Greetings you many kind readers of the Marmot’s Hole. A few words about moderation policy.
We continue to work with various ideas on what kind of policy to have, and how to implement it. We will try to be as laissez faire as possible. To be sure, there will be some comments that are not all that terribly inappropriate or inflamatory as long as you are in a good mood and give people the benefit of the doubt, and those should stay.
It is possible that on very rare occasions we implement brief moderation periods during which all comments must be approved. In even rarer cases some commenters will be banned.
A formal comment and moderation policy will be published in the coming days.
Comments that in the future will be deleted completely without warning or explanation are currently being deleted or edited with some sort of explanation given. The purpose of doing this is to let people see that it’s finally happening, because once a comment is deleted you don’t know it was there, and in order to give people real life examples of what will be deleted in the future.
As an example, have a look at comment by “captbbq.” There is nothing inherently wrong with that comment. It uses no inappropriate language or tone and is actually very helpful. However, it’s a comment about moderation policy in a post titled “Tweaking Korean Students” and is therefore off topic. A little uptight, am I? Perhaps, but given “captbbq’s” concern and helpful advice about moderation, I am hoping s/he won’t mind being made an example of in this case. Already at least two other comments have also been “deleted by editing” in this way, left up but either with the text deleted or crossed out, for being personal attacks. (In one case I also deleted the name of the commenter because that seemed to be the best thing to do given the reason action was being taken.)
This approach to deleting comments will continue for all deletion cases until the weekend (March 10, 11), after which those that need to be deleted will just go “poof” with no explanation, though it is likely some will on occasion be “deleted by editing” like we’re doing during this most historic period in the life of Marmot’s Hole.
Note that comments are disallowed for this post, but there is relevant discussion going on elsewhere.
/Oranckay
