Definition: "the avoidance of excess or extremes, especially in one's behavior or political opinions."
Here are some words someone shared with me regarding moderation: 1) Moderating is hard. If you do your job you are going to piss someone off. But the people you piss off are worth pissing off - because they will either modify their behavior or they will go away (desirable in some cases). 2) In order to get high S/N the list can't be open loop. Yes, it slows things down a little - but people will appreciate the filtering. Solution? Have multiple moderators. It doesn't need to be a single-op job. That will help the throughput. But last I checked there was no real-time requirement for any discussions on these reflectors. If there is, it should be a different focus list - like something to do with DX alerting regarding DXpeditions or whatever. 3) Some of the bad players are well known, and it's gotten really tiring listening to their stupid, snarky comments. I could name names, but we all know who they are. And their crap should just be stopped at the door. It's giving ham radio a bad name and it doesn't help attracting new people to this part of the hobby. I wish things were different, and that everyone could have empathy, intelligence, knowledge and perspective. That's what we wish for - unfortunately we're stuck with the human condition, so we have to deal with it. Let the bad posters berate the moderators - most of the audience will applaud, however. End of quote. I have reviewed some of the recent activity and decided that a small number of people need to be moderated. They simply don't know when to exercise judgment on their posts. The rest of us can decide if we want to keep this a positive place or not. If it does require all posts to be moderated - then so be it - but it will be different. I would like to think we can all work together to keep things from blowing up. Also - those who let the idiots get under their skin probably could have been part of the solution and let me know about the situation before getting to the point of taking their marbles and going home. We can work together to make this better. Don't assume I always have the bandwidth to read every post. KL7RA was good at alerting me when the pot was about to boil over... but he is no longer with us. I can still see him walking past the double doors at the ER and seeing them swing shut behind him. I miss him very much. Who will step up and let me know when things need attention? 73 Tree N6TR on a business trip in XE1 still - but will try to work VP8STI tonight _________________ Topband Reflector Archives - http://www.contesting.com/_topband
