it is time to get rid of the unmoderated forum policy

I think it is finally time for photo.net to get rid of the unmoderated

forum and go back to a strictly moderated policy. I think it makes

sense to have a 48 hour forum but that too will need to be

moderated. <P>Thois will probably mean there have to be more

moderator teams as the current moderating team is obviously

swamped, but if photo.net is going to survive the flood of muck &

nonsense & exchanges of insults that mark usenet forums, it

needs to be more focused. Right now if i were a potential

advertiser Iand bothered to actually take a look at the United

forums I'd shy away.<P>If you agree, say yes.<P>If you disagree,

say no.<P>If you have a better option than mine, offer it.<P>If you

are just replying to see if your computer is actually connected to

an internet site go or to relieve your boredom please go to the

next question.

No.

I don't read all of the topics, but I haven't seen any of those kinds of posts. Where are they showing up? Maybe those types of topics should be moved to a moderated forum.

<p>In short: no.</p>

 

<p>While I agree that there must be some way of improving the situation, my pessimistic view of online behaviour is that this change wouldn't be worth the hassle of finding all those new moderators.</p>

 

<p>Unless you're planning on strict moderation of all of the other groups (camera equipment, nature photography, lens work, etc.) as well, all this will accomplish is to splinter the stuff that currently is in the unmoderated forum into all the others. People won't stop posting "Hey, I read that film XYZ is good, is it good?" or "Is film ABC bad, I had it printed on a Frontier and it doesn't look good" - they'll just post it in nature photography or camera equipment instead of in the unmoderated forum. Lens Work will diverge even farther from its stated goal and will end up with a dozen people a day asking "Is there any difference between the old Canon 28-105 and the new one" or "Is $99 a good price for a lens" and "I read the 28-300 lenses are all great, is Tamron better than Tokina". And so on.</p>

 

<p>If any change is needed in what is and is not moderated, it would be that everything <em>but</em> the unmoderated forum should be moderated, to ensure that they keep on-topic, with the unmoderated forum as a catch-all where the miscellany and unworthy questions end up. If you're tired of the miscellany and unworthy questions, you can then safely read everything else and take the unmoderated forum out of your personal unified forum selections.</p>

 

<p>That's my opinion - worth exactly what you paid for it.</p>

Yes.

 

This thing is a mess, and virtually nothing is being added to the long-term database.

 

The Moderated DB is woefully short on up to date info on lots of stuff, and as long as there is an un-moderated DB, I don't see that changing.

I'm not very happy with the current structure of the "General" forums, either, for reasons I mentioned in the recent discussion that Bob Atkins initiated.

 

In theory the "Unarchived" forum is moderated in the same manner as the "Archived" forum as far as abusive, etc, posts are concerned. The only difference is in how high a barrier a question must hurdle in order to be considered "on-topic". In the Unarchived forum, almost any topic that is vaguely photography-related is fair game, whereas in the Archived Forum, a question must be one that in the moderators' opinion is significant and not "already answered" in the archives.

 

This means that with tens of thousands of archived threads, very few new questions "merit" being discussed in the Archived forum, at least in the opinion of the moderators. In practice, the moderators would also like to treat the Unarchived forum as a "minimally moderated" forum in order to keep their workload reasonable, but this is not working out, as the level of discourse in the Unarchived seems to have degraded.

 

Having said all that, the current moderator team has been working hard at this for years, as volunteers, and photo.net is in their debt. I think we owe it to them at least to defer to their opinions on what, if anything, should be done.

No.<p>

 

As far as know, the "unmoderated" forum <i>is</i> moderated. I actually saw insulting comments disappear.<p>

 

On the other hand, I wish the unarchived forum were moderated more closely. I wish it would stay on the topic of photography. I'd delete all the whinning about ratings and photo critique, where most insults come from, and about what photo.net should be. There's a forum for the later and we're in it now. I'd delete trolls also... too bad because some are funny but it's getting out of hand. <em>Reference to deleted thread edited out. -- Moderator</em>Finally, I'd go back to the 24h limit.<p>

 

Even with the presence of the 24h forum, I believe searching the archives should be encouraged, as well as adding questions/infos to archived threads on a given subject.

I guess this is a question for Brian: how much moderation is required in the unmoderated forum? I don't see much abuse, and think there is a reasonably good community feel to the unmod. forum, but perhaps that's because I miss a lot of posts that get moderated.

 

I don't think the advertisers worry about anything other than hits. Some online forums seem to encourage the trolls with flamebait posts seemingly in order to attract the page views (*cough* Slashdot *cough*).

Yes! Ellis, you beat me to it.

 

For those of you who are saying no, explain to me how the unmod has NOT become just another instance of rec.photo?

 

If you want to get picky, look at the trend of questions, it's basically a hardware forum for people who need others to salve their conscience about spending money. Just a SWAG, but I'd say ~85% of all the questions DO NOT FIT the "photographic objective" criteria that Philip originally conceived.

 

Some of us do miss the days before the unmod sprang into it's ungodly existence. We deserve as much consideration as those who think it serves some purpose.

 

BTW, Erik, you just descibed the moderated forum in your post.

The problem is there is too much information hidden in the forums.

I think photo.net should make all forums unarchived and unmoderated.

 

 

In the meantime, the skilled photo.net moderators could spend their time compiling and constantly updating a set of well-categorized and easy-to-find (no search engine) FAQs on photography based on the questions and answers in different forums.

 

Let people have fun in forums and get information from FAQs.

Liu, you want PN to BECOME rec.photo ("all forums unarchived and unmoderated")?

 

And you're mighty free with the moderator's time and effort.

 

Did anyone ever stop to think this MIGHT NOT BE what Philip had in mind?

I think a well compiled FAQ would be more useful than an archived forum. A 48 hour life time for a unmoderated debate about A v.s B wouldn't take too much resource from the system but would be very useful for information collection.

 

IMHO, the amount of information that could be archived from unmoderated forum might be more than the amount of information shouldn't be archived in moderated forums.

But the problem is not archived v.s unarhived or moderated v.s. unmoderated. The problem is how to increase SNR, which requires human attention more than simple moderating or archiving.

IMHO, the moderated forum should also include the credit to the moderators. This might not easy to impliment in forums than in FAQs

(you can not say who deleted what but you can say who picked what Q and what A).

 

In the FAQ format, a pair of Q&A could include the credits to three persons: who asked the Q, who gave the A and who picked and edited the Q&A. This would be very good for improving the photo.net as a community.

<p>

A FAQ might be a good idea, but who's going to read it? You can't even get people to read the static content on this site. Content which would very much answer 75% of the questions asked (like which film is best for sunlight in Guatemala vs. sunlight in Mexico).

 

<p>

When I started visiting this site, I spent a good six to eight months reading everything before even posting a single message. Unfortunately, most newcomers just want a quick answer. And it's here, they just have to search a bit. But they don't.

 

<p>

Yes, there is content that is asked over and over on the Unmod forum that could probably be archived due to the nature of rapid change (anything digital for instance). But most questions <strong>are</strong> hardware related and push this site farther and farther away from Philip's original idea.

 

<p>

So call me an old fart (though I'm only 28), but I agree with Ellis. If I want Usenet-like discussion, I'll go over to wreck.photo.*

Hi Keith,<p>

 

I know it sounds a lot like the archived forum but it's not. The unarchived was put in place so one could ask questions about <i>anything</i> photographic, while threads with long time values go in the archived forum. While it is sometimes debatable as to what should go in which forum, most times it is fairly clear.<p>

 

A problem I see is that some threads are bumped from one forum to another and vice-versa. Maybe <i>all</i> threads should be posted in the unarchived first and then those in which a good discussion develops could be "elevated" to the archived forum. The original post would be posted in "real time" and that way, the acceptation of a thread would not be based on one person's (a moderator) judgement on the original post but a general concensus on how the thread develop. No need to vote or anything like that, you can tell when a thread has value. In such a system, I think 48h would then make sense. I also believe there would be less work for the moderators as they would to moderate <i>almost</i> only one forum. "Almost" because there would be some "post-moderation" after a thread is archived but usually when a thread starts on a good foot, it stays that way.<p>

 

Anyway, that's opinion. I hope I make sense.

I still think that we should be able to promote a thread for archiving in some way. Be it a button you click to vote on it or whatever. There should be something because a lot of good data gets flushed down the drain. Good data that isn't in the archives.

I dreadfully hate to mention it, but how about a slashdot-type moderation system? It might make sense. It might make things a mess. But it's an idea.

No. Keep it, and keep it at 48 hours.

There are two different styles of moderations: RGB (additive) or

CMYK (subtractive). Which one is easy to manage?

 

P.S. I am not against moderation at all. I just doubt the

usefulness of archiving forums. If nobody reads them, why

archive?

I say blow away the unmoderated general forum. It just drags down the quality of photo.net in general.

Barring the specialized groups that recently came in from Phillip's site, it seems like 85% or more of the traffic on the site is in unmoderated. If you eliminate that, then what's going to happen? The return of a cleaner, purer, photo.net? Somehow I doubt it.

As to "search the archives", come on. The search engine is pathetic, and the "organization" of the archived stuff is hopeless. Try to use the archive to answer one of the typical, open-ended newbie questions that the veterans seem to hate in unmoderated. "What film for my trip?" "Which wide angle, 20 or 24mm?" There's no answer there, other than plowing through a ton of old messages, most of them off-topic to the question, and often of little better quality than what's in unmoderated, but often with the added benefit of being out of date.

 

Are such questions worthy of being ignored? Perhaps so. Certainly there often are no good answers to such questions, and they do tend to irritate old hands. And yet they come up. Again. And again. And again. So why is that? Apparently a lot of people think they're worth asking, even if some folks don't think they're worth answering.

 

I think the basic problem with this site is that it's founded on a false premise: an internet archive of questions and answers, all delivered by knowledgeable, polite volunteers.

 

It doesn't work that way because *people* don't work that way. photo.net gets as many hits as it does because it is a *community*, but the forum structure keeps trying to sweep "community" under the rug. The present proposal strikes me as more of the same.

 

Finally, if more active moderation served to reduce the number of comments like this: "If you are just replying to see if your computer is actually connected to an internet site go or to relieve your boredom please go to the next question.", then I would be all for it.

 

Before the flamage starts I should say that I fully appreciate Phillip's efforts, and those of the moderators. I'm not criticizing their sincerity, or hard work. What I'm doing here is questioning some basic assumptions about photo.net, and trying to get across the idea that the problems are unsolvable at present because some of the basic premises of the place are flawed. This is intended as constructive criticism, and is just imo, of course.

Yes, yes, yes. Please, yes.

My own inclination is to do the following:

<Ol>

<li>Eliminate the Unarchived Forum and the Staging Forum. Have only one Archived Forum for General questions. All questions posted to the forum would be considered "new" for at least 24 hours -- meaning that a question would be listed in the Unified Forum and in the "New Questions" list for the forum for at least 24 hours. A question would also be considered new if it was less than seven days old and there had been at least two answers in the previous 24 hour period.

<li>The definition of "on-topic" would be the same (relaxed) rules as the current Unarchived forum. Moderators would still be expected to delete abusive, off-topic, and trolling posts.

<li>After a question was no longer "new" it would automatically go into the archives, retrievable through the "categories" and the search function. We would appoint a category moderator for each category whose job would be to eliminate redundant or unuseful threads from the archives, including posts that are currently in the archives and have outlived their usefulness or have been superceded by more useful recent posts.

<li>We would create a few new forums to divert Equipment-related questions from the General forum, with the aim of spreading the moderation load. Readers could then use the features of the Unified Forum to control which topics they wished to have displayed in their Unified View.

</ol>

Yes

 

Also the database needs to be upgraded which is not being done.

Wayne, can you explain further what you mean by "the database needs upgrading" ?