tepples wrote:I have also gathered that different users may want to opt-in or opt-out to subject corrections, mark-up corrections, grammar corrections, dead link corrections, etc. What would be a good method of keeping track of this?
I don't think you
should try to keep track of this. These kinds of things shouldn't normally require moderator privilege to correct; just use the same methods that everybody else has at their disposal. (i.e.
ask)
Certain kinds of cleanup are good to perform, and sure, sometimes the author is not active, but you shouldn't be making significant modifications to historical posts either. If links have gone dead because a website has moved and the author is inactive, it seems sensible enough to provide revised links in an edit-- though personally I think you should leave the dead links in the post and provide the revisions in a clearly marked addendum. The dead link URLs might be important information. (e.g. a record of what the wrong link looked like can help identify similar dead links elsewhere)
And I think that's basically the way I'd suggest doing any moderator edits to old threads; don't mess with the record. Only make
clearly marked additions, not changes. Don't delete or replace things. This applies to spelling and grammar too; leave that stuff alone- it's relevant to the history of the conversation.
If someone posts bad bbcode by accident, that would normally be spotted while the thread is still active; i don't see this being a siginificant issue with historical threads. If someone makes a mistake in an active thread and they've posted a 5000 pixel wide image, or caused it to spew HTML garbage by accident, etc. I don' think anyone would object to you making an edit to correct this, but it should be as small as possible to correct the mistake.
Deleting or replacing should be reserved for intervention with bad behaviour / abuse,
not for copy-editing. (Forum threads are not copy!!!)
tepples wrote:But derailment is a touchy subject encompassing posts by more than a single user, and I imagine that in most cases, not everybody whose posts could be affected by loss of context can be reached promptly through private message. So other than PMing each derailing user "How does this post relate to this topic?", how should I handle it?
Derailment happens naturally in all types of discussions, this is not special about internet forums. I would go so far as to say that it's
necessary that it happens sometimes; a lot of digressions result in worthwhile exchanges. It's important that we be allowed to pursue this. It's not such an awful thing to have a plurality of topic in a thread.
Yeah, people don't like it when they aren't interested in the digression, but that's okay. They can say so, too! Again I really want to encourage starting a new thread because of a digression instead of forcing it with a moderator action;
anybody can do it, not just mods. I've seen you do it lots of times and I think it works well, without any of the context-destroying problems of a split.
If you think someone is consistently or deliberately derailing things, or acting as a troll, tell them about it. Warn them. Ban them maybe if it's bad. I don't think anyone here is causing digressions that are worth a ban, but if you think they're being a problem you can tell them about it publicly or by PM. Splitting the thread instead of talking to them is only enabling/encouraging the bad behaviour.
Same deal with editing someone's spelling. If you think it's important that someone spell things correctly, tell them about it. If you edit on their behalf, you're not helping them, you're just speaking for them. Telling them about it will correct
future posts, same as how telling someone they're being too irrelevant will encourage them to behave better, if they care about your opinion.
If they don't care about your opinion, moderating them is a hostile act anyway, so it's a losing situation from the start. I think most people here respond to others, though. We're a functioning community.