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Addressing Unresolved Questions and Concerns

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Addressing Unresolved Questions and Concerns

dancecats

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Now that we believe we have sorted what we all can agree was the main elephant in the room, we now are turning our attention to the valid questions, concerns, and points you have raised that need to be addressed. We thank you for your patience and ask you to remain so a while longer. We want to give you the well-thought out and articulately crafted responses you deserve, which means that every. single. question. concern. and. point. must. be. discussed. And that takes time. To do anything else would be disrespectful to you. So this is what we are going to do:

We are going to go through Saving DPF, discussing each of the questions, concerns, and points, one by one. We will copy and paste said question, concern, or point into its own post, along with our response. When we have addressed everything in that thread, we will open this thread to new responses, at which time you will be more than welcome to ask or bring up and new questions, concerns, or points for our consideration. We just respectfully ask that you carefully read the thread before posting; we do not wish to answer the same questions multiple times any more than we think you want to read the same answers.
 
Change in Leadership: DPF's mods have been doing this job for a long time, and mostly, they've been okay. Recently, however, they've been more and more stringent, and less and less willing to consider the real needs of this community, stifling its growth. Old feuds and hurt feelings are hard to let go, but if we don't allow the community to move beyond the sins of the past, then that's where we'll be stuck. My proposals:
1) Make moderation more transparent - This means making decisions and changes more public, allowing for periods of discussion, and not silencing dissenters (closing the pervious thread certainly did very little for my confidence in this forum's leadership).
2) Add new folks to the Mod Team - Not only will this bring new ideas and perspectives to the forum, but it will provide better coverage and quicker responses. Our current team can take a while to even remove spam posts, which sit around for days. We all have lives, but allowing for different time zones, different backgrounds and availabilities is best. Life happens to all of us - and I continue to wish the best for the mods/admins who have health problems <3 - but sometimes we need to put our health in front of our pride and let others take the jobs we may not be able to perform as well as we'd want.
1. We have discussed this point at great length. We hear and understand your frustration and believe that the tipping point was caused by the latest, unnecessary, and recently nullified-and-voided rules. If you do not know to which rules we refer, do not worry about it; consider yourself lucky that you missed the latest drama. If you want dramatic reading, we suggest Shakespeare; it is better written and far more interesting. But we digress, back to the topic at hand ... .

While we understand and appreciate your desire for more transparency in decision making, moderation is not and cannot be done by popular vote or group discussion. While it sounds like a good idea in theory, it just does not translate well in practice. If we were to put everything, whether it is a new rule change, policy, etc., to a vote or hold a discussion before we implement it, nothing would ever get done. Universal popularity simply does not exist and no matter what we propose, we always would have at least a few members who do not like/want/agree with said proposal. Many times, more often than one would realize, the right decision is not the popular one. More likely, when a situation has spiraled out of control to the extent when moderator intervention is required, emotions are so intense and inflamed, the likelihood of reaching a consensus is so slim that were it dependent on a popular vote, no action could be taken.

To my knowledge, no policy ever has been enforced without proper announcement and allowing appropriate discussion. In the instance of the late, but not lamented, policy, the reason we closed the thread was because you already had successfully made your points. The lily was successfully gilded and we did not see anything constructive to be gained in the conversation continuing. We were just trying to avoid the thread deteriorating into a spectacle of drama. If we were looking to silence dissenters, we would have moved or hidden the thread, not left it clearly visible for anyone to read.

2. We do our best as moderators and we cannot argue much of what you have said. We do the best we can regarding spam posts, and what you said is true. We all have lives and it is unfortunate that all of the moderators happen to be in the same time zone. We all have to sleep; it really is too bad that it is at the same time. When it comes to spam posts, we do the best we can, but you can help us out there: if you see something, say something. Or more specifically, report spam, please, so we can do something about it.

As far as saying DPF Staff are unwilling to consider the needs of the community, we think that is extremely harsh and unfair. This entire thread and conversation exists because we are doing exactly that. You, the community, told us that we enacted an inappropriate rule. We responded promptly by listening to you, retracting the rule, and we still are listening to you. If that should happen again (not that we hope that it does), we promise that your concerns will receive the same open ears (eyes) and attentive responses. If you have any questions or concerns, we are here to help and just a mouse click away.

We do agree that adding more members to DPF Staff would be helpful. On that, you are preaching to the choir. If we could add more moderators, we would; who would not wish to make their jobs easier by sharing the workload, not to mention increase coverage by adding staff in other timezones? The problem is that we do not own the forum, we just work here, and we are not sure we have to right to make staff additions. That being said, we are watching the forum closely, considering who might be potential candidates for both moderator and correspondent positions. Once we know who we want, we can request their addition and the simultaneous removal of all inactive moderators and correspondents (leaving inactive staff members left us vulnerable to that first quarter hack and we would like to close up that opening).
 
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