To be clear, I wasnât under any illusion that the Projects forum was going to return exactly as it was; the administration has been more than clear in its disdain for certain elements of its handling. But the way itâs being handled now seems haphazard and asinine, and certainly not like the results of three months of consideration.
I mean, this should be pretty simple to understand. The moderation work in getting the Projects forum up to the new standard is the sum of all the existing projects that need to be reviewed, plus all of the topics that later need to be restored from the Archives once they meet the new requirements. To oversimplify it into an equation, W = (P + A). We can even quantify the burden per moderator by taking it a step further: B = (P + A)/M, where M is the number of moderators doing the review.
By reviewing everything before the new rules are even available, the value of A goes up drastically: most projects by users who are willing to comply with the new rules canât. because the new rules havenât even been given out. All of these users will then have to get a moderator involved once the rules are posted and they comply with the new requirements.
By posting the new rules and giving existing projects (presumably new posts would always be subject to the updated standards) a grace period, and then working through that queue of existing projects once that grace period ends, the value of A suddenly becomes much lower: the majority of active users will have complied, and thereâs no reason for their projects to be archived, and no work in pulling them back from the archive. Further, because the new moderator(s) will presumably have been instated and brought up to speed by this point, both the burden per moderator and overall time of review also drop drastically.
But the larger source of my disagreement is how moderation has been handled on this topic. I donât find the idea that we canât mention a banned user to be at all ârespectfulâ of them or their work, and removing any mention of them being banned only leads to more people asking, because any information that would answer their question has already been scrubbed. Itâs completely antithetical to good community management, especially when the information being wiped is directly relevant to the topic at hand (in this case, the forced archival of what might otherwise be seen as a model project).
Anyways, âout of respectâ, I will not point out whether any specific user has been silenced in this topic for asking what were mostly reasonable questions about rules that are being enforced before theyâve even been given out, with the claim that their questions or observations had âNo constructive purpose [âŚ] other than creating dissent within the communityâ, but just in case itâs not clear, I find that to be bullshit as well.