Moderators

Subject: Re: Moderators

AR wrote: PS / PH are a long way from CH, can the Mods really effectively understand the day to day of the Nostrand stop at 2:00am? Not that I think ill of any Mod, to the contrary, most are great, but I think that the specific hoods should police themselves, if you don't live there how can you judge right and wrong? I just think that's a good idea.

fwiw, I live across the street from CH. I'm not a mod but nabes that abut each other aren't "a long way" from each other.

AR wrote: Come on, can you walk from Washington To New York Ave at night?, That's not next door.

I can do whatever I want - I might get hassled. on a particularly bad night, I might get mugged.

but the fact is that last night two guys pushed into my foyer behind me at 3:30 a.m. and I managed to handle that situation and get them away from me and stay safe. I don't think the pissing contest you seem to be raising by insisting that no one can moderate a CH board except for a CHer can be won using relative safety as an argument. then again, I think it's a stupid argument, so i don't think it's winable. the board exists at the suffrance of a PH resident.

I'm with you on the double-standard, AR. I learned very quickly that certain views are more tolerated on these boards than others. Try posting something positive about the Atlantic Yards and you'll see what I mean.

When I first started posting, the moderator asked me to back off criticizing another poster, saying that I had already made my point. But when that poster continued to repeat her views with equal frequency and intensity in future posts, nothing, of course, was said to her.

I also agree with what you said about Candicissma's term "whiny bitch". She sarcastically called me "classy" for posting my views (which she clearly disagrees with) on some neighborhood punks, but then feels that it's OK to call you a profane name. In the past, I recall Dave B posting a profanity-laden screed against someone else whose posts annoyed him - and after DaveB finished his post, he locked the thread so the other poster could not respond.

That's why I'd suggest that you read brownstoner.com more often. It's a more mature crowd and a lot more tolerant of a range of views. And before someone accuses me of being a shill for brownstoner, for the record, I am not. I just like that site better and prefer it to this one.

sweet tea wrote: okay, name-calling isn't nice, but it isn't as if it only happens to you, AR, or only by mods. there's a nice thread on the park slope park where SlimB gets called a c*** and i say that's mean and then i get called a retard, just to pick an example at random. oh, wait, it was "fucking retard". (and, yes, it made me REALLY mad, and i stewed about it way more than was healthy, and i wished a magic mod would swoop down and banish the meanie. but it was only the internet, and i turned it off for a while and thought mean thoughts about the meanie and hoped for him to get hemroids for real, not only online.)

As the boards have gotten bigger, none of the mods has time to read all the posts. Although it may not look like it, I am not really "officially" modding anymore, since I went back to school (the site admin never de-listed me, and I step in if I see something), but that means that I only look at the boards I would otherwise be interested in, which is mostly PH, and sometimes PS and FG. And of course, daveb is no more. So basically, you have to let us know, via PM, if something is going on, which plenty of users do. 90% of the time that I tell somebody to chill out, it's because the person who got called a jerk PMed me about it with a link to the post in question.

Needless to say, this isn't a great situation. But when daveb and I, the original mods, stepped down (after months of harassment by various anonymous posters, etc.) surprisingly enough, no one else volunteered, other than Candicissima and vanilla. If there are locals who want to be mods, great. Let dailyheights know. As it is, I sort of imagine this place to be like a giant, undersupervised playground. Although we'd like everyone to behave themselves, there aren't enough people to supervise adequately, and some kid is getting beaten up when our backs are turned.

As far as banning people goes, we've only ever really banned one or two people. Usually getting made fun of for breaking the rules is enough to whip most people into line. Or they just get bored of it.

Also, if you stay here long enough, you'll know that this place occasionally erupts into a shitstorm like this, and eventually everyone gets bored of it and things go back to normal.

ETA: alafairnadia also makes a good point about where these boards came from. Until last week or so, they were attached to dailyheights.com. It started out as a Prospect Heights board, and every other neighborhood board that has been added, has been added at the request of users. As a result, most posters live in PH, and especially most of the posters who have been around for a while. Since the mods are mostly people who've been around for a while, they are likely to live in PH.

Alafairnadia also spends tons of time hanging out in the CH. Rather than regarding it as a place to sleep while socializing in "cooler" places, she is always organizing outings in CH.

Yay for Apollonia!!!