Moderators

As I have mentioned previously, it has been a long time since I’ve had the time to read all comments myself. Luckily some good people have offered to help me with the moderation. So they are not totally anonymous, I’m posting a short sentence on each. None of them post comments themselves a lot, but have been long-term readers.

Richard is a thirty something year old mainlander. Into fitness. Supports Binding CIRs.
David is a retired vet, a (very briefly) former PSA rep, who once voted for Winston. We forgive him this lapse 🙂 )

Jordan is a student, is involved with National, and pretty good with computers and other things.

Ray is a retired farmer, a “liberal” who has voted for every party there is (no, no not Social Credit I hope 🙂 ). Another mainlander.

We did have un-PC Lesbian as the fifth moderator but she got busy. A real pity, because apart from her fine sense of humour and judgement, we would have been extremely politically correct with both a gay and a lesbian as moderators!

The moderators have been discussing stuff on our mail list. It may help people for me to share what I posted:

Hard and fast rules are never going to work, as it is always a judgement call. I suggest we use this list to discuss actual potentially offending comments, and see what consensus we get on them. Sometimes one has to look at the context. Also I look at the person – are they someone who started off making genuinely good points, and they just got abusive when someone taunted them, or are they just a troll whose only purpose is to enrage people so the comments become unreadable.

I tend to regard the C word as never acceptable, except in the most extreme circumstances. The F word doesn’t worry me a lot but I tend to agree if directed at someone it is probably over the top. But there is a difference between say someone referring to effing idiots and calling someone directly a f**kwit.

I don’t like homophobic stuff, and have warned a few people about it. I also really really dislike anything speculating on an MP’s sexuality or their family. Ie the Peter Davis is gay nonsense.

One should also refer to the the Posting Policy. It may get more detailed in time to come.

As I am a believer in second (and third) chances, I am also going to reset everyone’s ban periods back to the start. If currently banned you need to see out the period of the ban, but after that the clock goes back to zero, so any further suspension will be for one week only, and then doubling each time there after.

If there are any complaints, I refer people to the first paragraph of the Posting Policy 🙂