No you haven’t. The post is only hidden and the action can be reverted by anyone with same or higher privileges, including the author… Furthermore the post was sent by mail to all subscribers (regardless of access level), who are therefore free to quote it in part or full in their reply.
Rather than playing excalatory ping pong I would suggest to delegate part of the moderation to subscribers and community members. Folks can flag messages to bring them to the moderator’s attention, and only then decide whether to moderate or not. That’s how it’s being done in AskLibO and other category here, and it appears to work well.
I do agree with @guilhem and that’s why I proposed to remove moderation right from board members to avoid unilateral censoring.
I agreed to wait stating “Let’s give it a try and revisit if impartiality and objectivity is not applied.”
It seems like we didn’t have to wait long until someone got displeased with comment that bring some facts that go against the narrative one wanted to set.
The difficulty with that is the “moderators” are part of the argument so it’s easy for folk to further inflame matters with accusations of a lack of impartiality, and additionally the “moderators” can then presumably see who is flagging posts and potentially target them as well as has happened in the past. Perhaps TDF needs to retain some professional third-party moderators to assist with this?
I censored myself a bit even if I don’t think there were sensitive topics that we should have kept secret in my previous message, see if this version suit your taste better.
In reply to this:
It is worth pointing out that if you accuse somebody of slander and to spread untrue rumours you should be ready to support your accusations or, once again, you will demonstrate that you want to attack a fellow member of the board for… “reasons”.
In this thread you have directors and members of the MC telling you that what you support as a chairman is sub-optimal but you want to carry on regardless.
The discussion would have been settled if you would have accepted to have those changes reviewed by our trusted legal counsel and then published as a draft, as a rule you wanted when we published the CoI Policy, but both were denied.
“I really cannot see how that can possibly be seen as helpful (or even leading by positive example)” to have a chairman that accuses other directors of slander or “to spread untrue rumours” when not only he has evidence in his own mailbox of accusing unjustly a fellow board members but when the evidence is also public and in the same thread.
If I stated that you and Cor wanted this badly made change to the RoP to then follow up with creating committees (which is what your reinvented) where you could have imposed external participants that are aligned with what you want to do without worrying about conflict of interests then your could have accused me of spreading unsubstantiated rumours, but I will not state that and I will just wait for the next votes to happen.
One hint that things are not going in the right direction is the vote, that soon will be published, where you replaced myself and Emiliano in the area of oversight for employees, which deals also with the task in question, with two directors one of which is your contractor and conflicted member of the board. That goes against recommendations we received from professional advisers to improve our processes to ensure a level playing field for all.
The fact that I’m against imposing a policy that in all effects wants to stop TDF’s staff from expressing dissenting opinions and that I expressed my strong opinions on how the specific task at hand was previously performed could have influenced Thorsten’s vote to put other members of the board, including a conflicted one, to deal with that task. I suspect the purge of non aligned directors won’t end here.
So it is true I have personal feelings about the way you act as a chairman but I doubt I’m the one that is putting personal interests and animosity above TDF’s interests.
Once again it is really sad to have this discussions in public but when the chairman is accusing me of slander and to spread untrue rumours then he should be ready to waive the board confidentiality, I believe I’ve asked for it twice, to have his statements scrutinised by the community.
For this site, you need TL 4 to be able to flag other topics
That means basically no-one who joined when Board Discuss was added will be able to do so. I suggest this is represents a defect in your assertion, @guilhem since this specific community is unable to flag any post…
The sentence you quoted is for the Ask forum, where we changed the settings, I guess for this forum, the BoD didn’t asked to change from the basic settings.
Well, I currently have TL 1 (despite having posts going back years…) and in the defaults apparently that is supposed to enable flagging, but I have no … button under posts so can’t flag anything.
For the AskLibO migration we tried to map AskBot karma to TLs in order to preserve access level and permissions, but there is no such thing for mailing lists so it didn’t occur to me to do the same for this instance. Everyone is therefore starting with a fresh TL. Those who who have been active here for a while (for instance in other categories) might have gained TL >1 meanwhile. Discourse does that automatically.
You’re right though that TL1 were not allowed to flag and I lowered the threshold accordingly.
Ack, and in any functioning democracy police, prosecutor, defense, accused, and judge are all separate entities for good reasons. Right now moderators are both police as well as judge, and as you note often defense or accused as well.
Not quite obvious to me that we agree. For the record I find moderators not recusing themselves from handling their own flagged posts in the moderation queue just as problematic as those abusing moderation to silence dissent. Neither is objective nor impartial.
I’ve now read Discourse’s documentation about flags and discovered that it’s a simple on/off when clicking on the “reject” button. I thought it was part of a voting process between moderators where I wanted to express my disagreement in regards to the “inappropriate” flag as the user in question is perfectly capable of sharing with us what he feels is wrong with my post.
BTW yes, it is possible to see who flags messages and I’m not sure directors should see that.
Thanks for pointing out my mistake, I’ll refrain from clicking that button again.
It seems like I can’t undo my action so the user in question is free to flag this message again:
That would be, for me, another reasons to remove moderation rights from all directors and to let members of staff, which we all trust with their objectivity and impartiality, to deal with it instead of paying third party services.
I’m not so sure. To look may be an error; to vote is an abuse of privilege, and to.try to laugh it away when caught is a disclosure of character that highlights the hypocrisy of overstated accusations about enemies while behaving at least as badly oneself.
This conversation badly needs a reset. Seems anyone that tries gets savaged. That’s what really stinks here.
This conversation should be first moved out of this thread to a new topic.
As Guilhem said on moderation, I don’t feel comfortable to move this thread to a new topic elsewhere, where I would have done it without question on any other category.
This just show that people moderating this forum don’t know how to deal with it and;
. either made mistakes that are misinterpreted
. either made actions that in fact were mistakes
. either drive conclusions when there are none
. etc (I’m not judging anyone, just seeing the wrong usage of the forum or how it is perverted)
in any case whatever one does, it can be used against or for ones interest, when the learning curve and the settings of the forum should be the first discussed
This is just an unsafe way of using this discussion tool.
And it makes me very sad .
It is sad to read that you are talking about “enemies”.
Last time we met you didn’t gave the impression that you see an enemy in me. You even kindly supported my proposal to adopt clear fiduciary duties for the board at the last meeting and thanked you for that.
I’m sorry if my mistake, which I openly admitted, made you feel differently in my regards.
I find it not encouraging that you dismiss my comments as something cosmetic: you post contained multiple details - carefully selected - of confidential discussions.
And here you’re just doing the same: bringing parts of confidential discussions in public. Even the packaging (in a more friendly -looking- language) is sub-optimal.
Wrt the other parts:
What more proof would be needed if Thorsten replies to a post where you write ‘legal advise being ignored and circumvented, changes pushed with unethical interests in mind.’??
And then - after doing as if there is no proof - you play the game that you are being attacked (notably ‘once again’!) and by that are attacking Thorsten… How sad.
Positive framing?
Yeah, obviously you don’t say anything… just ‘only’ post an indirect insinuation, that obviously may create to distrust.
That’s no news, as much that it is news to you that no one wants that. Still you spread untruth about opinions from other board members.
Apart from what I’ve written above on the slander and rumours: the fact that you are disputing with Thorsten about such things can never be an excuse for breaching the Boards of Directors confidentiality.
