Moderation update

[Guest guest]

Dear Members,

 

Here is the final status on the Moderation idea,

based on feedback from members.

 

The last thing I want is for people to feel that

their opinions or ideologies are being censored.

In fact, one of my main goals behind moderation

was for a friendly atmosphere to prevail, without

any hiccups. This, I believed and still believe,

makes it easier for meeker voices to be heard,

without fear of being shouted away.

 

Unfortunately, I am not yet a person who engenders

universal trust among our members. It is clear

that a few members are not convinced that I will

uphold my word to be fair and impartial, cutting

out not content but abuse. This is disheartening

to me, particularly since some of this sentiment

comes from people who have known me for several

years, but I respect these feelings, as they are a

result primarily of my own shortcomings.

 

As a result, I will no longer moderate any posts,

with the following exceptions; these too, I will do

only time permitting.

 

(a) I will request members who are planning to

post a planned series to space them out

over several days.

 

(b) I will occasionally reformat posts which

are typed without line-breaks, or which have

extraneous garbage characters

 

© I will remove encoded/binary data from posts

 

(d) I will reject, after informing the poster,

completely irrelevant posts -- these include

advertisements for money-making offers, posts

about nuclear proliferation that make absolutely

no reference to religion, etc.

 

The last is the only content-based intervention I will

perform. I hope members trust me in this small respect.

 

Finally, a note regarding taniyans and format:

 

Over half of our members receive the Digest form of the

Bhakti email. It is only with these people in mind that

I had requested two posters to cut short their acharya

taniyans / salutations at the beginning of every post,

since it decreases readability, rendering the actual

content of their messages and the Digest as a whole less

comprehensible. Those who do not receive the daily Digest

really don't know the patience that is required to go

through 10 messages a day in one fell swoop. If these

messages are easy to read, it benefits the posters as well

as the readers.

 

I had never mandated the removal of the taniyans / salutations

as a rule. I merely requested it as something that would

increase the readability of the actual posts. I have read

many Visishtadvaita journal articles, in many languages,

and I have never seen a taniyan printed as a preface to every

installment of a piece, or at the top of every page of an

article. I do not think it wrong to remove or ask

for the removal of a taniyan from a series of articles.

 

In any case, one member agreed without complaint to cut short

his salutations, and another insisted on posting them. Either

case in the end is acceptable to me -- this certainly was never

a condition of article rejection (which should be clear from my

moderation guidelines). Anyhow, my only concern has always been

to increase the comprehensibility and readability of the Mailing

List and Digest. It is only in this spirit that I have acted

as administrator.

 

If there are any further objections, please make them known

in public. Let's wrap up this discussion by Tuesday of next

week, to allow for the weekend.

 

Thanking you,

Mani