a well run room/board. But if the mods are allowed to be snarky in this thread (or post conversations from private emails to a third party), that gives us license to snark it back. Once the mods stoop to this level, they lose credibility on any issue.

Ah, I wasn't aware there was an undo button with human interaction, and that "lol jk" reversed comments already said. I learn something new every day.

You insulted someone, while in a role representing the entire forum. It doesn't matter that you deleted it after most people already read it. And now you're blaming him for not accepting that you deleted it. Did you apologize? You should be aware of how the green text affects how you're viewed.

A bully making fun of you in the classroom is one thing. The teacher making fun of you, quite another. It doesn't matter if the teacher deletes it from the public record the next day.

Edit: I've gotten guff from mods for stuff I wrote and then immediately edited, because mods can read edits.

It's pretty clear that by deleting it I was essentially saying "yeah I shouldn't have posted that, my bad" or similar. Yeah I handled that poorly. I was pointing out that he did as well. Had he asked me about it I may have apologized in response. But he didn't, he chose to make an entry in his user profile about it instead.

I actually didn't find out I could read edits until a few weeks ago. It's amazing that no matter how much time goes by you still learn new things on here.

Well I can respect your view and the thought put into this post, even if I don't necessarily agree with all of it.

You deleted it after it was up for a day. You didn't replace it with edited text appoligizing nor did I receive an appoloy in my inbox. I think I'm safe in assuming you didn't send anything to everyone that read the post either explaining it.

Yes, I did put an entry in my profile about it. You deleted what you had done making it as if it never happened. What else am I supposed to do? Post it in a thread for you to delete if you don't like my questioning of your behavior? I've seen how you respond to a request in private so I'm not going to deal with that again unless I feel I really need to. So I put it in my profile answering an appropriate question there. I'd be shocked if the total number of people who read my profile comes close to that of those who read the post you put in here.

You don't like my opinions, that's fine with me and I sleep just well at night knowing that. However, in your position as a representive of 2+2 I don't understand why you made the post you did in the first place.

My choice of words ("unprofessional") was probably slightly off. I also believe in "firm, but fair", but also with a side of "do not let the inmates run the asylum."

I also moderate a few other forums, including one that supports some freeware that people sometimes generously make donations to support. We value all these contributions, but at times a donor will come to the board with a chip on their shoulder. "I am a donator, and I demand that you do X or Y to suit me." I have found over time that the only way to deal with people who have this attitude is to firmly tell them that we don't give a rats ass about their demands, that we do what we think is best for all of our users regardless of whether anyone donates or not, and that we are happy to discuss the matter civilly if they will just meet us halfway.

I think the analogy to a well run poker room is a good one. The floor should treat their customers fairly, but that does not mean the customer is always right. Sometimes you have to kick an ******* to the curb in order to protect the rest of your customers.

There are boundaries that probably should not be crossed (eg posting PMs without consent), but I think if you're going to come here and throw snark at the mods ("stay classy"), don't be surprised or play the victim when some of it gets returned back on you. When it's done in a content thread, I expect them to delete the comment and handle it privately. When it's done in this thread, I'm willing to give them leeway to explain themselves and defend their conduct. Even if I would have done it a different way myself.

The mods here do a job I don't have the time or inclination to do myself, which I think benefits my experience here. I don't agree with them 100%, but I'm not going to cast stones the few times I do disagree. YMMV.

That was not "essentially" what you did at all. You deleted a post that you thought better of later. You identified me in the post. Look at my profile and you'll see that I never mentioned you by name.

I admitted I handled it poorly. I'll lay off you from now on cf410, I know I haven't been fair with you.

You get what you pay for.

That's something, thanks for that much.

Sometimes you do, if you're lucky (or unlucky)....?
I certainly wasn't saying that mod's should act inappropriately, just because they're unpaid. They shouldn't, and obviously sometimes they mess up, but they're volunteers and IMO should be cut more slack than if they were actually paid pro's.
I also think that sometimes some mod's underestimate the impact which their modding has on posters here. Many people take these forums very seriously (in case no one's noticed).

This discussion is pretty strange for me. Years ago I'd mod like a robot, giving warnings/infractions for pretty much every guideline violation I saw and being nothing but perfectly polite and as non-confrontational as possible. That's what I was told modding was when I was brought on, so that's what I did. When it came time that someone got to 100 infraction points, there wasn't a weighing of whether that poster is a benefit to the forum overall, whether that poster might make positive contributions to 2+2 in other forums, etc.; that poster was simply banned and there was an e-"paper" trail of violations that was hard to argue with given the guidelines at the time.

People complained about the coldheartedness of it, the overly-technical nature of the violations, and the loss of posters who might have made positive contributions elsewhere.

So now we have a system that has eliminated the technicality stuff, we take into consideration all the factors above when deciding whether to boot someone from the forums, and we have an exile option available to us for posters who can't post well in B&M but make positive contributions elsewhere.

With all that subjectivity and non-robot behavior involved in modding, we now get ragged on for not having enough of that robotic politeness and removed/aloof behavior that I used to get complaints about.

My default position is always going to be polite, helpful, and respectful. There are users who have proven that they're not worthy of that and they're treated accordingly. The only users I can recall telling me that they believe I've treated them unfairly are the typically bad posters who make the classic argument, "I've seen someone else do this before. Now I am getting flak for it. Therefore, you are targeting me personally." Other than that, the complaints these days are about thread and topic management, which is very much stuff that reasonable people can disagree about and not at all an emotional topic for people with perspective.

And we now have this thread, ATF, and the administrators if people feel the need to blow off steam about decisions they disagree with. So it's rare for a poster to come to B&M, willfully violate the forum guidelines twice, get tempbanned for it, and then willfully violate them again via a whiny, sarcastic remark about modding in a substantive thread.

Forgive me if I think I no longer owed that poster the politeness and respect I show the other 99% of posters with respect to that particular issue. And even if you think my response was "snarky" (despite it being truthful and informative), I think that it was quite a ways away from any reasonable line you could draw where my actions in response to that poster's behavior would have been unacceptable.

I don't think anyone wants to go back to RoboMods, so I think it should be OK for us to be human once in a blue moon in this thread or ATF when presented with a situation like the one that started this particular discussion. Notice that the poster was 100% in the wrong and hasn't complained about my response. It's not like he/she brought up an interesting topic worthy of discussion and consideration and was treated poorly. We don't do that.

Was that original system the TT way?

Originally Rapini was brought on so *TT* and I could let someoen else be the "heavy."

I honestly don't know when it started, but I also don't think it matters. I think I started lurking 2+2 in late 2007; at that time, *TT* was a blue mod and a mod of B&M.

Edit to add: haha looks like RR beat me to it.

No it doesn't matter I was just curious.

fyp

No. TT was certainly not about technical impartial modding. He is the only mod I have had an issue with and it was because of disagreement over a . Substantive issue.



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