I do a lot of thinking when I'm driving around, mainly because when I'm not on the net I don't have to react to randomly-occurring issues needing my attention. At some point on a long drive it occurred to me that a huge majority of issues people have with Fark's moderating process are due to the fact that people don't actually know what we're doing. Fark operates very differently than any other website I can think of, and there's no indication of this in our FAQ or anywhere else. We don't have a discussion of Internet Community Theory anywhere. So in a bid to cut down on a bunch of the false positives we've been getting, here's the first of a multi-part discussion of what we're doing on our end and how it's different from other sites.

Here's our list of discussion topics, we're going to do the first two today. I suspect more issues will pop up later, I'll hit those too. If any questions you may have fall under the other topics, hold them until then.

Do not post questions about the status of individual banned Farkers, either post a hypothetical or email me. Also be aware that hypotheticals don't exist in a vacuum - individuals who claim to have been banned from Fark for no reason either rewrote history or omitted something. For example there's at least one person banned currently with over 50 various infractions who claims to have no idea why they were banned. I believe them too (that they have no idea). That doesn't change the fact that incidents occurred, they were notified at the time, claimed to have understood at the time, then later wiped them from their memory. Some people are like that. In a community of over 4.3 million individuals we see just about every possible combination of personality traits, that's one of them. So it goes.

What kind of community Fark isn't
Our goal in moderating
Internal checks and balances against bad moderating
How to get banned permanently from Fark
Popular misconceptions about Fark that impact moderating
Problems with the current system

I'll begin by explaining what kind of community Fark isn't.

Most online communities (and by most I mean everyone other than us) attempt to be variations of real life societies. Many claim to be some kind of utopian hippie commune where every voice is "important".

Most espouse some kind of anti-censorship bent. In reality this isn't the case at all. Most methods of not-censoring posts involve making sure that while comments won't ever be deleted, no one ever sees them (via voting comments down or 'unpublishing' them). If no one can ever see a comment it might as well be deleted This is silly, just call it what it is. What these other sites do is only technically anti-censorship, in reality it's the same thing as deleting comments but with a different name.

A lot of other communities, mainly news aggregators, try to adopt the democratic model of posting stories and links. This works great until you factor spammers into the equation, then everything goes to hell. You also run into issues with something I like to call "tyranny by well-organized minorities". Note how Ron Paul supporters were able to effectively dominate social news websites during the primary election season.

Fark takes a different approach altogether. Fark isn't attempting to emulate any real world society. Fark is a house party. Everyone's welcome to come and I certainly hope they have fun at the party and enjoy themselves. People who complain that the food sucks, the decor is bad, and the people at the party are jerks will eventually get shown the door. Sometimes people get thrown out of the party, try to get back in and claim that it was perfectly fine because the front door was unlocked.

We run things a little tighter than most people would probably expect given how lax other sites are. Fark is a website though, not a government. I am very much anti-censorship in the real world, but in my own house things are different. Anyone who comes to a party at my place who causes trouble gets shown the door. Anyone who wants to argue that Ron Paul is awesome or that Ralph Nader is great can keep right on arguing that, or any other conservative or liberal ideology they might believe - provided that they really do believe it. We censor, but there is no political motivation behind it. The goal is to allow everyone to have as much fun as possible, and when necessary remove people from the house party who are preventing that from happening.

You'll note that regarding political discussions I said "provided that they really do believe it." How do we know? We don't. We're guessing. And we're not afraid to be wrong because of our next discussion topic...

Our moderating mantra: anything can be undone.
This isn't the real world, we're not sending people to jail or executing them. It's a discussion board. In the event that our moderators can't decide if someone's done something wrong or not, we tell them to pull the trigger anyhow. We'll sort it out during internal discussion and fix it during the review process when necessary. When we're wrong we apologize. The assumption that mistakes will be made is built-in to our strategy.

Our goal: identify troublemakers and remove them from the party
Some people just cause trouble. Some intentionally, some unintentionally. Our entire moderating system is built around identifying people who cause the most work for the mods and dispensing with them. We're not attempting to punish or rehabilitate repeat offenders. Luckily most of the time we can work with folks and get individual issues sorted out quickly via the Farkback form.

Our objective in moderating is the main cause of the misconception that timeouts and bans are handed out inconsistently. People assume that a given infraction has a given penalty no matter how many times you commit it. In the real world, this is more or less how it works. On Fark, the bans and timeouts are assessed on a sliding scale. Repeat infractions for the same thing, even minor ones, earn longer and longer timeouts. Significantly longer timeouts. In the event that someone continues to do the same thing over and over again, eventually the call is made to issue an open-ended ban. There's a series of drop-down boxes on our end to ensure that the sliding scale is consist. An infraction is committed, the mod looks in the individual's history to see if it has happened before, if so, then the next higher penalty level is assessed. This stuff is already hardcoded into the system.

The amount of time that passes between infractions is taken into account as well. Anyone can accidentally threadjack, for example. People go online drunk and do stupid stuff. It happens. If it's a one-off thing, the moderators generally don't worry about it. If it's a frequent thing, such as multiple infractions in the space of days, steps are taken to remove that person from the community. We also take into account how long ago the last infraction was. Fark's been around for almost 10 years now. We have several community members that were constantly being banned from Fark five years ago, but not today. Your outlook on life when you're 20 is vastly different from where you end up at 25. And so on.

We work under the assumption that in the larger world of the Internet, there is a certain small percentage of people who exist solely to sow chaos and disorder, either intentionally or unintentionally. It doesn't take many individuals like this to take down an entire community. Some of you have probably witnessed this firsthand on other sites. Part of the reason that Fark's community works so well is that we take steps to remove these people from it.

Along these lines, the general TotalFark community appears to have two veins of thought on moderating. One segment is happy with how things are currently, the other segment wants to be recognized as consenting adults and generally left alone.

My personal sentiments lie with the consenting adults crowd, but the problem with leaving things completely alone is they tend to drift toward the darker side regardless of people's best intentions. Some have suggested that we create a darker section of Fark and just leave it alone altogether (with warnings when you were about to cross over). I personally have no problem with something like that existing - elsewhere. For example, I don't mind going to the occasional strip club but I don't want to run or own one. Same goes for that kind of community, I have no problem with it existing per se somewhere out there on the Internet, but there are some not-so-good ramifications of it existing inside Fark that I'd rather avoid. So for the consenting adults crowd, I get it, but we can't do it.

I'll be hanging out in the thread for a bit but I'm doing 100 other things atm so some responses may be slow.
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