Graham

I have emails from you, written by you that are abusive and non-conciliatory in nature. I am not the only person who has been treated in this manner. You are well aware that a number of people disagree with your style of 'moderation'. You go so far as to ban people who have merely written that they disagree with your style of moderation.

I do not wish to allow myself to be baited any further by you. I do hope that OLO continues, as I have stated before, however, you really need to consider your manner in communicating with people who do not agree with you.

I defend your right to express your opinion, I expect to be treated with the same consideration.

J Parker, in a post on Saturday, 12 February 2011 at 7:26:02 AM to this thread, addresses several questions to me.

I can only answer them as an OLO user: I have no standing with OLO other than that, although I look forward to shortly participating in a funding campaign of the nature suggested in my posts of Thursday, 10 February 2011 11:47:08 AM, Thursday, 10 February 2011 11:54:12 AM, and Thursday, 10 February 2011 11:59:38 AM that may help immunise OLO against such standover tactics as have been mounted against its otherwise legitimate revenue, should OLO see its way clear to promote such a fundraising drive.

J Parker's question, if it is directed also at OLO, as to whether "people who raise complaints to the editor receive respect and consideration?" is effectively similar to that begged by 'gp_' (Gregory Storer), by his assertion in his post of Monday, 7 February 2011 at 4:15:51 PM, that "Young will not enforce his own rules.".

Those rules, under which all have contributed here for years, can be seen by clicking the 'Legals' button at the bottom of every page, which will take you here: http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/display.asp?page=legal

Under the heading 'Monitoring site content', those rules say, in part:

"... [OLO does] not assume any obligation
to monitor or censor materials.

[OLO] reserve[s] the right to host moderated
or unmoderated forums or other web pages to
which site users can post materials ("Forums").
[OLO is] not responsible for:

* materials posted to Forums by third parties,
whether or not [OLO] moderate those Forums;

* materials altered by [OLO] in moderating Forums; or

* [OLO's] removal of, or failure to remove,
all or any part of those materials."

Moderation of the style seemingly desired to be imposed on OLO by outsiders, or by some users outside of the terms of use to which they all have had to agree to use OLO, costs money. Exploration of alternative means of getting it, without the making of any commitments as to change, is what, IMO, this thread should be about.

One of the points that sticks out in this is how blind most can be to abuse and villification when we have some sympathy for the viewpoint and how obvious it is when we don't.

I did not dig deep enough into LP's comments area to see the tone of comments there (Graham if you had some examples it might be useful) but I've seen enough evidence over time that people don't tend to be as keen to identify comments directed at opponents as hate speech as they do comments directed at themselves or friends.

R0bert

Graham,

I was just as interested in the comments that followed Kim's piece - especially in light of the latest developments.

The JS Mill quote says it all.

Graham Young, my theory is that you run some of the more primitive stuff (hellfire harry, eg) for a cross section of public opinion on a given issue, rather than a truncated or neutered sample useless to researchers or those interested in the complexities of an issue and people's responses, valid or otherwise, to it. In other words, would you really get the same grasp of opinion if your sample was watered down by over zealous moderation?
That is quite apart from whatever new info a given individual post may contain. I think the cross section approach is better.
If there are oddballs "out there", we also need to know about and we need adequate and varied responses to discover why some people feel in certain ways about some thing and there fore what can be done in light of that.
(s--t, probably get "moderated" here for not using capital letters for hellfire harry's name)

Paul, I actually deleted Hell Fire Harry's comment. We operate on complaint moderation. I hadn't noticed the post. It didn't add anything, and he's only ever posted once on the site, suggesting it was just trolling, maybe not even what he believed, just an attempt to stir things up.

I don't take a sociological approach to these threads. Whoever posts posts, and I rarely delete except for abuse of another poster or an author.

J Parker, that is a pretty serious allegation and I want you to justify it. That would mean taking the worst of the correspondence that you have and posting it here. I'm comfortable that I have never abused anyone, nor have I banned someone for contesting my style of moderation.

However I will ban someone who comes on these threads and makes unsubstantiated and defamatory claims about moderation. It is important that the moderator be able to moderate. If you don't make good your allegation with a concrete and genuine example within 12 hours I will apply a permanent suspension to you, irrespective of what other action I may take.