Hey.....

Catchfire wrote:

lol @ Kafkaesque.

What would you suggest, Slumberjack? Sean has the last word here.

We could.....always promote me to Moderator.....that outta keep the membership happy :)

NorthReport wrote:

The moderators here might want to consider taking a deep long look in the mirror. Perhaps it is time for you to back off a bit instead of using your big stick. No one likes bullies.

I'm on a few message forums and I can honestly say the Moderators at rabble have been the most open minded and non-strict ones I've seen.  In most places you tell a moderator to fuck off and you're done for good.

Look Sean, can you please give it a fucking rest or take it to PM? I for one don't want to hear any more of this whining.

I think pretty much everyone here has expressed our appreciation for your input here, and we are happy you are back.

Seems to me that wnat made that possible is the mods you are complaining about backed down in the interest of peace and let you in.

And you are back at it again.. for what? Because MegB expressed some frustration?

Are you surprised?  And since you seem to want to do this in public, I don't know if you might have said anything to either mod in private in the way of a peace offering or apology, but I know you haven't said anything in public about some of the things you said that were frankly, nasty and uncalled for, and your own responsibility here which led directly to you getting canned.

So again, are you surprised? And if you want better relations do you not understand that is a two-way street? If you don't want what you consider attitude maybe it is time you had a good PRIVATE conversation to address that.If not, be prepared to get attitude from more than the mods.

As for dragging this perennial thread killer out forever, I don't want to hear any more of it, for a little while, at least. Get a room.

Sean, thank you for ignoring Pondering. Noted! Can we put this to bed now?

Sean, I know I have been abrasive at times, and annoyingly tenacious, I am human like everyone else. I strive for perfection but it has so far eluded me. So, I sincerely apologize for the manner in which I have at times responded to you. I can't promise I will never do it again because as I noted I have not yet attained perfection.

I sympathize with some of your complaints.

This is a bizarre place. After seeing a mod told to fuck off with no apparent backlash I thought to myself "holy shit you can do anything here". I was wrong.

I think the policy here is crap and criticizing posters (including for their views) should be out of bounds. I think "time-outs" should be used more but shouldn't lead to permanent bans. If they made me mod I would be way more strict and my definition of "personal attack" would be very broad. So, everyone should be very pleased that I'm not a mod.

On any message board I have been on the mods are gods. Publishers and editors don't have time for message board upsets. They don't care about it. They always have a few mods. If one mod is not doing their job then the other mods would complain.

In many cases the mods are highly respected people who do other work as well. Meg, for example, has an established reputation at rabble. Some stranger from the message board, even one that has been here a long time, has nothing that can compete with her established reputation. Complaints will simply be rerouted back to the mods. So basically, whether or not our complaints are valid is immaterial.

Your letter didn't say "I want you to fire the mod(s)" but sending complaints like that to a person's boss is easily interpreted that way. If someone sent my boss a letter of complaint about me (regardless of it's veracity) I would probably not like or trust that person especially if they never apologized to me. I certainly wouldn't consider them a friend. I try not to hold grudges but it's hard not to if I think the person may do the same thing again.

I know that like myself the mods are flawed and they have buttons that can be pushed. I also know that they are decent people and knowledgable progressives that I would probably be honored to have as personal friends.

Don't let them bully you away Sean. Take the high road my friend.

While babble isn't the rabble powerhouse it was before other social media took off, the Active Topics page is near the top of most visited pages, which means it's still an essential part of rabble. However, if those visits radically drop in numbers babble will cease to exist. We don't want people to leave for a wide variety of reasons and that is one of them.

Sean, I don't know what I posted that pissed you off when I first started moderating but four years of acrimony is enough. Let's bury the hatchet, okay? I'm sorry if what I post is hurtful to you - I don't have the patience and am not as laid back as CF and Old Goat are and that's not going to change (I won't pretend otherwise), but I will, as always, try to improve my performance as a mod.

A few thing that folks should know about me: I was very recently diagnosed with bipolar type 2 disorder (previously known as untreatable major depressive disorder) and am currently on meds that have improved my quality of life. I was also, several years ago, diagnosed with PTSD, stemming from a period of time when I was physically, verbally and sexually abused.

I don't disclose this for sympathy. These things are as much a part of me as my hair colour, my name (which I'm using now on babble) and my shoe size. I am simply at a point in my life where I absolutely need to be the person I am and have no patience or energy to continue to try to conform in any way or worry about being stigmatized. Part of my activism involves being a mental health advocate and it would be disingenuous of me to pretend that my PTSD and BP2 don't exist when I am advocating for more openess and understanding, better treatment options, etc.

That is all.

oldgoat wrote:

Hi

I just wanted to dedicate this thread to CraigHubly, the very first person to be banned from babble, (you would not believe the existential angst on the board  at the time) and to Socrataire, the first person to flounce.  (not so much angst here, but he did set something of a gold standard for flouncing.)

Funny thing, they were both pretty nice people.  I'll bet there's no more than five people still posting here who remember.

Just thought I'd post this.  Not sure why, except to note we're still here and life goes on.

 

Perhaps we should have an archive entitled "Great Drama Queens of Babble". 

Cool handle: Anddra Makings!

oldgoat wrote:

Hi

I just wanted to dedicate this thread to CraigHubly, the very first person to be banned from babble, (you would not believe the existential angst on the board  at the time) and to Socrataire, the first person to flounce.  (not so much angst here, but he did set something of a gold standard for flouncing.)

Not much angst over Craig Hubley: [url=http://archive.rabble.ca/babble/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic&f=5&t=00004... Rocks![/url]

[url=http://archive.rabble.ca/babble/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic&f=15&t=0000...'s flounce[/url]

Unionist wrote:

oldgoat wrote:

Hi

I just wanted to dedicate this thread to CraigHubly, the very first person to be banned from babble, (you would not believe the existential angst on the board  at the time) and to Socrataire, the first person to flounce.  (not so much angst here, but he did set something of a gold standard for flouncing.)

Not much angst over Craig Hubley: [url=http://archive.rabble.ca/babble/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic&f=5&t=00004... Rocks![/url]

[url=http://archive.rabble.ca/babble/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic&f=15&t=0000...'s flounce[/url]

 

Good Lord!! None of the people in that thread are here today.(at least not under those names)

Epic flounce that, but a few months before my time.

Bacchus wrote:

Good Lord!! None of the people in that thread are here today.(at least not under those names)

I think I'm in there.  The Socrataire thread, anyway.

Now I feel old.  Thanks, Bacchus...

Unionist wrote:

[url=http://archive.rabble.ca/babble/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic&f=15&t=0000...'s flounce[/url]

The breaking point, way back in 2001?  For those of us still around from those days, there doesn't seem to be a bottom to our endurance.

MegB wrote:

Sean in Ottawa wrote:

Thanks Meg.

All that is understood and appreciated.

I am confused about the years of acrimony though. I do not recall a problem with you when you first started moderating and I never ever made a complaint about you beyond a reply in a forum addressed to a specific post. I have found it strange to hear references of me calling for your job since that never, ever happened. It is a pity you thought this. There was a conflict with Catchfire in 2011 but it did not involve you at all and that has been aired enough already. As far as I know our conflict was very recent and seems to be based in part on this misunderstanding about a complaint from the past I never made. The comment I had trouble with was the veteran post which escalated due to responses back and forth afterwards - I was not aware of the background misunderstanding at the time and just responding to what I saw. No doubt this background played a role I did not understand as I went in without any animosity beyond the post I was responding to. Happy to see it all end.

What "background" are you talking about?

 

That you heard I had called for your job. I did not know that story until very recently

MegB wrote:

You emailed our boss, complaining about moderating. Amounts to the same thing, don't you think? And for every time I reacted to your posts there were several times I didn't. However, I will continue to work on being more "moderate" in my work. It's a tough balancing act sometimes and doesn't always come off the way it should.

 

Why are you doing this?

If you are calling for someone's job it is a clear and specific action -- it means you name the person and ask for them to be fired. I did not do this to you and I don't understand why you feel the need to keep insisting that I did. It is also a dirty accusation to level at someone on a progressive board.

I also don't appreciate the idea that I should have to just accept the interpretation being put out here, do this debate in public, or face a never ending mischaracterization of it.

If you are so angry about this message I sent in 2011 -- why wait till now and beat me over the head with it and -- why insist on seeing an email that did not mention you as calling for your job? And you never sent me an email tro complain or ask for an explanation -- you just do that here.

I have already posted the entire communication here to stop the misunderstandings from that email.

Let's also discuss since we seem to need to go there why if anyone sends a private email about their contribution to rabble that this be something that has to be discussed in public. I still feel that the public airing of this -- by both of you -- has forced me to go back and dig up the actual email and present it here. That email was not public. In order to stop the misrepresentation I posted the whole thing which included what was a private comment about my income and the amount I was contributing. I feel this ongoing saga has been a breach of privacy although I accepted that and posted the email rather than continue to have the false statements that I called for your job persist. But then here we are doing it again in an open thread.

I expect there will be someone along to complain about why I am doing this here in spite of the fact that it is the two of you who have decided to take this private complaint about me public.

If you want to take this as a criticism go ahead: When someone who has contributed here in writing and financially writes to rabble about their feelings about what the organization is doing or to stop their contribution, this is private and it is not up to the moderators, no matter how hurt their feelings may be, to bring that communication to an open forum. Certainly it is not their right to use a personal and private correspondence as a club to beat the person with in public. Certainly it is not their right to misrepresent that communication into something it wasn't.

I will agree that a complaint is not going to make anyone happy. But the complaint was well founded and was in the only place I could make it. It was not sent for the purpose of complaining but to cancel my  voluntary payments. I believe I had a right to cancel and I had a right to explain why.

The message did not mention you. It involved a moderator (not you) who deleted a post in a reactions thread that was critical of his own behavior. Since the public board was censored and the issue was huge for me I stopped posting for a while and my contribution (which is my right) I sent a message in the only way I could which was to rabble contacts and I never mentioned your name.

I did not ask for anyone to be fired and specifically I did not name you at all. I did give reasons for stopping my contribution and leaving at the time and I did suggest a better way that the monitoring could be handled. It is not a difficult thing to implement -- have a different moderator deal with a person when one moderator is in conflict with them.

For the record I am not going to do this but it would not be outrageous if I did write a email complaining about the moderators and asking them to be re-trained on privacy.

Now I thought you wanted to bury this – so why go back and restate the same accusation -- that I keep denying -- that I asked for you to be fired? If you think there is a posting, message, email or anything calling for you job back in 2011—send me the text by PM that bothers you and we can discuss like adults. Don’t force me to have to keep explaining this in public. You may think this is helping you but it is not helping you any more than it is helping me.

Sean in Ottawa wrote:

Why are you doing this? 

I'm beginning to suspect that we don't nearly know enough about what dire consequences await employees who displease the management at Rabble.  It's probably all meant as code for ixnay and amscray on the emails.

No one is 'forcing' anything to be public, just deciding to bludgeon people until we all agree with a certain position. Which will never happen, even in ideal circumstances

This will just end with a banning or a flounce and then life will go on

-

@ Bacchus

Yeah. At this point I'd put my money on the latter, if only because at this point it is being spun that if the moderators actually do their jobs they are fascists.

So they are kind of hooped into remaining polite and just letting the trainwreck continue. Not sure how anyone else here feels about it, but it certainly isn't liberating, or contributing to freer discourse or better understanding. It is doing a lot of damage and causing a lot of resentment.

Kind of funny considering that this was about babblers supposedly being able to govern their own behaviour and not needing to be told what to do.

(perhaps it would be better to just shut up and watch, but obviously that hasn't stopped it either, and it is to the point where people here might want to speak up, because obviously it is not working)

6079_Smith_W wrote:

Yeah. At this point I'd put my money on the latter, if only because at this point it is being spun that if the moderators actually do their jobs they are fascists.

So they are kind of hooped into remaining polite and just letting the trainwreck continue. Not sure how anyone else here feels about it, but it certainly isn't liberating, or contributing to freer discourse or better understanding. It is doing a lot of damage and causing a lot of resentment.

Kind of funny considering that this was about babblers supposedly being able to govern their own behaviour and not needing to be told what to do.

Sorry this is bullshit.

This is about a specific and untrue characterization. You have decided to enter this with your own extreme and very unhelpful false interpretations. I don't know where your hate on me is coming from. Nobody is calling anyone a facist.

I am just insisting that Meg stop saying that I called for her to be fired. Since I didn't. There is nothing facist about that.

She (not they as Catchfire has not been involved in this latest) is not hooped into anything just a demand to be truthful about this. I am being hooped into letting stand a statment that I called for a moderator here to be fired when that is untrue.

Such a statement is so extreme that I could not hope for anything but severe bias against me by many who post here if it were to be left standing. I have a right to see this corrected since it is false. And you really have no standing in this.

Cross-posted with you Smith-- I don't appreciate your help in this.

And yes I am happy to stop it.

I just want that accusation to stop. Do you really think the accusation I was calling for Meg's job is not a big deal? I think a lot of people here would disagree. Since it is not true I would like it stopped.

This is after all not a disagreement about politics but a false statement that I was calling for Meg to lose her job.

That statement has apparently caused extreme predjudice for almost 4 years and I did not even know it was out there till this month.

Is that unreasonable?

There is a solution to all of this! We need a new forum!

We need a forum where each babbler can have their own vanity thread. A thread where they can flog whatever theme they want and for as long as they want to keep flailing away at it.

The vanity threads should be moderator-free, and the WINNER will be determined by the number of replies posted to the thread. ('cause it is so damn important we have WINNERS in here, isn't it?)

Oh, and for those who absolutely have to get in the last word... it should be possible for each individual to close their vanity thread without having to call a moderator in to do it for them (remember, we want the vanity threads to be moderator-free).

We can determine who the WINNER is, and who gets the last word. That solves everything, doesn't it, that need to determine WINNERS and ensure that someone can get in the last word?

And for lunch today.... Irish babies.