A letter to the membership from Walter

DMS General
#1

On Fri, Apr 14, 2017, at 09:20 AM, Walter Anderson wrote:

My fellow DMS members

For those of you who may not be aware, the board has taken action, which
I believe to be a violation of state and federal law, to block my
ability to post to Talk and communicate with you the potential voters
just prior to this election. If your curious as to their reasons, there
are multiple other threads where your fellow members discuss those.

I asked Zach to post this last message because, the moderation team has
been allowing a small group of members to flag and hide even this
limited form of communication a few of your fellow members have provided
me. I am doing this because, I have been given indication by this
permissive approach to the flagging of these posts that the moderators
consider these posts a violation and that the board may choose to
‘punish’ these folks as well.

On 04/10/17 15:26, Andrew LeCody wrote:
2) The moderators have already been in violation of the resolution
passed by the board, via inaction we/they have allowed you to
continue posting via proxy users. The resolution is clear that “The
BoD instructs Infrastructure to Block Walter Anderson on Talk.”

While I obviously disagree with this effort to illegally silence a
political candidate, I do not want these people protesting the heavy
handed treatment by the Board to suffer their potential vindictiveness.
As such I consider it ill advised to attempt to answer these perfectly
reasonable questions you have asked.

If you would like my response, I am frequently at the space, just ask
for me, and someone will point me out to you, or send me a PM through
Talk. I can read them, but not respond, so you would need to include
some kind of email address I can provide you a written response.

Thank you.

3 Likes
Questions for candidates
#2

Walter, it’s my thread and I’m happy to post your replies to the questions.

5 Likes
#3

Walter, this is frankly bullshit.

  1. The board blocked you from talk before you decided to run because they believed you were being toxic on the forums, not to block you from communicating with members for the board election.

  2. The moderation team has been allowing the system to work as normal, as I stated in the e-mail where you demanded we go out of the way to actively protect your proxy posts.

  3. I made it clear in my e-mail, I’m tired of you trying to drag the moderation team into a proxy war between you and the board. We followed a directive from the board, and then when presented with a grey area (you posting via proxies) decided to let it slide. This is mostly because the moderation team doesn’t want to get involved in this bullshit.

  4. I’ve made it clear, we (the mods) are not going to punish people who proxy post for you, but we are not going to give your posts special treatment to be immune to flags.

  5. The fact that you continue to beat up on the volunteers maintaining these forums is disappointing. There’s a board meeting scheduled for tomorrow to sort out your issue with the board, deal with it there, stop harassing us via e-mail, proxies and private messages.

  6. We’re currently developing clear moderator guidelines which include how flags are handled and makes it clear that the moderation team will take a very light hand (as we usually do) for any moderation actions. The guidelines will also cover an escalation process to better handle toxic and disruptive users, which will likely be a series of steps such as starting with a warning, then moving to a 2 week block, then formal complaint to the board.

4 Likes
#4

(This is Zach)

Andrew, your responses, while clear, are aggressive in their tone and may lead some to believe that you are not fit to moderate a forum like this. You don’t seem to have the patience and neutrality to be an impartial moderator.

(Now, back to my vacation day …)

5 Likes
#5

For fuck’s sake, will you all calm down?

It’s Easter. Go bake a ham, eat some chocolate, and chill the hell out.

This isn’t the holiday where we celebrate the martyrdom of our Lord and Savior Walter Anderson who died so that we may troll. That’s April 1st.

12 Likes
Dye Sublimation 101 Classes coming up!
#6

I think there may be some confusion as to who the members of the Board are.

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#7

Fair enough, I’ve modified that section. Though he was implying that the mods not giving his proxy posts special treatment was going to result in “potential vindictiveness”.

#8

Honestly I didn’t see any aggression in his post. Exasperation perhaps at worst.

7 Likes
#9

Everyone is tired of the antics.

I was going to vote for Walter until his rant post went up instead of him simply answering the questions. He’s perpetuating this crap and it’s very old now.

He had the opportunity to rise above it and be better than everyone else, instead he sunk to new lows IMO.

And NO, I have NO affiliation with the board or with the moderators. My post is mine alone.

5 Likes
#10

Walter is obviously frustrated and I get that. I’m just selfish and I want a drama hiatus for the weekend.

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#11

You may wish to consider Andrew, that using the word “toxic” is just a way to demean one person, while elevating yourself. Having read your posts elsewhere (today, regarding exposing member’s private details, which I largely agreed with), I find it entirely curious that you now assume the position of censor, stifling the free expression of the membership against their wishes, with few or no rules to support your actions. This does not seem like a principled stance in common with your other views. While its true that the Board directed increased oversight, that was conditioned on developing a set of rules (TOS) for the forum. This was not done, but we have censoring happening anyway, without even the support of a set of rules members can read to understand what the limits are supposed to be. Therefore, the current “moderation” is nothing more than an individual imposing his point of view on the rest of us without any due process at all.

Given the views of the majority of people who have spoken about this, and the profound support Walter has received, its clear that the membership does not agree with the action taken towards Walter, and does not support the recent increase in “moderation” (censorship) in which comments other than sycophantic cheerleading are labeled as “Toxic”.

Perhaps you might consider, that a principal doesn’t mean much, if you’re willing to compromise it in order to please your friends.

7 Likes
#12

Board meeting, tomorrow, 2 PM. Sorted. Done (I hope).

Amen!

1 Like
#13

You are conflating moderator action with the flag system. I have not censored any posts and I disagree with censorship, I’ve run a Tor node for a long time for this very reason.

The moderators almost never hide posts. The flag system system is the members of this forum, choosing to flag posts as off-topic, inappropriate, or spam. If 3 flags accrue on a post, it is hidden. The poster is sent a PM notification that the post was hidden, explaining why it was hidden and how to unhide the post. After 30 minutes, the poster can edit their post to unhide it. The only time a moderator ever has to step in, is if the post is hidden a second time (another round of flags) and only then, to unhide the post if the flags are deemed incorrect. To my knowledge very few, if any posts have been hidden twice.

The moderation team does not censor posts, and under the new guidelines we are developing will never unilaterally act to hide a post. Which is merely a clarification of how the moderation on this forum already works.

You’re imagining a conspiracy, where none exists.

3 Likes
#14

No he isn’t. He is expressing dissatisfaction with the moderation policy while also showing (by citing your belief that the mod team has been in “violation of the resolution passed by the board”) that “the board may choose to ‘punish’ [the moderators] as well.” It’s a bit convoluted and could have been written more clearly, but there it is.

1 Like
#15

In the Honorarium system, auditors can not take honorariums as it is deemed a conflict: they wouldn’t reject their own class and other auditors may not want to reject a fellow auditor’s submission. (an auditor as I understand it, can see who did the rejection, not something available to a person that has an item rejected).

Will the new Moderator rules have a similar prohibition? E.g.Moderators can not flag on Talk. Being able to flag and then being able to pass judgement on that flag would seem to have the same conflict as it would Honorariums.

I think this is an important consideration since Moderators operate “in secret”. For the system to remain opaque then the “Moderated” should have confidence that it is impartial.

Thanks

Thanks

9 Likes
#16

I don’t think I’m even remotely confused, and said nothing about a “conspiracy”. But whether you realize it or not, your recent posts have largely been “defend the perimeter” oriented, in which you’ve made it clear you support the action against Walter - censoring him -, defending moderators, flagging, etc. And so sorry - you push the buttons, you earn the title.

And whether you intended it or not - you have positioned yourself as the chief supporter of censorship here on the forum.

Hardly the sort of dispassionate point of view needed in a moderator.

As to Walter, I certainly don’t support his remarks accusing Robert of directing DMS funds to a “girlfriend”. This was a serious accusation, and it’s just wrong to make such a claim based on gossip by another member. If you’re going to accuse someone of acting criminally, you’d better have something a little more serious than gossip.

On the other hand, speaking out in the face of something you consider wrong, is a civic and moral responsibility - and not to be taken lightly either. Whether his facts were correct or not - that is what Walter was doing (pushing for the Board to obey the bylaws and the law, and toshine the light into things he felt were being hidden or neglected.

What I object to, is that in reaction to Walter’s accusation, he has been censored, with no demonstration that he violated any rule of the space, and based on a charge (threatening Brad Knapp) which no one felt was valid. Instead, they accused him of being Toxic, and attacked him in a malicious way by asking the audience (sic)"Who here hates Walter like we do?)

In so doing, they emulated the exact same behavior Walter was guilty of with Robert - letting their personal feelings drive them to capricious behavior.

7 Likes
#17

@Tapper I’ve been flagging many of Walter’s surrogate posts. I’m not on the Board or in the moderators group, I just think his behavior is very unexcellent.

4 Likes
#18

I am going to use a word here that I think underlies a lot of
the recent problems at the space,
The word is

TRUST

Many members have lost Trust in the ‘officials’ at DMS
When that trust is gone, even normal, innocent things can
be seen as not. The uproar over the freebie shelf was where
even less active folks jumped in, Last year, there was talk
of transparency, a lot of from folks other than Walter. So he
did not create that issue it was here already, he brought it
back up.

In general, trust is easily given at first, but when it is lost, if very
hard to regain. (in business news, look at the problems United
is having right now and how much it will cost them to regains the
trust of customers)

8 Likes
#19

That’s fair. But what I have witnessed is some folks, Walter foremost, take relatively minor issues and blow them up all the way to multiple threats of lawsuits.

You have to ask yourself whether the loss of trust you’re willing to extend is due to underhanded actions by the board, or due to a persistent and vicious campaign against the BoD and a few of its members in particular…

This is what I’ve seen. You may see it differently, but I see a bunch of good-hearted volunteers dealing with difficult membership issues (and some difficult members).

4 Likes
#20

I see that too. We’re all very good-hearted folks. But we’re also human, petty, and tend to take sides.

1 Like