Penn Jennings made the following keystrokes:
>
> 1. The net some how absolves people of personal responsibility.
No, it doesn't, but people do tend to flame in mail where they would otherwise
get a punch in the nose or bounced from the bar, etc. Loss of personal contact
means more that you'd think.
> 2. The net removes normal expectations of protection and decency
> from online communities?
No, I expect people to act in a civil and responsible manner. I have a list of those
that I do not think fit that banner and ignore them as much as possible. So far
I haven't been presented a real "problem" with someone on a list. Most just
go away on their own or they grow up.
> 3. List managers should not police their list members or don't want to
> police their members.
This is the difficult one, and the one that could put you at risk.
That said, I still think you could be right on most of your issues. I don't
want to police my mailing lists, nor do I think I should need to. Tell the people
to act like professionals and not like 2yr olds in the sandbox. If a couple kids
start fighting, either everyone becomes unhappy or the trouble makers (both parties)
get removed from the play area. :-( Why both parties? Well, because neither was
able to act in a reasonable enough manner to stop the problem on their own.
I don't really think that you are in the minority, but there tend to be lots of
facts that get dropped when dealing with these situations. I've been down
this road a number of times, and it tends to be that the ones complaining are
also the ones at the root cause of the problem. Remember that email and usenet
don't carry the facial expressions and facial tones as does personal contact.
It's really easy to miss judge something and even easier to overlook the obvious.
The procedure that I now take in mailing lists and user that I run systems for is:
1st, don't get pulled into the middle of it.
2nd, be really careful how you word things to both sides involved with the conflict.
3rd, do not assume guilt on either side.
4th, ask for copies of ALL the messages in regards to this matter from both sides.
These messages should be the full message with all headers in tact. You can't
make a decission with only part of the evidence. Dates are important as well
as all the content. (This is where most complainers will fall short. They only
keep the critical parts of messages to prove their point, and have deleted the
slime they have thrown, in some cases first.)
5th, review the issues involved, and then if you think that someone is doing wrong,
get someone else to review the facts for you and see if they agree.
Now if action is warrented, cover your tush. Contact the admins of the machine/system
that the mailing list is being run from and state the actions you are taking and give
the evidence as to why. Make sure they are aware of what you are doing up front so
that they can be prepared for any backlash that occurs. If it's a company machine
make sure your boss knows what is going on as well and agrees. Then take the
needed actions.
If no action is needed, then reply to both parties involved that you can see
how this "could be" a problem, but it is not something that warrents action
by you as list maintainer. If they continue to have problems with each other, then
they can take their evidence to a legal type and see what they want to do from there.
(again I doubt if this will happen) Their other choice is to leave the mailing list
and start their own where they can do what they want and not worry about the fight.
The other problem that comes in to play is various "rights" that people think they
have. If you leave the position of list maintainer and go into list moderation,
which you would be doing if you cut someone from the list for their viewpoint or
comments to others on the list, then you become a target of law suites as well.
Since you stopped joe from posting, you should also stop sam, and since you didn't
I'm going to sue for harrassment and stress, etc. Your the target now as well
as the parties involved. I can't rememeber with of the big (aol, compuserve, etc)
companies lost on this as they were doing content checks and failed to stop a
flame war. The judge said that since they were acting as moderators, they couldn't
do half a job so they lost big bucks plus all the legal fees. DON'T put yourself
in such a position.
--gene
References:
|
|
