Remove pruning/post deletion permissions from lore staff.

[Guest]

Caveat: Lord jackboot being excluded from this rule.

I'm just gonna lay it out there and preface it with the fact that the report button exists for all subforums and people should be using it so that real administration/moderation staff can go and handle topics.

My post, and a few others pertaining to the topic which was valuable discussion, was immediately pruned when one off-topic post evidently threw off the entire conversation in the lore staff member's eyes, which they then decided to take upon themselves to immediately prune for themselves rather than call for moderation to curb off-topic posting.

It is not the job of lore staff to regulate what gets posted on the forums and what does not. Lore staff are equivalent to everyone else in-game, why should it be any different on the forums?

[Frances]

Alternatively, maybe have Jackboot talk to the staff in question?

I remember a month or two ago, someone made an app to have an albino Unathi, a few people discussed the pros and cons of it, then Jackboot posted his official stance (allowing it). Tool came in shortly after and deleted the entire comment thread, save for Jackboot's post, with the intent of clearing up the app. A lot of interesting conversation was lost, and I don't really see the problem in an app being one vs two pages long.

Just to say it's a problem I agree has been happening. (And I'm not mentioning Tool for the sake of namecalling, but just, because that's what happened. It could've been anybody else.)

[Guest]

It is not the job of lore staff to regulate what gets posted on the forums and what does not. Lore staff are equivalent to everyone else in-game, why should it be any different on the forums?

In a sense it is, they are the lore staff and those forums specifically deal with what they are here to do.

I'll also note the forums is not the server, you can be banned from the server but not the forums and vice-versa.

If you are mentioning a topic that was pruned and locked due to the topic in question, the person who did it had the full backing of the administration. If you are talking about another thread then please make it known to me.

Lore staff only have lock and move permissions for the Lore Questions and Answered Questions forums.

Whitelist management uses (The people who accept or deny whitelists) have moderation access for whitelist forums, it is their job to make sure that forum remains clean. If deletions like that did occur then it should have been reported at the time. I have seen no reports about that specific event Frances mentioned.

Xander used to have an exception but I recently got told to remove their access due to them resigning from the lore team.

Jackboot is the only exception to some of the lore forums from what I have looked at.

[mrimatool]

Deleting of posts is only done when the posts are unnecessary and yes certain Lore Staff are given moderation duties on certain sections. For example Species whitelists, lore questions, Lore applications. And with the post Frances I've now decided if it is an interesting conversation it'll all be put on a separate thread in the Off topic sub forum. But there are rules for posting in application areas. And those rules aren't to be tossed to the wind because of interesting conversation.

I know this mostly because Tish makes it his goal to delete ANYTHING I say that's remotely off topic then send me a heart warming PM.

Tl;DR: lore staff moderate certain areas, if you believe your post shouldn't have been deleted go make sure you read over all the specific sub forum posting rules.

[mrimatool]

Damn scopes beat me to it.

[Gollee]

As a heads up, 1138; I can't delete posts, I pointed your post out to Jackboot, who agreed with me that it wasn't necessary and didn't advance the issue; so he deleted it.

[Guest Marlon Phoenix]

I was actually multi-tasking and misinterpreted our policy on the severity of 'off-topic policing' for the lore question board.

Your post was pointed out to me as having broken the subforum rules, which says to not answer a lore question if you're not a lore member. Your post was "It should be x", and I went "Well it's not x so this is rule breaking, apparently" and pruned it.

It was a mistake, I'll admit. I've given it some thought and have decided to allow such things, unless they are unnecessarily off-topic or otherwise seem to assert authority over the lore. I'm not fully decided and will try to establish a reliable system; loosey goosey rules interpretation is recipe for disaster when it involves deletion.

The lore staff don't have delete permissions for the lore question board.

[Guest]

Thank you for clarifying and answering, I wasn't aware of that.

[Skull132]

It is not the job of lore staff to regulate what gets posted on the forums and what does not. Lore staff are equivalent to everyone else in-game, why should it be any different on the forums?

 

It sort of is. The lore staff requested, and was granted, the right to conduct moderation on a limited set of subforums. While they aren't full on moderators, in terms of the forums, they have the liberty to remove off-topic remarks, inflamitory posts, etcetera. If people persist or actual modrator oversight is necessary, they're expected to inform us.

And the reason why it's any different here, as opposed to ingame, is that lore staff aren't equivalent to everyone else ingame. Even ingame, they are the lore staff: the bunch of misfits who try to decide where to take our WHM40K ripo- I mean lore. Just that, none of it actually requires them to have anything special in game. The forums and wiki are different, however (by the same argument, they shouldn't also have wiki editing powers).

Of course, all of the above comes with the note that they are held responsible, accountable and are otherwise expected to act in a reasonable manner. While no one from staff, that I know off, keeps active tabs on the moderator logs on the forums (with the possible exception of Soundscopes and I, but we're looking at/for other things, generally), we will check their activities more thoroughly as requested in a staff complaint, or on request. The alternate method to solving conflict such as this is talking to Jackboot, and seeing if he can shed light on the specific situation in question.

Ultimately, I'd like them to keep their powers, mainly because it makes sense. Should issues arise with their usage of the power, then individual members can be rotated out (only 3 lore members actually have any forum powers, I should add: Xander, Jackboot, Tool, Sue). If issues arise with modus operandi questions (how to make an end solution presentable (one key reason why entire discussions would get purged) while also keeping the discussion around), then those can be discussed here, with Jackboot, or in General forums, I guess.

EDIT: Forgot one thing. Lore staff's power over the forums is two-fold:

There are those who belong into the whitelist management group, who are responsible for enforcing the rules specific to that subboard, as outlined in the posts in that subforum. They actually carry full moderator powers, and can hand out warnings. In the whitelist applications area only, of course.

Then there are those who act as moderators/organizers for the lore questions and lore canonization subboards. This is mostly to ease their work, as having them contact an admin every single time they want something done in their domain is inefficient and silly.

Relavent links:

...Actually, I can't post any, due to tablet being a pain. Click on Jackboot's name find Whitelist Management in his groups -- those are the lore people who have power in the whitelist subforums.

The only other two areas where they have control are lore questions and lore canonization boards. And only Jackboot + Xander have power there.

SoundScopes-

http://aurorastation.org/forums/memberlist.php?mode=group&g=10 //Lore writers

http://aurorastation.org/forums/memberlist.php?mode=group&g=11 //Whitelist Management (Needs updating due to people resigning or leaving)

Edited June 13, 2015 by Guest