Everything in Moderation
In the spirit of openness that we hope to engender, this post describes the purpose and role of Forum moderators. Moderatorship is not a position of rank and confers no status the user. It is merely a useful function, an additional service to others, a responsibility that some individuals offer to take on and others have thrust upon them.
Moderators have the ability to move, remove or edit others posts as well as their own, and merge complete topics, either in specific forums or the entire Forum. In an emergency, they are able to suspend from posting and personal messaging but not ban or delete other users.
The role of moderators is to act as a guide to the Forum as whole, helping other users, protecting the forums form abuse and improving the general, overall look and feel of the forums. To avoid the excesses of other internet forums, the BrahmaKumaris.Info Forum is not primarily intended for social networking nor forums of self-expression. It is a public resource to fully document issues arising from BKWSU teachings and lifestyle, and to support those individuals effected by it.
As not all forum members are native English speakers, nor experienced in using the code that formats the forums, moderators are encouraged and able to correct errors in grammar, spelling and 'bbcode' formatting. We do not and have not changed the meaning of any posts and have only very rarely removed posts, or part of posts, when they have seriously broken the guidelines or are too offensive even for our fairly liberal standards.
The reason we do this is to make the forums as condensed and easy to read or follow. It puts all users on a more equal footing and to some extend helps to protect the identity of users by removing idiosyncrasies by which they might be recognized. The forums are archived by Google and other search engines to become a widely available resource and so we wish to create the best possible impression of what we are doing.
Guides to Moderators
1] Spelling and grammar
1] Lack of paragraph breaks
If you wish to experiment and learn more, there is a trial forum with full access; here. Please request access.[/list]
Moderator mistakes
It takes time, experience and experimentation to learn the skills of moderatorship which we allow. If any individual feels that their post has been moved, removed or edited unfairly, please contact the moderator or Forum Administrator in the first place to discuss the matter or leave a note in the Admin forum.
In the spirit of openness that we hope to engender, this post describes the purpose and role of Forum moderators. Moderatorship is not a position of rank and confers no status the user. It is merely a useful function, an additional service to others, a responsibility that some individuals offer to take on and others have thrust upon them.
Moderators have the ability to move, remove or edit others posts as well as their own, and merge complete topics, either in specific forums or the entire Forum. In an emergency, they are able to suspend from posting and personal messaging but not ban or delete other users.
The role of moderators is to act as a guide to the Forum as whole, helping other users, protecting the forums form abuse and improving the general, overall look and feel of the forums. To avoid the excesses of other internet forums, the BrahmaKumaris.Info Forum is not primarily intended for social networking nor forums of self-expression. It is a public resource to fully document issues arising from BKWSU teachings and lifestyle, and to support those individuals effected by it.
As not all forum members are native English speakers, nor experienced in using the code that formats the forums, moderators are encouraged and able to correct errors in grammar, spelling and 'bbcode' formatting. We do not and have not changed the meaning of any posts and have only very rarely removed posts, or part of posts, when they have seriously broken the guidelines or are too offensive even for our fairly liberal standards.
The reason we do this is to make the forums as condensed and easy to read or follow. It puts all users on a more equal footing and to some extend helps to protect the identity of users by removing idiosyncrasies by which they might be recognized. The forums are archived by Google and other search engines to become a widely available resource and so we wish to create the best possible impression of what we are doing.
Guides to Moderators
1] Spelling and grammar
- The correction of spelling and grammar is according to your ability and discretion. Perfection or de-personalization is not the aim, we wish to merely to remove the most obvious obstacles to others understanding what is being said. In case of doubts, where posts are difficult to understand, refer back to the original author.
- As a rule, discussion is allowed to wander but where it becomes an obstacle to others or an indulgence, completely "off topic" discussion can be moved to the "Lost Property" topic in the Admin forum. In many cases, valid "off topic" discussion can be split or merged with other already existing topics. Again, this is for moderators discretion.
One other alternative is just for moderators to steer conversation back "on topic".
- Foremost consideration is given to those that wish to remain incognito. It is understood that many individuals are still practising BKs that maintain a relationship with their local BK center and many ex-BKs, especially recently ex-BKs maintain friendships with current BKs. In the case of PBKs, individuals may well experience direct discrimination and abuse from the BKWSU if their identity was revealed. Accidental or deliberate attempts to reveal identities should be removed.
- BBcode is the code which creates custom formatting of posts. You can see the buttons above the posting window, please experiment with them. They are very similar to HTML used to writing webpages. There are two main issues where individuals have difficulties, the quote and URL tags.
- The forum software allows single posts and complete topics to be split, merged, or moved. Each of these can be done in order to keep the forums concise and orderly, e.g. , splitting a thread to create two new ones where discussion goes off topic or an important new issues arises, merging two similar or identical topics to keep an old discussion active or moving a universal topic into The Commonroom from a usergroup forum.
As a moderator, you will see small buttons/icons at the bottom of the page which allow you to perform these actions.
- Moderators will see a link to a Moderator control panel at the bottom of the page after logging in. This allows them to perform certain action including adding to the word censorship list and suspending but not banning other members to allow them to cool off when necessary.
1] Lack of paragraph breaks
- Some posters have a habit of writing without paragraph breaks, or using only one carriage return to break text. Traditionally, it is not clear if or where BapDada intends there to be paragragh breaks in the Murlis and some users are uncomfortable at inflicting their own. General practise on the forums is to use double carriage return paragraph breaks at regular spaces, or at obvious points of emphasis. In this case, the readers' interests are put before the contributors and breaks are added. Tidy spacing helps make posts more readable.
- The software cannot tell the difference between characters of a word and a fullstop, e.g. "too.....many". This can cause it to break the frame that holds the forum and cause layout problems. Please limit fullstops to 3 and create a break between the words, e.g. "just ... right".
Microsoft Word, which some write their posts in first, puts in place a single character with 3 dots that breaks other parts of the website. Replace with 3 normal fullstops. It also uses unusual coding for apostrophes and quotation marks that are best replaced.
- This is the most common problem individual have becoming used to the forum software. There is a topic, here, that explains how to fix it, e.g.
- Code: Select all
[quote="author"]... message is here ...[/quote]
- Code: Select all
[quote]... message is here ...[/quote]
- Code: Select all
[quote="author"]... quoted text is here ...[/quote]
Your message goes here without a space
[quote]... quoted text is here ...[/quote]
Your message goes here without a space again.
Where one edits out the bits of the message one does not want quoted. One can also type in your own quote tags if you are a programmer type you can just type;
or for multiple quotes;
• The quote tags create a space above and below themselves, so no space is required when posting.
• When quoting the same person many times in one post, it is only necessary to use their name once.
• When quoting subsequent individuals is is good to put their name in so that quotations can be attributed to the original contributor.
• Please limit the amount of quotation to one or a few lines and avoid double quoting a quoting, i.e. a quote within a quote, unless it is really necessary.
• Please avoid quoting the original contributor's addresses and signatures etc.
The purpose of all this is to keep the forum as condensed and informative for the reader as possible and avoiding the usual unreadable mess most public forums descend into. Written language is meant to be invisible to allow the meaning of what is being said to come through.
- Ur nt alld 2 wrt in SMS txt language 4 evr. Write in English.
- The over use of smilies is disuaded because, again, it does strange things to other bit of the site software. If there are too many smilies feel free to edit them down. One is fine to denote mood.
- Thankfully we have very little of this. There are many issues more profane and obscene than bad language.
We understand that many ex-BK are coming out of the BKWSU and need to let off steam. To some extent we allow and encourage this to the limit that is it nor hurtfully directed at other forum members. BrahmaKumaris.Info is not the BKWSU and has more liberal policy towards individual's self-expression, the sincerity of their intention is more important than the manner in which it is expressed. Priority is given for ex-BKs experience.
No server software is perfect and at times posts or messages have been lost through no one individuals actions. A common fault causing lost posts is users internet browsers either timing out or logging the individual out. This is normally due to a poor or broken internet connection or the editing of a post taking too long. Under such circumstances, it is not possible to recover such posts. If in doubt, users should be encouraged to write and save their posts in a simple text editing application and then copy and pasting into the forum when they are online.
- Again, too long URLs if left as is can break and break the forum. To shorten URLs, copy the actual URL into a URL tag, e.g.
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[url=http://www.example.com][b]The name of the domain[/b][/url]
which will look like this;
The name of the domain.
Unlike quote tag it does not create a space after it.
- To lay out recommended books etc.
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Book :[list]• [b][url=http://www.example.com/]The Name of the book[/url] by the author[/b][/list]
A personal review about the book and it relevance to BK life.
which will look like this;
Book :
- • The Name of the book by the author
- Sometimes posts can be made much more clear my creating a list of items;
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How to make a list:
[list]1. First item
2. Second item.
3. Third item.
4. Another item. [/list]
The message contines afterwards ...- Code: Select all
adding [b]bold[/b] formatting to draw emphasis
which would look like this;
How to make a list:
- 1. First item
2. Second item.
3. Third item.
4. Another item.
or adding bold formatting to draw emphasis, like so;
Not every contributor appreciates this but it is acceptable within reason.
- New memberships require screening to discover whether they are genuine or merely a spammer attempting to abuse the forum. Generally these "membership spammers" want to promote pornographic sites and are often "bots" or automated software designed to spread links. Any such details are removed immediately they are discovered.
Spammers can generally be identified by searching for either their email or website in Google but be warned, most sites are XXX pornography.
- When moving topics DO NOT leave a shadow in the old forum. There is a tick box to do so which should be unticked. Suggest discussing the move in the forum before doing so.
If you wish to experiment and learn more, there is a trial forum with full access; here. Please request access.[/list]
Moderator mistakes
It takes time, experience and experimentation to learn the skills of moderatorship which we allow. If any individual feels that their post has been moved, removed or edited unfairly, please contact the moderator or Forum Administrator in the first place to discuss the matter or leave a note in the Admin forum.