Locked Topics
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I agree, mostly. Politics and Guns are two things that tend to get folks really worked up and taking things personally around here... I think she was wanting to prevent it getting to the taking things personally level. I also think @anonymous is right too though. That was actually a good discussion,.
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I agree that it was civil and no one was arguing, but I can see the concern and that it was outside of IT scope as well. It's a tough area to combine staying on topic and heading off potentially heated conversations.
Two ideas I will throw out, just ideas to kick around...
- Locking topics while intended to cool people down can unintentionally make things more heated by leaving things left undiscussed / undiscussable.
- What about a new community specifically for political or similar discussions? I imagine that these things exist all over the Internet and this is highly redundant, but maybe it is not. Maybe it would be valuable to have a community on the NodeBB platform more or less like this one but for topics that are not IT and that may get heated or more likely to get heated than a discussion on RAID 5 vs. RAID 10... which gets heated enough as it is
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@anonymous said:
Seems to me like to community should police itself, not be left up to one or a handful of people.
It is a tough balance. On one side you get anarchy and that can turn into a big problem. On the other you get major mod issue. Finding a happy middle ground is necessary, but tough.
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@dafyre said:
I agree, mostly. Politics and Guns are two things that tend to get folks really worked up and taking things personally around here... I think she was wanting to prevent it getting to the taking things personally level. I also think @anonymous is right too though. That was actually a good discussion,.
It generally is. We had a similar, mostly gun related discussion, a few months ago and while I'm sure we'd call it heated partway through, I feel like it was a good, healthy discussion and resulted in some really interesting insights that made the whole "disagreement" shed new light on the whole process. Things that we would not have thought of, I don't think, had we not had the full discussion and far better understanding of both sides. Does not mean that we all agree, but we moved based logical disconnects into finding different perspectives leading to different answers.
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It is really hard to decided when to lock a topic and when to leave it alone. I tend to lean to the side of lock it before it becomes an argument or flame war. There really is only one Mod around here right now and that is me.
We have tried very hard to keep this an IT community. And while part of hanging out and having fun is having non-It discussions, we also have to be careful how far off topic we allow it to get.
I am perfectly happy to have another community for you all to have political discussions on.
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I can open that topic back up, however the minute someone gets nasty with another person I will lock it again.
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I like the idea of keeping this more closely related to IT. If I want to discuss politics (which I rarely do) I'll go someplace else on the internet.
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We are getting ready to hire a Community Manager however soon, a day I can't wait for.
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One thing that I was thinking about before @anonymous posted this was about how IT is such a broad scope item and when we talk about people going to college, for example, for IT the thing that we (or at least I) heavily recommend is liberal studies - all the things that are not IT. Psychology, political science, literature, history, etc. Being good at IT, truly great at it, really requires this huge scope of not just technical stuff but all this "other" stuff. How does a community about IT limit itself to IT when the necessities of IT are so incredibly broad and the people who do it have to think so broadly?
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@scottalanmiller said:
I agree that it was civil and no one was arguing, but I can see the concern and that it was outside of IT scope as well. It's a tough area to combine staying on topic and heading off potentially heated conversations.
Two ideas I will throw out, just ideas to kick around...
- Locking topics while intended to cool people down can unintentionally make things more heated by leaving things left undiscussed / undiscussable.
- What about a new community specifically for political or similar discussions? I imagine that these things exist all over the Internet and this is highly redundant, but maybe it is not. Maybe it would be valuable to have a community on the NodeBB platform more or less like this one but for topics that are not IT and that may get heated or more likely to get heated than a discussion on RAID 5 vs. RAID 10... which gets heated enough as it is
If it was outside of IT scope, why wasn't it closed when it was started, not after a good conversation was started?
Following this logic, why do we have a place to discuss not-IT topics, if this community is only for IT Topics?
Also, as your stated before, there was nothing to cold down, the conversation was very civil.
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My other thought is let it be a free for all and If I don't agree with it I'll stop reading that post. This is one of these issues where there is not a clear cut right way to do it or not.
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@scottalanmiller said:
One thing that I was thinking about before @anonymous posted this was about how IT is such a broad scope item and when we talk about people going to college, for example, for IT the thing that we (or at least I) heavily recommend is liberal studies - all the things that are not IT. Psychology, political science, literature, history, etc. Being good at IT, truly great at it, really requires this huge scope of not just technical stuff but all this "other" stuff. How does a community about IT limit itself to IT when the necessities of IT are so incredibly broad and the people who do it have to think so broadly?
I see this, especially in small IT Departments where the department (as a whole) is expected to know how to perform every major job function on campus and be able to do so at the drop of a hat. I learned more about real business and IT stuff at my last job than I ever did in my college days or technical college (and I had several accounting classes!).
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@Minion-Queen said:
We are getting ready to hire a Community Manager however soon, a day I can't wait for.
I am sorry to hear this.
- Why can't we have a community that doesn't need a community manager?
- Where the community decides what goes, and what stays?
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I promise you will all love the person I am hoping to hire. Part of a Community Managers job is to keep you all engaged and to keep everything fun. As well as help with keeping the IT value of our community at a high level.
Unless you all want to start paying to keep the community going we do need to make sure we provide value to both all of you and Vendors.
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@anonymous said:
- Why can't we have a community that doesn't need a community manager?
- Where the community decides what goes, and what stays?
It's always had community manager(s), just people who are not focused on it and not trained on it. It's not "more oversight" it is simply "more disciplined oversight."
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You really can't have a community without a community manager, not one with any traffic, anyway. Something that you might not notice is that we have regular porn spam traffic now. It is continuously eliminated before anyone sees it but there are active attempts to be posting garbage on the site being thwarted left and right. It takes oversight once we start getting SEO. The last thing we want to be is Reddit.
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@dafyre said:
@scottalanmiller said:
One thing that I was thinking about before @anonymous posted this was about how IT is such a broad scope item and when we talk about people going to college, for example, for IT the thing that we (or at least I) heavily recommend is liberal studies - all the things that are not IT. Psychology, political science, literature, history, etc. Being good at IT, truly great at it, really requires this huge scope of not just technical stuff but all this "other" stuff. How does a community about IT limit itself to IT when the necessities of IT are so incredibly broad and the people who do it have to think so broadly?
I see this, especially in small IT Departments where the department (as a whole) is expected to know how to perform every major job function on campus and be able to do so at the drop of a hat. I learned more about real business and IT stuff at my last job than I ever did in my college days or technical college (and I had several accounting classes!).
In the SMB especially IT is often called on to make business decisions, often ones that are very deep and complex and beyond the business skills of the SMB management that they support.
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@Minion-Queen said:
I promise you will all love the person I am hoping to hire. Part of a Community Managers job is to keep you all engaged and to keep everything fun. As well as help with keeping the IT value of our community at a high level.
Unless you all want to start paying to keep the community going we do need to make sure we provide value to both all of you and Vendors.
I would happily pay, but sadly, I might be in the minority.
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@scottalanmiller said:
You really can't have a community without a community manager, not one with any traffic, anyway. Something that you might not notice is that we have regular porn spam traffic now. It is continuously eliminated before anyone sees it but there are active attempts to be posting garbage on the site being thwarted left and right. It takes oversight once we start getting SEO. The last thing we want to be is Reddit.
Easy to solved by having trusted community members review posts of new users before they are allow to be open to the everyone.
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@anonymous said:
@scottalanmiller said:
You really can't have a community without a community manager, not one with any traffic, anyway. Something that you might not notice is that we have regular porn spam traffic now. It is continuously eliminated before anyone sees it but there are active attempts to be posting garbage on the site being thwarted left and right. It takes oversight once we start getting SEO. The last thing we want to be is Reddit.
Easy to solved by having trusted community members review posts of new users before they are allow to be open to the everyone.
Well two problems there...
- That's not easy, that would require a huge development investment to make a system able to do that.
- That's just community managers with another name, that's the same solution that there already is.
