Important Threads/Info & Poor Behavior

Open: A proposal for community standards of forum behavior

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mszv
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Re: Important Threads/Info & Poor Behavior

Post by mszv »

Dot and Mac_File, I see the Mystonline forums are in very capable hands!
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Marten
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Re: Important Threads/Info & Poor Behavior

Post by Marten »

Two points I hope I can contribute with an economy of words. All of this pertains to the "surprise deletion" issue that preceded this weekend... and not to the broader topic of moderation consistency, which is also near and dear to my heart but I'll spend all night writing about it if I let myself get started.

First, I feel Nalates is correct with her "discuss the action, not the person" point. Even so, when you are the person whose actions are being questioned, it is sometimes difficult - especially when your emotions are inflamed by other events and problems - to see either the difference between guidance and criticism, or the difference between criticism of your actions or criticism of yourself. And this is an unavoidable problem because we cannot predict how a person is going to react. You can't escape that drama will happen. All you can do, is try to do your best to defuse it when it erupts. As communities go, I believe the Myst/Uru community is still relatively drama-free and sane.

Second, and I'll mention this only because I didn't see it explicitly pointed out previously in this discussion, I believe the rules of content ownership - aka, copyright - are key to determining what is the correct (or at least, legal) course of action when important information has been deleted from a forum. As far as I know, Cyan does not declare ownership over content posted at the MOUL forums, so I'm presuming that copyright remains the wishes of the individual authors. Ownership gets fuzzier - less clear - when the contents of a post are mostly an aggregation or summary of other posts. And when the content is almost entirely hyperlinks to other discussions - an index, such as what was deleted in one of the 3 removed threads - then the only ownership one ought to be able to claim is over the work it took to collect and organize the index, not the content itself. Disclaimer: I'm not a lawyer, I just know barely enough about copyright to be dangerous.
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Mac_Fife
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Re: Important Threads/Info & Poor Behavior

Post by Mac_Fife »

Marten wrote:Second, and I'll mention this only because I didn't see it explicitly pointed out previously in this discussion, I believe the rules of content ownership - aka, copyright - are key to determining what is the correct (or at least, legal) course of action when important information has been deleted from a forum. As far as I know, Cyan does not declare ownership over content posted at the MOUL forums, so I'm presuming that copyright remains the wishes of the individual authors.
I kind of touched on that, but in a less explicit way, in the section on Vandalism in my earlier post. On another forum I work with, which deals with technical, industrial matters we have a Copyright policy statement that says that all contributions to the website are considered to be published by the group and the property of the group unless the submitted material carries a copyright statement to the contrary. This allows the group to use submissions and rework it into technical papers, presentations etc., without too much concern over copyright issues, because we can clearly see where rights are reserved. But it's a small group of professional people with agreed common aims, so there's no squabbling :) That said, I know of one very similar group operating a related field that has largely broken into two opposing factions :( .

As is being proved in a number of ways, deleting something from a forum doesn't mean that the information has been lost. And in the case of indexes of links, etc., they can always be rebuilt by another user - I don't beleive you can really copyright the idea of an index or list.

I don't know of any forum that has a rule "you are not allowed to edit a previous post", although some forum software is set up to block edits after a reply has been posted, so in those cases I guess the rule is implicit.
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