Is there a way to add another alert reason for posting untrue information?

[EarlG]

37. You're correct

I mischaracterized what you wrote, and should have made a better effort to read it properly. My apologies.

When it comes to "so much going wrong" with Rubyshoo, I dunno about that. They were causing a disruption, as indicated by that thread you started which resulted in lots of people calling them out by name, complaining about their behavior, and calling for me to make changes to the site rules in order to deal with them. I guess I could have reached out to Rubyshoo and explained the situation, and tried to get them to listen and understand -- I do that from time to time, as MIRT can attest to -- but the signals I saw indicated that they did not seem interested in changing their behavior, so I decided not to waste my time.

As for the rest, it's all moot. I'm intimately familiar with the traditional forum moderation model because it's the system that DU used for the first ten years of its life, and running that system was... a challenge. It involved constant micromanagement, and it produced significantly worse results than the current system. Hundreds of alerts were sent every day, and every single one had to be discussed by a team of moderators who needed reach a consensus on each decision. A vast number of posts were deleted every day. Threads were locked constantly because too much fighting was taking place in the replies. As you note, we even had a moderator function that would delete entire sub-threads in one click. We had some members who would get fifty posts deleted in a week, let alone five in 90 days.

This happened because we tried as hard as we could to give everyone the benefit of the doubt. People who failed to follow the rules were given many chances, despite repeatedly showing us that they could not, or would not change their behavior. We did this even when those people were attacking and abusing the moderators and the Admins personally, both in private and in public. Especially in those situations, because we wanted to do our best to demonstrate that the system was fair and evenhanded and unbiased, and that we could tolerate fucking awful behavior and give people the benefit of the doubt, even when they repeatedly proved to us that they didn't deserve it.

At the end of that ten years, Skinner and I were completely and totally burned out, and if we had not introduced the Jury system (which took more than four years to develop, by the way, just so there's no confusion about how much thought we put into it), DU would probably have ceased to exist and I wouldn't be discussing this with you now.

So I don't think I can make it any plainer than that. Does the Jury system produce perfect results? No! There is no system of forum moderation that can produce perfect results. Sometimes you're going to see decisions that you disagree with. It can't be helped. But the Jury system works for DU by producing a more civil community with significantly fewer disruptions -- and just as importantly, it works for DU by allowing a single Administrator to keep the entire community humming along while avoiding burnout. That's why we're not going back to a traditional moderator system.