On Thu, 2005-03-17 at 15:54 -0500, Olin Lathrop wrote:
> Herbert Graf wrote:
> >> I think kicking me off the list for a week or so would have been
> >> less work and frustration all around.
> >
> > Unfortunately that never seemed to work with you in the past.
> 
> It was never tried in the past.

Actually it was, you were kicked off, then came back without being
invited. We allowed you to stay based on your promise you wouldn't
revert to old behaviour. You didn't, for a while, and then did, and the
cycle happened again.

> > And obviously something happened which made one of us (admins) put you
> > back on the moderate list. Do you think this is reasonable? I don't know
> > which of us put you back on. What other choice did we have?
> 
> At the very least you could have told me.  

Why? It would have just resulted in the mess that's happening now. You
would have demanded this be brought to the list. It would have been
brought to the list, a flame war would have happened, and in the end
nothing would have changed.

In retrospect all we ended up doing by NOT directly telling you directly
was delaying things, which resulted in a good few months of peace on the
list. Looking back I'd say it was the better choice, since at least we
did have that peace, until now.

> This is the first I heard that
> maybe I was not on moderation, then put back some time after 18 October.
> This also implies there was a post that went to the list that you objected
> to.  If so, I was never told of that either.  Whatever you guys do, at the
> very least you should be up front about it.

We are, except with you.

Frankly I'm tired of having to deal with you. I've never said this
before but I will now: I didn't personally want you back. The main
reason I was against moderation is it meant you would be back, and given
the amount of pain that involved in the past I didn't want it any more.

Obviously I wasn't the only one with a vote and things went differently.
I don't regret it, I was wrong about the moderation bit and it has been
great, until now.

> > Olin, I already explained that to you: the post was OFF TOPIC, it was
> > labelled as [PIC], yet the largest content of the message was your
> > comments on being on the mod list. I already told you privately that if
> > that post had been labelled [OT] (or I guess separated into two posts)
> > it would have probably been approved.
> 
> Actually, no, I didn't get such a message from you.  The post was silently
> deleted from what I could tell.  I apologize if a message got lost
> somewhere.  I labeled it [PIC] because I copied the entire content of the
> person asking me about an IIC bus problem, and I thought others could reply
> to that if they wished.  The part about being moderated was a single
> paragraph at the end.

You're right, I rejected it without sending you a message, and I stand
by that, since it would have generated exactly what has now been
generated. 

What I was talking about is the discussion you and I have had within the
past 24 hours, where I did explain why I rejected it. Of course, giving
the explanation resulted in the exact flood of crap on the list that we
have now, which means my intuition was correct: it was better to just
discard the message.

> > There's nothing to get past.
> 
> I was referring to the "until we feel he can post ..." part.  There is an
> implied milestone in there somewhere.  If a thousand messages isn't enough,
> what is?

You are asking for absolutes, for hard numbers, there are none. 

There are no written guidelines for when a person is brought off the mod
list. It's a decision made every time a post gets received. Obviously I
never felt it was time to bring you off the mod list. And obviously none
of the other moderators felt it was time. 

And this flood now proves it wasn't time.

> > It did stop, as promised, at some point you were re-added to the mod
> > list, that's my guess as to what happened.
> 
> It would have helped a lot if you had told me this at the time.  However,
> I'm not sure this interpretation is correct since James feels he never made
> any such promise.  One of the problems is lack of openess.

If you don't like it: leave. We'll refund the money you paid for this
list (which of course is zero).

> > Of course, since it's been so effective very few ON the list have
> > noticed anything, which is the only problem with moderation: problem
> > posters never get seen, so nobody thinks there are ever problems.
> 
> And nobody gets to find out what you think a problem is except the person
> writing the particular post.

Right, which has worked brilliantly. Since moderation started I can only
think of one other poster who was put on the mod list, and I'm pretty
sure they are no longer on the list at all (lots of profanities and
stuff like that) (other admins will correct me if I'm wrong, my memory
isn't always the best).

Lots of newbies have been taken off the mod list.

At the core, the MAIN thing we as admin/mods want is the piclist to run
smoothly. As such what we consider "not appropriate" isn't static. Hence
there are no hard guidelines. Again, if you don't like it, leave.

-----------------------------
Herbert's PIC Stuff:
http://repatch.dyndns.org:8383/pic_stuff/

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