Questions about Moderation

I gave @dougselsam a time out. The last couple of days I had to spend too much time moderating his comments.

Some examples:

Someone needs a break. And someone needs to up their game, considerably. Or maybe find a different hobby where results are more immediate, like gardening.

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I again gave @dougselsam a time out, for some 18 days this time.

This time I did not bother to moderate his comments from the last couple of days, with the one exception below, except to move some of them.

So, I deleted this:

And ignored these and others:

Commentary does not add to or improve the conversation.

Climate change denialism.

Commentary does not add to or improve the conversation.

Source has an agenda.


@dougselsam you shouldn’t let poets lie to you I’ll declare commentary about the lack of critical analysis in the news off-topic on this forum. Anyone capable of advancing the field has enough scientific and media literacy to not need to be reminded of such basics, and won’t be hypnotized by the TV.

And a negative tone is not a substitute for valid criticism. That’s just negative vacuousness, which I will rate limit, now through time outs.

Questions are welcome like always.

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I will make this topic public for a bit. Let me know if you’d like to try moderation or what vision on moderation you have.

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Why not test a software for moderation?

Assign moderators to forums

A quite common use case for permissions and roles are forum moderation. phpBB3 makes assigning users as moderators of forums really simple.

As you might have already guessed, moderation of specific forums is a local setting, so you can find FORUM MODERATORS in the section for FORUM BASED PERMISSIONS. First of all, you will have to select the forum (or forums) you want to assign new moderators to. This form is divided into two sections. In the first one, you can select multiple forums (select multiple by holding down the CTRL button on your keyboard, or cmd (under MacOS X)), where the moderator settings you will set in the following form will only apply to these exact forums. The second area allows you to select only one forum but your changes will apply not only to this forum but also all its subforums.

After selecting the forums and clicking SUBMIT, you will be greeted by a form you should already be familiar with from one of the previous sections in this guide: Figure 1.7, “Select Groups”. Here you can select the users or groups that should receive some kind of moderation ability over the selected forums. So go ahead: Select some users and/or groups and press the SET PERMISSIONS button.

In the next form you can choose, what moderator permissions the selected users/groups should receive. First of all, there are some predefined roles from which you can select:

STANDARD MODERATOR

A Standard Moderator can approve or disapprove, edit and delete posts, delete or close reports, but not necessarily change the owner of a post. This kind of moderator can also issue warnings and view details of a post.

SIMPLE MODERATOR

A Simple Moderator can edit posts and close and delete reports and can also view post details.

QUEUE MODERATOR

As a Queue Moderator, you can only approve or disapprove posts that landed in the moderator queue and edit posts.

FULL MODERATOR

Full Moderators can do everything moderation-related; they can even ban users.

That is phpBB, this forum runs on Discourse, which does the same thing you are quoting like this: Understanding user statuses, roles, and permissions - Site Management - Discourse Meta // Trust Level Permissions Table (inc Moderator Roles) - Using Discourse - Discourse Meta

So both TL3 (regular) and TL4 (leader) user groups can recategorize and rename topics for example, leaders and moderators can merge and close topics for example, and moderators can silence or suspend users for example.

Another time out.

Also, why are you writing essays. https://youtu.be/9FiMCdEQhMI?t=2548

Here is another timestamp. She talks about a theorist. Imagine she is talking about an experimentalist instead, not liking theory. Or in your case someone who pretends to be an experimentalist but hasn’t done anything since, what was it, 2009: https://youtu.be/9FiMCdEQhMI?t=3393

Looking through the admin logs, Doug was unsilenced on July 7. Between August 2 and September 6 when I silenced him again, I deleted these comments from Doug. This ignores the moved comments, and the comments I ignored in the moment but that still contributed to the time out, like the one I quoted above.

I changed my mind on this one later and undeleted it.

Does not add to the conversation as this is not a media analysis forum. Topic deleted due to moving the comment to a different topic.

This was an older comment.

Yes, well, there is always “Global Warming Derangement Syndrome”, where all “reasoning” must be able to fit on a bumper-sticker. How many years did “global warming panic” involve pretty much just CO2? After a couple of decades, mere CO2 became boring, and so suddenly natural gas leaks became “a problem”. Any idea how much methane is generated naturally in the whole wide world, from everything from animals and fungii, to soil, swamps, oceans, volcanoes, and natural seeps? And CHAT GPT only “knows” what it can find on the panic-stricken internet. AI can often be nothing more than a stupidity-multiplier. Let’s also keep in mind, the supposed “severity” of the global warming impact of methane keeps “increasing”, as the bumper-sticker-level “reasoning” goes viral, and the relevant “facts” are repeated and multiplied.

Methane molecules started out as having somewhat more warming effect than CO2 molecules (even though the actual concentration was far less), but then someone decided to multiply that by the time it supposedly takes to be eliminated in the atmosphere, over CO2’s supposedly-shorter atmospheric longevity. Then that increase gets repeated by someone else, but multiplied again by the difference in atmospheric persistent longevity. They only stop re-multiplying it when the story sounds scary enough to get a reaction.

Meanwhile, other sources state that methane does NOT last as long in the atmosphere as hypothesized by the panic contingent. It’s almost like the CO2 story was getting old, so they needed a new “boogie-man” to blame.
Coincidentally, they could blame methane on “the evil oil companies” (that stopped deforestation and greened our planet).

To fixate on the hypothetically-leaked fraction of a comparatively tiny amount of contained methane that might be used for buoyant lift, while probably a million times as much is constantly leaking from pipes, tanks, and wells, intentionally released, and being flared (which produces a LOT of CO2) is misguided.

In fact, I’ll bet it’s similar to worries about wind turbines killing birds, while hi-rise buildings, cars and trucks, housecats, windows, and even radio towers, kill a million times as many birds. I’ll bet you all have found a dead bird outside after a mysterious “thunk” against a window, right?

Back to bumper-sticker “reasoning” - no it’s really NOT reasoning at all, it’s just what will fit into the pea-brains of the teeming masses, too busy with their daily lives to get truly up to speed on pretty much ANY issue.

A more realistic inquiry would look at how much methane would actually leak from a certain hypothetical number of balloons and blimps, and compare that with how much is produced from existing sources, including existing leaks, to find that using methane for lift would form a negligible fraction of total CO2 emissions.

Meanwhile, discussions of the sins of using helium are as old as these AWE forums, and far older actually. It’s a topic that’s been beaten to death ever since Santos castigated me for “wasting helium” by using a couple of tanks in the back of my van to fill a few balloons to elevate my Popular Science Invention of the Year Sky Serpent at the first High Altitude Windpower Conference in Chico/Oroville, California in 2010. Since then, new sources for helium have been located.

Here’s a synopsis of one natural gas leak in California about a decade ago.

n 2015, a natural gas storage well in California experienced a catastrophic leak that released over 5 billion cubic feet of methane:

  • When it happened

On October 23, 2015, the Southern California Gas Company’s (SoCalGas) Aliso Canyon Well SS25 failed, causing a sustained leak in Porter Ranch, Los Angeles.

  • What happened

The leak was initially thought to be from the subsurface well casing. The leak lasted until February 2016, when SoCalGas crews were able to stop it and seal the well.

  • The impact

The leak was a disaster for the environment, public health, and California’s energy supply. California Governor Jerry Brown declared the incident a state emergency, and over 5,000 households in the area were forced to relocate.

  • The response

An interagency task force was formed to respond to the incident, including representatives from the Department of Energy, Department of Transportation, Environmental Protection Agency, and more.

  • The aftermath

CARB and SoCalGas developed an agreement to mitigate methane emissions.

California has 12 underground natural gas storage fields, which are used to store natural gas for a variety of purposes, including residential, commercial, industrial, and electrical power generation.

You never heard anyone say the Glorious State of California was causing global warming. But I’ll bet there was more methane release in this one incident than all the leaked methane you could expect from 1000 years of blimps, balloons, and dirigibles.

Yesterday, as my girlfriend and I were on our way to have breakfast, she pointed out a birthday balloon, still partially inflated, along the side of the road. I told her once again about how many of these celebratory balloons I pick up on a daily basis, saying; "You never realize how many of these balloons there are until you own some acreage of real estate, at which point you find yourself picking them up practically every day. Just then we passed another crashed balloon, probably purchased from a local discount store, and I said “See, there’s another one!” “Oh Yeah!” she said.

Again, you have the concern of a mind fixated on a pet issue in order to “make a point”, versus the overwhelming surrounding factors that make the concern actually quite irrelevant. But that doesn’t even slow down the “bumper-sticker-reasoning” crowd. They are too busy to actually think about things in the context of the big picture. They can only process a single thought at a time, usually one inserted into their brain by someone else. :slight_smile:

etc.

I have silenced your account until October 14th. You’ll have to go elsewhere to share your views on climate change. You can appeal this by saying you’ll refrain from talking about it in the future. A time out in the future for the same reason can’t be appealed.

Sad to hear about the leak.

Can we report on “climate change” according to the views of the World Economic Forum, and only them, by knowing the current evolution of the AWE?
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2023/08/why-wind-power-makes-a-smart-investment-in-an-inclusive-and-sustainable-road-to-net-zero/

Energy access and climate action go hand in hand. They provide more people with clean renewable power while reducing greenhouse gas emissions, helping curb climate change and distributing development opportunities more evenly.

International energy experts foresee that current renewable energy technologies will only be able to deliver emissions reduction until the end of this decade. Beyond 2030, and to achieve net-zero, we must develop and massively scale up a broad variety of renewable energy technologies.

Many innovations face the challenge of crossing the infamous ‘valley of death’ between research and commercialisation. Airborne wind energy is one of them. This relatively unknown clean energy solution warrants attention because of its exceptional versatility. It facilitates integration between different types of renewables, while embracing circular economy principles and promoting an inclusive energy transition.

Moreover, the investment needed to mature the airborne wind energy industry is on par with a single 1.2 GW offshore wind park.

The idea that Doug presents on methane for AWE would put its hypothetical use into perspective for a hypothetical field of application, in relation to the real dispersion of methane according to an event that you take up.

Treating “climate change” or “global warming” as a new religion could ultimately backfire on its own goals by closing off possibilities, even if they do not appear relevant.

The drawbacks of allowing crackpot theories and misinformation on established science outweigh the benefits. For the drawbacks: It confuses the people less able to discern credible from false information, turns away people who can, and just increases the noise to signal ratio. I don’t see the benefits.

The methane thing is some combination of crackpot and trolling, as he didn’t actually give a benefit to using methane over established lifting gases when asked.

This is not a forum on climate change and we are not climate scientists, so you can only promote established science on that here, to not further confuse everyone in this topic that we are discussing here and are actually trying to make simpler. So: https://www.ipcc.ch/

That quote seems good to me, although perhaps too definitively worded on the promise of AWE. The attitude in that is good: research and development into AWE is worthwhile and the investment needed is manageable.

Doug’s attitude is, what, orthogonal or opposed to that: everyone (or everyone he chooses to focus on) doing research and development in AWE are idiots, crackpots, really smart people, and so on, disparaging and at the same time ignoring the work that is being done and not understanding how scientific progress works, how business and product development works, how media works. It’s the same attitude as he has on climate change – that of a crackpot -, it’s just less noticeable since the science is less established, so it’s more difficult to check it with credible sources, and we also don’t have the background to check. It would be good if there were more moderators who were more able to fact check.

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On the methane thing there was a benefit, as now everyone is a little bit more informed on it. Not much more informed though. If it wasn’t challenged though, like it often isn’t, the smaller the forum the more often it isn’t, the confusion would be able to linger. The drawback for me is that I had to spend time on something so stupid. A new person visiting the forum is just going to leave. But If you have an idea, communicate clearly why you think it is a good idea and better than other ideas and cite your sources, to make it more likely people are going to look at it.


@dougselsam, on a different subject: if you don’t have a name for a thing it’s more difficult to see and think about it. So I thought of a new label reading tea leaves, a subcategory of a crackpot theory, or superstition. Things like commenting on “renting office space,” “setting up a website,” “renderings,” “group selfie” (for everyone doing something new together), “game changer” (for reporting on a new thing) “swirly wind logo” (for a wind energy startup) thinking that something every startup is going to do is predictive of something and seeing patterns that aren’t there. The pattern is that most startups will fail, new hardware technology startups even more so.

Putting out press releases like this is to share progress and hopefully generate interest, find collaborators, and perhaps find funding. So everything a startup that doesn’t already have those things needs.

Next is deciding if the label is correct or not, then if comments like that are bad or not, then if bad, how bad or disruptive, then if sufficiently bad or disruptive what to do. My opinion is that an occasional comment like that is normal, a stream of them like from @dougselsam is unwanted. It’s the dose that makes the poison.

I couldn’t find a definition of “open forum,” for online forums, but I came across this, which seems like a good definition:

https://www.rcgroups.com/forums/showpost.php?p=48046381&postcount=43

So a place where (almost) every comment is public (and also where anyone can join I think). The moderated/unmoderated axis is not part of this definition. This forum is moderated.

There are definitions of “open forum” that do include the moderation, but I think those do not refer to online forums:

If anything, these definitions point to open forums often being moderated.

This moderated forum was created in big part in response to the Yahoo forum being unmoderated, with the negative consequences that that had.

Questions about moderation can go in this topic.

@PierreB correctly chose to comment in Slow Chat, quoting your comment and not derailing the original topic.

I “deleted” your later comment from the original topic, moving it to: Deleted Comments See the FAQ on why that is.

I had to “delete” 3 out of 3 of your comments today. I will temporarily silence your account if this continues.

Too many of @dougselsam’s comments over the last while disregarded the FAQ - AWESystems Forum, for example. So I silenced his account for some time.

Has Doug posted in the meantime? I don’t see any new post.

I’m not sure it’s a good idea to silence so-and-so depending on their mood. AWE is already a tiny niche that doesn’t need to be divided.

I count 5 comments, 1 “deleted,” some or all of the others further contributing to the time out.

My current moderating style for @dougselsam is to allow him a little leaky bucket for comments that break the FAQ, maybe out of mercy kill some that would otherwise instantly fill the bucket, then if the little bucket is full silence him for a month or longer. The little leaky bucket is a compromise to still allow him further chances and so on. It should be embarrassing for him to need it.