I have tried a search but not come up with all the answers. Can you tell me more about being a forum Mod. I have met 3, Sian, Kristian and evil Dr Neil (nice people). What do you do, work in shifts in the SF office or do you work from home somehow. How did you come to be a Mod did you apply? or were you asked?. I have no desire to be one myself BTW I'm just curious about it.

Originally posted by owl74
I have tried a search but not come up with all the answers. Can you tell me more about being a forum Mod. I have met 3, Sian, Kristian and evil Dr Neil (nice people). What do you do, work in shifts in the SF office or do you work from home somehow. How did you come to be a Mod did you apply? or were you asked?. I have no desire to be one myself BTW I'm just curious about it.

lol @ working in an office??????????????

theyre just like us (to a certain extent :P) sitting at home reading the board, but get a special bit on their forum with extra commands like ip addresses, banning / deleting functions.

You have more chance of understanding Einsteins theory of relativity than getting to know how the Mods work on here.. ;)

Not that I am being critical mind you (said he quickly before the axe fell)

Hiya,

We have no office - there is no SF 'Office'. We all do our Modding from home, office, etc.
We're volunteers and we're asked to consider being a Mod after a while on the Forum.
We don't have 'shifts' as such, but just spend time on SF as and when we can.
As has been mentioned, we have a few extra bells and whistles available to us than other Forum members.
And of course, we belong to 'Mod. Club'. And the first rule of Mod. Club is..... 'We do not talk about Mod. Club'. ;)

Hope this helps,

Joe

Oh I see, I thought it was a bit more mysterious than that :hihi:

Thanks Joe

Also then, as mods do you sometimes have "oh bu**er it I'll pretend I haven't seen that, as although it's close to the bone it's very funny" kind of moments?. Plus it must be limiting to your own posts having set to a good example and all that.

Originally posted by owl74
Also then, as mods do you sometimes have "oh bu**er it I'll pretend I haven't seen that, as although it's close to the bone it's very funny" kind of moments?. Plus it must be limiting to your own posts having set to a good example and all that.

There's also the sense of humour extraction that they have to undertake before becoming mods! ;)

Originally posted by alchresearch
There's also the sense of humour extraction that they have to undertake before becoming mods! ;)

see, I always thought they were robots :? but seen as I've met Joe, Sian and Dr Neil... I'm inclined to believe they are actually human, or at least they look rather real anyways :D

plus if they were robots, Sian would learn to type slower to improve her sentances, and Joe would learn that:

the != teh ;)

*ducks and hides*

Originally posted by alchresearch
There's also the sense of humour extraction that they have to undertake before becoming mods! ;)

It's all right. You get it back when you leave - although mine had some strange holes in it.

I like to think of it as a form of penance, like self flagellation. It's certainly comparable.SF needs mods to clean up and janitorialise (clean up the crap).

It's a filthy job, but someone has to do it.

Originally posted by Phanerothyme
It's a filthy job, but someone has to do it.

can you imagine how much money you could make creating an mod-bot? a fully automated mod that did everything? :o OMG, thats another idea on my list of business ventures! hehehe

And what I want to know is, do any of you put it on your CV? Should do - responsibility of cleaning up after 10000 users :P

Originally posted by alchresearch
There's also the sense of humour extraction that they have to undertake before becoming mods! ;)

:hihi:

Like Phan says, people do need some kind of control.

Originally posted by xafier
can you imagine how much money you could make creating an mod-bot? a fully automated mod that did everything? :o OMG, thats another idea on my list of business ventures! hehehe

If I could write a fully functional mod-bot, I wouldn't bother trying to flog it to forum admin's, I would simply take up my life tenure as AI professor at Caltech.

You might be able to write a triage-bot that combed the forum for 'bad' threads, moving them to H&D and notifying fleshmods. Also one that corrected obvious spelling errors in thread titles.

It wouldn't be too hard , either, to get one to identify tit-for-tat exchanges...hmmm

So what other sorts of patterns could a modbot detect that would enable it to do the menial work so hated of meatmods I wonder?

Originally posted by venger
:hihi:

Like Phan says, people do need some kind of control.

but i do think on here theres a bit TOO MUCH control tbh ..........and from what feedback ive received back about the subject on other forums i frequent..........everybody seems to agree with me.
and when ive tried to iron out my issues with the mods ive been banned ............prolly get banned for saying this too

Originally posted by Phanerothyme
So what other sorts of patterns could a modbot detect that would enable it to do the menial work so hated of meatmods I wonder?

spammers? people who post the same message multiple times in every thread... or create new threads all over the place with the same content...

*thinks* I'm sure there are a lot more things that could easily be done by a bot... they're just eluding me right now :(

Originally posted by xafier
spammers? people who post the same message multiple times in every thread... or create new threads all over the place with the same content...

*thinks* I'm sure there are a lot more things that could easily be done by a bot... they're just eluding me right now :(

Oooh.

detection algorithms for:

txt spk

long posts without para breaks
posts with too much big text or other inappropriate formatting

profanity - obviously.

dodgy links (use DNSBL + private BL)

multiple user IDs

illegal sigs

and maybe a 'desksergeantmodbot' that takes reported posts and checks them out against a set of common infractions, replies to the user and sends a polite pm to the poster after taking the appropriate action.

with a bit of help from this (http://tinyurl.com/7rzez) and some training, I fully expect to be able to replace mods within 2-3 months.

A 'userbot' may be constructed to perform the function of users - such a bot would need to be able to

-assimilate information from other web sources
-tap into a large database of abusive phrases
-drench every post in sarcasm
-contradict itself, and deny this strenuously
-post random, angry messages at 3am, tilting at windmills.
-create another user ID and have long, backslapping conversations with itself

once userbot and modbot are in place, all that remains is to write an adminbot, and we can all go outside and enjoy the sunshine.

-

Originally posted by Phanerothyme
once userbot and modbot are in place, all that remains is to write an adminbot, and we can all go outside and enjoy the sunshine

hehe, nice one Phan ;) although... seriously, some of the ideas for a mod bot are quite interesting, even if it doesn't actually delete/move posts creating a bot that keeps track of users and their posts could prove very useful.

It could provide a table for the real mods to use highlighting possible problems, ranking them in order from mass spammers down to people using too much annoying txt speech. Easily match stats of users IP address and system details to try and find those irritating people that create about 5 accounts.

Am I right in assuming that female Moderators on SF are very much in the minority? Is there a reason for this? Is it that a lot of females are not interested in becoming a Moderator? Or is that females just aren't being recruited in the main?

I'm not trying to be controversial, but am curious!

:?

Originally posted by Ann_x
Am I right in assuming that female Moderators on SF are very much in the minority? Is there a reason for this? Is it that a lot of females are not interested in becoming a Moderator? Or is that females just aren't being recruited in the main?

I'm not trying to be controversial, but am curious!

:?

I would suspect the point lies in the fact that there are far more men on the forum than women, generally speaking (I hate to generalise btw) men are more computer minded, and are more prone to sitting online for stupid amounts of time... whereas woman can see sense in the fact its generally a pointless waste of time lol

I think theres 1 female and 3 male mods? start a poll on whether people are male or female if your so curious (if it hasnt been done already?) then we can see what the stats are like and see whether there is some unfairness about

maybe its because the women on here have less free time because they're looking after their kids etc?

Hi all,

There are 8 mods, one of whom is female. We have a few names in the frame for moderators in future and when we find a few more we'll let folks know in the usual manner.

There's no reason why we don't have more female mods; it's just a case of waiting for someone to appear with 'Mod' qualities. We don't care what gender they are - half the time we don't know what gender users are anyway. :)

In terms of software - believe it or not we HAVE had a brief look at automating some of the tasks but generally we feel that the human touch is more acceptable to people. Even tasks that should be easily automatable - like spotting people who use the same IP address - isn't always worthwhile because of the widespread use of proxy IP addresses by ISPs. We have a range of approachs that we adopt for spotting duplicate IDs, and we usually clean them up quietly in the background.

Joe

Got my hopes up there....

I shouldn't have thought that checking IP addresses would be acceptable, given that there may be two or more SF users with access to a (family) pc.

Also, I know that my IP address changes regularly (I have no idea why ~ s'pose I could ask BTBroadband about it), and also I sometimes log in at work (during my lunch break, I hasten to add) and other places.

Originally posted by Mod2
Got my hopes up there....

I think if you want to be a mod, you should be automatically excluded as being unsuitable.

Originally posted by Ann_x
I shouldn't have thought that checking IP addresses would be acceptable, given that there may be two or more SF users with access to a (family) pc.

Also, I know that my IP address changes regularly (I have no idea why ~ s'pose I could ask BTBroadband about it), and also I sometimes log in at work (during my lunch break, I hasten to add) and other places.

Which is exactly why we don't automate. There are several decades worth of IP networking experience in the Moderating team, so we are very aware of proxy servers, DHCP allocation of IP addresses, etc. Some people do have static IP addresses, however.

Joe

Originally posted by Phanerothyme
I think if you want to be a mod, you should be automatically excluded as being unsuitable.

:)

Was it in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy where people who wanted to be President of the Galaxy were automatically excluded from the job?

Joe

Originally posted by JoePritchard
Which is exactly why we don't automate. There are several decades worth of IP networking experience in the Moderating team, so we are very aware of proxy servers, DHCP allocation of IP addresses, etc. Some people do have static IP addresses, however.

Joe

If I wanted to spot dual userids, I would use stylistic or bayesian analysis rather than using IP.

Originally posted by Phanerothyme
I think if you want to be a mod, you should be automatically excluded as being unsuitable.

I don't know if you was, but i'm talking about Mods

Originally posted by Phanerothyme
If I wanted to spot dual userids, I would use stylistic or bayesian analysis rather than using IP.

That's the approach we do take, funnily enough. The Moderating equivalent of a 'copper's nose'. :)

Originally posted by Phanerothyme
I think if you want to be a mod, you should be automatically excluded as being unsuitable.

unsuitable or unstable ? ;)