Official thread to discuss moderation policies

Kickapoo wrote:

We could have a special category called "Registered users only."

I push this because I think it's the only logical change you can make at this point.

Let's Run.com is the best website of it's kind in the world. We do have to allow everyone

to use the other categories. Perhaps getting rid of politics, haters, romance, and other things not related

to sport is impossible. Plus some of them are interesting. (I do not think I have ever, in 5 years, went to

a political post. My memory may be short. But by and large I am not interested.)

Of course we have to realize that change may require LRC to hire more employees and spend

more money. I think you have a good thing going now. LRC has improved vastly in the last 3 years.

I think it was rojo that stated Chinese and North Korean spammer trolls are actually registered, probably developed a program to do it.

Wow, you guys are still talking about me. Just to clarify the 'dildo' post. I'd already been subjected to threats of assault including threats of rape, as well as vague threats regarding any children I might have (luckily I don't have any, or I would have dealt with those threats a long time ago). Some of these might be the posts you (casualobserver/spadedetector) are complaining about being unfairly deleted by the mods. As well as that, it was direct response to one of the doping apologist trolls who was accusing me of racism with regard to Konchellah for 'giving him a hard time'. This was because I had pointed out, as well as a likely accusation of doping from Johnny Grey regarding Konchellah, the confirmed and widely publicized fact that Konchellah was convicted in Finland of drugging and raping two children. This conviction was AFTER he'd been accused of raping a sleeping woman in the UK, a case dropped because of insufficient evidence. Does it make sense to some people (CasualObserver/spadedetector not included) why I might say such an admittedly obscene and juvenile thing in the heat of the moment? The obsessive troll who has been harassing me posted just yesterday that he was going to break my jaw. He's regularly posted comments which suggest he is actively trying to find my address and personal information about myself. In fact, one one occasion he asked forum members if any of them knew my real name and address. Apparently in the middle of the night (he seems to be from the UK) he regularly posts obscene comments here detailing his bestiality and rape fantasies. In one post recently he projected his bestiality fantasies on to an U18 athlete (i.e. a child). The post stayed up for quite some time. This is the central figure in the campaign to have me branded a 'racist' to keep silent about the Kenyan doping problem, a figure supported by the likes of Casual Observer and Rekrunner. As far Casual Observer is concerned, he's a very dubious character - almost certainly the same guy who also posts as Spade Detector, as they used identical language within a minute of each other posting on one occasion. He'd obviously forgotten to log out and log in again. What's disturbing about this is that they present two fairly different views on doping. Casual Observer claims that everybody dopes and, for example, the doping problem in Norway is as great as Kenya, and the doping problem in GB today is as bad as in the GDR. Spade Detector, on the other hand, more explicitly defends Kenyan doping through the usual accusations of 'racism'. Nearly every doping thread, and many non-doping threads, end up being a wall of text discussion between Casual Observer and RekRunner on whether EPO works. Both appear to be doping apologists who turn every discussion into what appears a polarized argument - everybody dopes or doping doesn't work - but which has the same doping apologism conclusion. Namely, that doping doesn't matter (everybody does it, or it doesn't work anyway).https://www.standard.co.uk/news/star-athlete-on-rape-charge-6957208.htmlhttp://www.espn.com/espn/wire?section=trackandfield&id=2007073

rekrunner wrote:

Everyone seems to placing a lot of blame on moderators, but I think there should be some personal accountability for what people post.

No, that's essentially begging the question. If people were always civil and actually posted on topic threads and comments then the moderation wouldn't even be in question.

Someone said it should be like Reddit, but Reddit has a much worse problem with inconsistent moderation, lack of transparency, and abundant harassment/trolling. The only sub-Reddits I've seen that haven't been totally hijacked and flown into the ground are ones that require accounts to be a certain number of days old before posting, but even then you'd be surprised at the tenacity of trolls.

Subway Surfers wrote:

I think it was rojo that stated Chinese and North Korean spammer trolls are actually registered, probably developed a program to do it.

Here is where a more robust registration method with non-throwaway email approval and an in-built delay would help massively as would a limit on how many posts someone can submit over a given time.

malmo wrote:

The only thing I want to do with political threads is nuke them all.

This is a HUGE problem.

I love the idea of this site being a way for people to talk about the things they would talk about on a run. We talk about politics all the time. It's often the safe stupid conversations over and over, but it's what we choose to talk about because we enjoy it. It is none of your business to decide what people should and should not be talking about. You should not be deleting threads that annoy you. That is not what moderators are for.

I’m curious - if I made the news and saw posts on here about me, could I ask them to be locked, with an explanation that the source of the thread requested his or her privacy in discussing the matter? If it was a crime or ongoing investigation, does the answer change?

Just curious - I don’t plan on gaining national attention but curious about how policy would apply with a direct request like that.

I made a post and put it correctly under the "politics" sub-topic, and it was deleted without any explanation.

It had no curse words, no porn, no copyright infringement, no bias against protected groups, no spam, and no advertisement. I didn't violate the terms of service.

Moderation like this is a sham.

facts and reason wrote:

I made a post and put it correctly under the "politics" sub-topic, and it was deleted without any explanation.

If you're just going to delete all political posts without hesitation, then why even have a "politics" sub-category in the first place?

Why not just say it explicitly in the terms of service that all political posts are banned? And that only a few, select political threads will be allowed for 72 hours during elections?

Innocent people may post in the "politics" sub-category without knowing that all of them will be deleted. It's easier to just delete the "politics" sub-category altogether in the drop-down menu when creating posts.

Thundergunner wrote:

I’m curious - if I made the news and saw posts on here about me, could I ask them to be locked, with an explanation that the source of the thread requested his or her privacy in discussing the matter? If it was a crime or ongoing investigation, does the answer change? Just curious - I don’t plan on gaining national attention but curious about how policy would apply with a direct request like that.

Anyone who requests, authorizes, and/or releases any personal information on anyone else, should be required to also release ALL of their own personal information to the public to the person who's info was released, and also to the public.

That’s certainly a way to prevent posting about all people ever.

I mean, I’m fine with that since I am primarily here for running advice.

The original intent of my post was to find out if a poster requested a thread about them locked, do they have that ‘right’? The Frank Meza thread wasn’t locked until his death - not sure if anyone requested it be locked before then and were denied, or if those taking offense never tried engaging the board at all. If the former, I’d say that’s something to consider handling differently.

The rather innocuous thread referred to below has now been deleted, for some reason. It's of no consequence beyond its indication of the continued opacity of the moderation processes here. The thread was started by someone at Letsrun, purportedly to garner support for Greg's writing ambitions. Greg, however, took issue with some of the sincere, professional advice he was given and disliked one or two users' screen names. So he requested the thread be locked and it is now gone. Why bother contributing if discussions are at the mercy of the capricious whims of unknown moderators?

Greg wrote:

I have an idea on how to improve.

Registered User names must not be offensive.

In my screenplay thread for example (now locked)

https://www.letsrun.com/forum/flat_read.php?thread=9485903&page=1

, the final post comes from

a user with a name I don't care for.

I reported the post though it's still up.

Mod's might not understand why the post was reported.

Someone else mentioned an explanation for reporting posts.

That would help.

There is another user on page one of that thread who's username contains a sexual overtone.

your daddy wrote:

malmo wrote:

The only thing I want to do with political threads is nuke them all.

This is a HUGE problem.

I love the idea of this site being a way for people to talk about the things they would talk about on a run. We talk about politics all the time. It's often the safe stupid conversations over and over, but it's what we choose to talk about because we enjoy it. It is none of your business to decide what people should and should not be talking about. You should not be deleting threads that annoy you. That is not what moderators are for.

The problem is if they didn't delete political threads there would be like 50 of them on page 1 at any given time. Just let them all post in the Trump thread.

Hoser, eh wrote:

The rather innocuous thread referred to below has now been deleted, for some reason. It's of no consequence beyond its indication of the continued opacity of the moderation processes here. The thread was started by someone at Letsrun, purportedly to garner support for Greg's writing ambitions. Greg, however, took issue with some of the sincere, professional advice he was given and disliked one or two users' screen names. So he requested the thread be locked and it is now gone.

Message board glitch. It's there.

John Schiefer of Track & Field Media (the predecessor to Letsrun) once said "Don't believe everything you read." The corollary is, "Don't believe everything you don't see."

rekrunner wrote:

Everyone seems to placing a lot of blame on moderators, but I think there should be some personal accountability for what people post.

^ +1 Anonymous posts and lack of meaningfully "registered" users means its easy to post marginal or unkind content without much consideration or consequence.

More accountability, please.

One good suggestion I saw is for Moderators to be identified, like the "Benevolent Dictator" etc.

Purpose of moderation is to remove "crap" from the board.

Crap = posts violating TOC.

Crap posts upsetting a thin-skinned reader/moderator.

At least one moderator abused their privileges to willy-nilly delete countless messages not violating TOC - they just didn't like many, many posts (for reasons not well understood or communicated).

That' s not moderation. It's censorship.

Less of that, please.

Ernest wrote:

Crap posts upsetting a thin-skinned reader/moderator.

EDIT:

Above should read ...

"Crap [sign for does-not-equal]* upsetting a thin-skinned reader/moderator"

*Board interprets "" as special characters and does not display it.

Apologies if this has already been posted, as I haven't read through the entire thread, but...

Why was the tree counting thread deleted? This is years after the fact, but that was all-time Letsrun content and it was deleted with no explanation, and any attempt to ask why was subsequently deleted too. That's an example of a harmless thread being deleted without explaining that irk the community.

Two others would be Malmo's discretion over what stays and goes which has been noted already, and trolls flooding good threads. A recent, obvious example is Frank Meza. Obviously when a thread hits thousands of posts its hard to sort through everything, but I support Letsrun's attempts to out frauds (just an example) but it's taken away from / gives the forum a bad reputation when 'harassment' is allowed. No easy fix for that though.

wejo wrote:

I said perhaps we should start a thread to discuss how to best moderate Letsrun.com and here it is.

What can we do to improve?

..

Thread:

LRC: There seems to be a lot of negative stuff here and visitors aren't happy. Why are you unhappy? What are your thoughts on how we can do this better?

Visitors: We're unhappy with the racists and trolls. Ban racists, and require register users.

LRC: you don't know what you're talking about. This is not the problem.

Rather than incessantly defend against the comments provided by the people you asked, maybe try to heed them.

The registered users things is so clear, you even implemented it in this thread because you see it as a potential remedy, yet simultaneously you are emphatic that it isn't helpful.

It's like watching you apply bandaids to a bleeding toddler. When you ask how to Stem the blood loss, people suggest taking away the endless supply of razor blades. You steadfastly proclaim those aren't the problem, and suggest we just need bigger bandaids. You want to wipe away the tears and mucus from the crying baby's face, but not deal with what's causing the injuries.

Some of the issues here are simply structural.

The racism stuff is almost comical at this point. For the more than ten years I've visited LRC I've seen fairly consistent commentary about how much racism there is on these boards. Yet all we see in this thread from LRC and mods is defense against that notion. Even to the point where Malmo finally says "There, I deleted it, end of story. What's the problem?"

The correct answer from Malmo should've been

i) about three pages earlier, and

ii) "oh yeah, you're totally right, ban this fool."

But it's NEVER that.

It becomes about how the people pointing at the racism are somehow the problem. It's like if only that young lady hadn't been so drunk, poor Brock Turner would never have raped her.

And that's a big part of the problem here.

How or why should anyone take you seriously here?

It is indeed back. Curiously, though, it's locked--as Greg indicated he would request it to be. And four posts have been deleted, including mine, which Greg said he reported because he "didn't care for" my username. The thread itself is completely insignificant and my post doesn't matter at all (although I did carefully and politely articulate what I believe to be sound advice). What matters is the impression of the unseen hand. Greg gets the attention of someone at LR, who starts a thread on his behalf, encouraging readers to help Greg's dream become reality. But Greg doesn't like the advice he's being given, so he requests the thread be locked--and it is. Oh and someone's username is uncouth, please can Greg have that user's post deleted? Why yes, yes he can. Why don't you pin a thread at the top of the page titled "Deleted Threads and Posts" and have short-form explanations. For "Threads" simply list title, poster and why deleted; for posts list Parent Thread, poster, and why deleted.

malmo wrote:

Hoser, eh wrote:

The rather innocuous thread referred to below has now been deleted, for some reason. It's of no consequence beyond its indication of the continued opacity of the moderation processes here. The thread was started by someone at Letsrun, purportedly to garner support for Greg's writing ambitions. Greg, however, took issue with some of the sincere, professional advice he was given and disliked one or two users' screen names. So he requested the thread be locked and it is now gone.

Message board glitch. It's there.

John Schiefer of Track & Field Media (the predecessor to Letsrun) once said "Don't believe everything you read." The corollary is, "Don't believe everything you don't see."

https://www.letsrun.com/forum/flat_read.php?board=1&id=9486706&thread=9485903#9486706

The Dingo^3 wrote:

Apologies if this has already been posted, as I haven't read through the entire thread, but...

Why was the tree counting thread deleted? This is years after the fact, but that was all-time Letsrun content and it was deleted with no explanation, and any attempt to ask why was subsequently deleted too. That's an example of a harmless thread being deleted without explaining that irk the community.

There's a weird thing on this board with both posters and moderators where things that are just funny are considered to be trolling even if they aren't inflammatory in any way. I've written a number of posts in years past that were just intended to be good natured humor that got deleted.