Everything in moderation

You’d think that this grown man would have enough on his plate to have to worry about what after-market earphones to recommend to geeks wanting to boost their iPods or to explain to a new Mac user what "repairing disk permissions" means and why it’s good for routine maintenance. But no – seven nights a week, and even some mornings, I prowl three or four websites like a true Pinoy Big Brother seeking problems and questions like these to resolve for the digital masses as an unpaid, unsolicited call-center agent.

It’s a strange form of relaxation, but it gives me a kick like few other diversions. It’s called moderation – yes, as in wading into a schoolyard brawl and pulling the combatants apart by the collar, or sitting in a corner of the hall watching the glee club or debating society rehearse. You’ll sense a paternalistic streak there somewhere, but the paternalism is intentional and arguably even essential in the virtual society and the virtual families spawned by the Internet.

If NGOs have their "convenors," then the Internet has its moderators – the overseers and traffic controllers of the hundreds of thousands of online forums and message boards that have cropped up on the World Wide Web. These e-groups have converged around every conceivable (and a few inconceivable) topic or interest; I’m signed up, for example, with Yahoogroups for my elementary-school class, my high school batch, my college fraternity, our local chapter of the English-Speaking Union, the Philippine Fulbright Scholars Association, a fountain pen collectors’ club, a political-affairs discussion group, several geek and techie groups (for Macs, PDAs, cars, etc.), and any number of school-based classroom groups. (I am and have never been a member of the Yahoogroups for female wrestling holds, midget sex, boots and tights, sugar daddies, and Selma Hayek’s feet – that’s right, folks – just her feet and nothing else.)

While most people who sign up for these e-groups are quite happy to remain "lurkers" – members you won’t hear a pipsqueak from until something comes up to bring them out of the woodwork – some others prove themselves willing and able to assume greater communal burdens, i.e., dispensing technical wisdom, defining and upholding community standards, smiting down troublemakers, spotting new trends, provoking and steering discussions of industry issues and gadget pros and cons.

It’s a life, I tell you – for some, a substitute life where it suddenly doesn’t matter what you do by day or how much you make or whether you look like Antonio Banderas or his dog; for as long as you have the know-how, the patience, and the time to deal with problems that often have more to do with human foibles and frailties than mechanical glitches.

Aside from the Yahoogroups I set up for my high school batch and my classes, I moderate for two geek groups: the Apple Macintosh freaks at the Philippine Macintosh Users Group (www.philmug.ph) and the iPodders at PodCentral (www.podcentral.ph). I also actively participate in the Mapalad Palm users forum at www.mapalad.org. I am, in fact, a little more than a regular mod; as "super moderator," I get to do what all mods can do – move threads around, issue warnings, edit messages – and more, without having to worry about the hardcore programming that the site’s administrators or admins have to do.

This all sounds pretty routine if not downright boring, and most times it is; a mod’s life should be a quiet one, concerned with pushing little pieces of digital paper around. But now and then we come across some miscreants who make our lives more animated than it should be. Like I noted a couple of columns ago, it’s amazing what people will do or say online, under the cloak of anonymity and with the security of distance, that they will never dare do in public.

These people are what, in Webspeak, are called trolls and flamebaiters, semi-professional nuisances whose mission in life seems to be the aggravation of other lives.

A troll, says that wonderful Web resource Wikipedia, "is a person who posts inflammatory messages on the Internet, such as on online discussion forums, to disrupt the discussion or to upset its participants. The word, or its variant, ‘trolling,’ is also used to describe such messages or the act of posting them." Such a person might invade a Mac or Palm forum, for example, and extol the virtues of the Windows platform – which is a fine thing purely for information or discussion purposes, but pushing for it too hard and too insistently to the point of provoking violent responses could be tantamount to trolling (or its cousin, flamebaiting, the inciting of riotously contrary passions among the faithful).

Let me share with you – especially those of you who may be moderating or thinking of moderating a forum – some of our guidelines (slightly revised below) for moderators at Philmug.ph. We just made these up – which means, they come from solid experience and years of having had to deal with some of the most clueless, annoying, and inconsiderate people online (as well as many – many more – of the smartest, sharpest, and most pleasant folks you could hope to meet in cyberspace). Thanks to Adel Gabot, Elbert Cuenca, and the rest of the Philmug gang for these ideas.

Let it all hang out, warts and all. Post deletion is the final solution. We can chastise people, advise them, correct them (with kindness, of course), but their posts are their property, their sacred ownership, and only they should be able to remove them. We should delete posts only if they are offensive, libelous, and malicious, and for other similar reasons. Seek a consensus among the other staff members before deleting a post, and properly inform the poster via e-mail or U2U if a post has been deleted, and for what reason. Deleting a thread with posted replies by other people is a whole magnitude more problematic.

(Let me interject that the question of "Who owns the posts?" is an interesting one – legally and even ideologically. It is, after all, the members and their contributions who give value to the forum – "value" meaning not simply the technical know-how that moderators – acting as senior geeks – usually dispense, but also the exchange of ideas itself, the creation of a virtual community. For practical purposes, it might help to separate the notion of "ownership" from "use" – meaning, you might own your post but I, the moderator, can still decide if it’s appropriate for the forum or not. Unpleasant and very un-Webbish as it sounds, I think most e-groups can’t be considered democracies communally owned; they’re usually started by one person or a few people who have the right to set the rules, and if you can’t abide by them, then feel free to step out and go elsewhere – or start your own group.)

Kill with kindness. Don’t lose your cool. Be polite, levelheaded, and sensible, even in the face of screaming, spluttering obnoxious-ness. If you lose it and fight back publicly, that reaction will remain for cyberspace posterity to be seen, viewed, and regretted forever. Be patient and polite – even and especially if the poster is asking for it, or baiting you into losing your composure. Give particular consideration to newbies; forgive them, for they know not what they do.

Watch out for each other’s back. If there are things that slip past the radar of a mod in his or her designated area, take the initiative of telling that mod, or if that fails, work on it yourself. Mods must never quarrel with each other in public. We may have differences of opinion about how to handle situations, but they should be sorted out behind the scenes. Squabbling mods are all malicious members need to sow intrigue and weaken the organization.

Moderate actively. Establish your presence and authority in your forum. Monitor and steer the discussion to positive and productive threads. Discourage redundancy, flamebaiting, post padding, boorishness, and unhelpful remarks. Check your forums at least once a day.

To all these, I should add that the less you see me as a mod, the better. That means that things are chugging along just fine, and you can discuss the finer points of comparison between the iPod nano and the iPod shuffle without anyone chewing your ears off.

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Send e-mail to Butch Dalisay at penmanila@yahoo.com.