[nekokami]

As a member of the moderation team, and one of the moderators who expressed grave concerns about the direction the Conservatory was taking, I wanted to respond to some of these comments.

Originally Posted by Daithi

I can understand why Ea is upset.

When the Conservatory for first proposed the idea was shot down by the moderators. Then it was put to a vote and overwhelming the Mobileread community voted in favor of the the Conservatory. Now it is being shutdown because "private" messages were sent to Alex indicating they didn't like the tone. Then the Conservatory was closed with no warning whatsoever. Try looking at it from Ea's perspective and maybe you can see why he feels shafted.

I can appreciate Ea's perspective-- echoed by Daithi here-- that the decision was made with no advance warning. However, the creation of the forum was not as simple as what you are describing, either. As a member of the moderation team, I can tell you that there were a lot of difficult decisions around how-- or if-- to engage in this experiment. One late decision that was made was not to include "Leave things as they are" as a poll option, even though this had been discussed and several people in the moderation team (myself included) had expected to see that as a poll option. The choices were limited to "New forum" or "New prefix." As a result, we have no idea what proportion of the MR community actually wanted the new forum area. We only know that of those who thought something needed to change, a new forum area was preferred over a prefix.

Originally Posted by tompe

Do you mean the content or the tone? I really do not get what it was that upset people. I participate in discussions in other places on the net and the Conservatory seemed just like a standard discussion place. And if you discuss certain topics you will get polarized opinions and sometimes bad arguments but so what?

Tompe, both the content and the tone of the Conservatory area were the cause of complaints to the moderators. As you probably all know, there is a "report post" button on each post. Reporting a post results in adding the post to a queue and sending email to the entire moderation team. Many of the posts reported are spam, and are simply dealt with by the first moderator who has a chance. When a dispute arises between members, however, and a post is reported, the moderation team discusses the situation and decides what action to take, if any.

In the Conservatory, not only were a number of threads started with what appeared to be deliberately provocative topics, but the tone seemed to become angry much more quickly than in other areas of MR (even compared to copyright or DRM threads). You wrote, "the Conservatory seemed just like a standard discussion place." However, one of the comments we've received consistently about MR is that it is not just a standard discussion place. People find the tone here unusually civil and friendly. I feel safe in saying that the moderation team considers that maintaining this atmosphere of civility and friendliness is a priority. It does not mean that people cannot disagree with one another here. But we would like to be a cut above the usual internet forum in which flame wars seem to be a daily or hourly occurrence.

You wrote, "And if you discuss certain topics you will get polarized opinions and sometimes bad arguments but so what?" My response: why should we even discuss those topics here, unless they relate to ebooks? I understand building community with the light-hearted banter in the lounge, but these controversial topics don't bring people together, they drive them apart. Doesn't the internet already provide enough places where that can happen?

Originally Posted by ShortNCuddlyAm

And what I've found here is that when you do ask there's usually quite a lot of people willing to help you and point you in the right direction. Unlike some other forums I've been on, where the standard response is to tell people to use the search function

I've noticed that too, and I think it is representative of the difference in attitudes here compared to many other places I've been online (and I go back to the days of 300 baud dial-up modems).

Originally Posted by Lady Blue

...when someone from across the pond posted something once about going to the NEW FOREST and I'd never heard of it before, I asked what it was. To me, the name sounded like a term that the "locals" might use, like a "pet name" or nickname" of a place. Kind of like we might call McDonald's, Mickey D's, or WalMart, Wally World.

I received a response that said something like (I paraphrase) "Why ask here? Look it up yourself here" with a link to a Wiki page.

I am so sorry this happened to you. Providing a link to someone to answer a question is a reasonable practice; including the search terms you used to find the link is also helpful. But telling people "search for yourself" isn't what we hope for in this community.

Finally, I'd like to respond to some specific concerns from those who find the Lounge cumbersome or unsatisfying to use. I hear the following concerns:

1 - One can't subscribe to a subset of the lounge, e.g. only specific prefixes, for notification purposes
2 - One can't choose to select or exclude specific prefixes in the "new posts" view
3 - When thread drift occurs, more action could be taken to split threads, so the original topic can be continued and the new topic can continue

It seems to me that these are concerns that we can look to address. The first two involve technical issues that will require Alex's attention (and I have to say, this is the best forum I've ever been on from a technical standpoint, bar none. Alex is a genius in this matter.)

The third would involve action by moderators, but we do have the technical tools to do this already. We could probably use the "report post" function for this, with a request "please split" in the report field. That is, if the original poster (or the other participants) feel that a thread needs to be split, they can report the first post, include "please split" in the field provided, and perhaps identify followup posts that should go to the new thread, as appropriate. I would far rather spend my moderation time helping members split threads so everyone can enjoy conversations than responding to complaints about vicious personal attacks.