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Posts Tagged ‘moderation’

Moderation

Posted by on July 28th, 2011

I thought it might be time to have a chat about our moderation policy on Red Alert.

It’s been a while since we told you all what it is, and it’s important that we remember that new people view Red Alert all the time; there are new commenters. And some of the existing ones can forget.

I thought it might also be useful to say a few words to anyone who has transgressed the policy and found themself  “in moderation” (where their comments get held up until they have been vetted and approved. Or worse, have been banned.

The Red Alert moderators (myself, Trevor, Grant and Chris) will review your status if you ask us to.

Here’s the moderation policy:

  1. Keep it relevant to the post.
  2. Keep it clean. Don’t use offensive language. We’re tolerant, but we use the test of wanting to have intermediate age school kids using this site for research.
  3. Don’t make it personal. Stick to the issues rather than the person. By all means criticise what people have said or done, but do it in a way that is not personal. Leave families out of it. And we moderate attacks on National and ACT MPs on the same basis as Labour.
  4. Don’t tell lies

If you’re commenting for the first time, your comment will go into moderation, and is generally approved. After that your comments should automatically appear.

But if you step outside the guidelines, you’ll be placed “in moderation” which means your comments will sit in a box and be looked at by one of us before being approved.

(more…)

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Filed under: #OpenLabourNZ, blogs, comms & IT, Red Alert
45 Comments

A note on moderation

Posted by on July 27th, 2010

To all those who get frustrated when their comments are stuck in moderation for a while.

Firstly, you are in moderation because you have said something that has given us cause for concern and while your comments are generally allowed through they are watched. Or because a word or a link you have inserted in your comment has caused you to end up in moderation. The moderators are four MPs. Myself, Trevor Mallard, Grant Robertson and Chris Hipkins.

No staff, just MPs who have meetings, House duty and other activities that take up their time. Sometimes (not often) comments are stuck in moderation for an hour or two while we are all doing something else.

Secondly, while it’s a weakness of Red Alert that comments sometimes get stuck it’s also a strength that your comments are only moderated by MPs. It’s the real deal. So it’s not a conspiracy or anything, it’s just human stuff.

Thanks for your patience.

Clare

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Filed under: #OpenLabourNZ, blogs, comms & IT, Red Alert
52 Comments

A word about moderation

Posted by on January 22nd, 2010

Here at Red Alert we want to provide an opportunity for a wide range of people to engage with our MPs. As the political year gets into full swing, we thought it would be useful to do a quick re-cap of our approach to moderation. Clare’s post back in November set out the four golden rules:

  1. Keep it relevant to the post.
  2. Keep it clean. Don’t use offensive language. We’re tolerant, but we use the test of wanting to have intermediate age school kids using this site for research.
  3. Don’t make it personal. Stick to the issues rather than the person. By all means criticise what people have said or done, but do it in a way that is not personal. Leave families out of it. And we moderate attacks on National and ACT MPs on the same basis as Labour.
  4. Don’t tell lies.

In addition, we also encourage you to moderate yourselves in terms of the number of comments you make on a particular post. We will always be flexible to encourage genuine debate about issues raised in posts. However where people are commenting in such a way that clogs ups comments and discourages others from engaging, we will moderate the number of comments they can make on each post. We’re reluctant to stop people engaging, but if you can’t moderate yourselves, then we will moderate you.

The moderating team consists of Trevor Mallard, Clare Curran, Grant Robertson and myself. We welcome reasonable feedback, either in the comments thread here or direct via email.

We’re really pleased with the way Red Alert has evolved. Rest assured there is more to come!

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Filed under: blogs, Red Alert
48 Comments

Good things in moderation

Posted by on November 9th, 2009

There’s been a bit of discussion on Red Alert among the commentariat about our moderating policy. In the interests of transparency and a willingness to engage, we, the moderating team, thought it would be good to introduce ourselves and set out some guidelines.

That should make it easier for everyone.

As Red Alert’s readership has grown, so have the number of comments. You may have noticed in the six months old today post (from last week) there have been to date almost 14,000 comments. We’ve now exceeded that and while we’re keen to keep expanding our readership, we’re pleased with our progress.

More comments, require more moderating, so our team has expanded.

We consist of myself, Trevor Mallard, Grant Robertson and Chris Hipkins. Our approach is pretty simple. Here are the guidelines for commenting:

  1. Keep it relevant to the post.
  2. Keep it clean. Don’t use offensive language. We’re tolerant, but we use the test of wanting to have intermediate age school kids using this site for research.
  3. Don’t make it personal. Stick to the issues rather than the person. By all means criticise what people have said or done, but do it in a way that is not personal. Leave families out of it. And we moderate attacks on National and ACT MPs on the same basis as Labour.
  4. Don’t tell lies

If you’re commenting for the first time, your comment will go into moderation, and is generally approved. After that your comments should automatically appear.

But if you step outside the guidelines, you’ll be placed “in moderation” which means your comments will sit in a box and be looked at by one of us before being approved.

If you have been banned then you’ll be placed in the banned box. And your comments will not appear on Red Alert during the period you are banned for. After your ban period ends all your comments will continue to be moderated.

In short, we do not tolerate trolling on Red Alert. For those of you who don’t know what trolling is, here’s the wikipedia definition:

In Internet slang, a troll is someone who posts controversial, inflammatory, irrelevant, or off-topic messages in an online community, such as an online discussion forum, chat room or blog, with the primary intent of provoking other users into an emotional response or of otherwise disrupting normal on-topic discussion.

Trolling results in editing, deletion of comments, and in the case of gross, or repeat offending, banning. So if you don’t troll, you’re generally okay. We moderate people from across the political spectrum. The occasional Labour MP has experienced moderation.

We write our posts in good faith, and we expect good faith and robust discussion in return. That’s not too much to ask.

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Filed under: blogs, comms & IT, Red Alert
51 Comments