Salamo 3alaikom,

I know that I am opening a topic that I might be tackled for so hardly and I might be banned for yet I am going to open it for discussion. Moderators in many instances are harsh in their dealing with users. In many instances (please don't ask for examples), they attack active users and tell such active users that they post non-sense sometimes. Moderators themselves sometimes post non-sense. Aren't we all bound to the same rules of the forum? I think that the rules of the forum should be followed by moderators in the first place. I saw some moderators that even are not good with their colleagues. I wonder till when will this attitude prolong. I hope that this forum gets to be more reasonable. Reasonable from all user: moderators and users. I have a very bad feeling about that the forum is falling down due to such bad attitude in between users and between users and moderators. I guess that so long as this attitude extends many of the active users will lose interest in the forum. The MODERATORS will be the cause for that. Imagine that a moderator who should keep a forum alive is the one who might make it sink. Please forum administrators take action.

Please don't ask for clarification for my words. The last month posts include so many examples for what I am saying.

Sorry for making a long Post & Salam if I get banned for such a thread.

Salam.

you need to seperate between a moderator stating his opinion and a moderator actualy moderating.

if a moderator used his moderation priviliges unfairly tell us about it (moderation privileges are the closing, moving, editing or deleting of posts), if a moderator intimidated others using his moderator priviliges tell us about it.

if a moderator breaks the guidelines tell us about it.

and tell us publicly we have nothing to hide.

but don't mix this with moderators joining in discussions and stating their opion.

to be clear we have a very limited and simple set of guidelines.

don't use rude language
don't do anything illegal
search the forum before you ask
stick to the topic

these are broad guidelines and they are not even strictly enforced, no one wants to limit anyones freedom (for instance off topic is liberaly tolerated).

any higher level rule or guideline should be the result of open discussion and agreement among the members.

so for instance when I said that I find certain forms of software anounecment a bad or stupid idea, this is simply my opinion it has nothing to do with moderation power.
I did not say if you send anyother anounecments you will be banned, and I did not delete or modify or even threaten to do anything like this.
I think you will find this to be the common practice.

now to are you suggesting that moderators do not have the right to state their opions like other members??

>I know that I am opening a topic that I might be tackled for so hardly and I
>might be banned for yet I am going to open it for discussion.

ahhh quit the show, why are you dramatizing.
I don't think you believe you might be banned at all.

as far as I can remember no one was banned here unless they REPEATEDLY, broke ALL guidelines after being warned SEVERAL times and INSITING on keeping at it.
this has only happened a handful of times, and most of them where the same person anyway.

moderators have been, insulted, attacked, flamed and abused in many ways without anyone being banned.

>instances (please don't ask for examples), they attack active users

sorry you have to supply examples harsh is a broad word that could mean anything, in order to be able to fix this problem you have to talk about specific moderators and specific events.
if you say I will not proved examples how can we know what you're talking about.
I can simply ignore this thread and assume that I never commited such an example.
if you're truely scared we might somehow hurt you find another moderator you trust (we have a couple who are tooooooo nice) and tell them privatly about it.
oh and BTW being active or not is irrelevant in this case, all users should get the same decent and fair treatment.

> and tell such active users that they post non-sense sometimes.

thats an opinion, I believe that most of what is posted here is non-sense I think I'm entitled to this opinion and to stating it.

let me clarify, I may believe that everything you post is nonsense, I should not state such an opion since it is an attack on your person.
but if I find a certain thread, topic or comment to be irrelevant or completley wrong I should be allows to say this as long as I'm talking about the topic, post or comment and not the person who posted it.

of course problems might arise if a certain moderator always reacts to a posts by a certain user in a negative manner, but this doesn't seem to be what we are talking about here, and anyway there is nothing we can do about it since you choose to use inuendo instead of actualy stating the problem.

> Moderators themselves sometimes post non-sense. Aren't we all bound to
>the same rules of the forum?

sure no rule in the forum says don't post nonsense, it only says behave and try to be in topic.
in short nonsense happens, should be tolerated and may be welcome in the community center forum (depending on your definition of non-sense of course).
if a moderator posts non-sense feel free to point it out and say hey what you posted is non-sense, try to follow it up with an argument though just to make things a bit constructive.

now if you find the amount of non-sense posted is just too much you might ask for a rule against non-sense, or if you find the amount of people shouting hey this is non-sense to be to much you might ask for a rule against critisizing other's post and deeming them nonsense.
in that case the vocal majority will have to agree on this rule.

> I think that the rules of the forum should be followed by moderators in the
>first place. I saw some moderators that even are not good with their
>colleagues.

what do you mean by not good?????!!!!!!
not good as in some behaviour that actualy warants a personal apology?? I don't think this ever happened.

sometimes people would differ in opion, sometimes they would differ so much that their arguments will be very loud (specialy if they're emotionaly involved in the subject at hand).
its a normal thing it happens everywhere and specialy on net-communities.
yeah some people are worse than others (I for one can never resist a flamewar), and some people manage never to get involved in such a thing.
but I don't think it is bad in itself at all.

> I wonder till when will this attitude prolong.

you've got loads of wondering to do if you're not going to get into specifics and tell us exactly what is it that irks you soo much.

Alaa

Salamo 3alaikom,

A moderator to me is a judge within the forum. A judge should not get involved much into the case he is dealing with. A judge can contribute within the community however, there should be an attitude a judge must fit. Be reasonable, Be quiet in his replies, be strict and be fair. Those are the features of a good judge and a good moderator to my mind. Some posts within the forum have showed moderators getting in let me say combats with users (the network administrator stated that the one who insults or does something like this behaviour would be banned). I guess that a moderator should not react to user's intimidations. This conforms to what I think is the correct definition of a moderator. Take an example The GImp 2.0 pre1 post. Again this is just an example. Nothing personal to any moderator.

Salam.

> The GImp 2.0 pre1 post
I was insulted, Is this correct or not ?
Which is better:
React as a moderator and ban him
Or
React as a contributer in this forum and reply to him as well ?

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I think you did accept them ?

>I was insulted, Is this correct or not ?
Uniball, I apoligised on the #linux-egypt IRC channel for taking the flamewar personally). Which I will *try so hard* to avoid in any next flamewar. Regarding what I said, I just reviewed the Gimp post again, it looks that there was a misunderstanding regarding what I said .

When you posted your question, it's normal to tackle the subject and start discussing it, which alaa kindly clarified the *possible* situations that could occur from software announcement abuse. Your first post after alaa's was as if your dealing with the situation where every category has 20+ software announcements on it's first page which isn't true. The part where things went rough between both of us was when you mentioned that if I didn't like your opinion, I could simply ignore it which was something I wasn't raised to do (2aw mesh men 3adatna fel forum), then you ended it up with calling our discussion as nonsense (which I kinda suppressed).
Then comes my post where afaik you consider as an insult, I may have not put what I meant in a reasonable sentence but that's probably cause I took things somehow personal, but that still didn't lead to an insult (If you think otherwise, then that's the misunderstanding)

Anyway, I apoligised for taking the flamewar personally and I advise other Linux-Egypt members not to take flamewars personal at all since that would lead to both sides not being too comfy togethor later.

cheers,
Maher

>A moderator to me is a judge within the forum.

I'm sorry this is not how I see a moderator job at all.
I would feel very uncomfortable if we had judges working as judges reading and responding to all posts in the forum.

in my view a moderator's task is to try and keep the forum organized, remind people of the rules and interfere very very little and in the very bad cases only.
we are not here to judge anyone.

anything else is IMO not (limits freedom) and impossible.
for instance under your definition a moderator should be completley impartial and not involved in anything that may conflict with his judge's duties, the mere fact that one of us works in a major ISP and three of us work in a GNU/Linux company puts us in a conflict of interest, if we talk about our jobs at all we're no longer impartial judges, I don't think this is acceptable or needed at all.

I hope your view is not shared by many people here.

> A judge should not get involved much into the case he is dealing with.

yes but a judge is always judging in a case where one party claims another party did wrong.
I don't think this is what a dicussion forum is.
posts and threads are not cases where one party claims another party did them wrong or broke the law.

> A judge can contribute within the community however, there should be an
>attitude a judge must fit. Be reasonable, Be quiet in his replies, be strict
> and be fair.

reasonable is a subjective word, to me it means thatwhat you say follows some rules of logic, your statements are connected, don't contradict each other and provide evidence if there is one or state clealy when evidence is lacking.
as such we have almost always been reasonable, and have apologised whenever we where not.

and no I refuse to accept that my being a moderator means I should adopt a different tone, if I did not break the rules then I'm free to use whatever ton I want.
and since I'm not the only moderator here, you should not worry about abuse since other moderators can and will interfere when I break the rules.

you can always remind me that I broke the rules and you can use the reports this post to a moderator feature and you can privatly contact other moderators, you'll find that our ability as moderators to disagree is exactly what protects you from one moderator abusing his position.
oh and BTW I cannot remember any instance where a moderator was told that he broke a rule or was reported to another moderator (expect maybe once for going off topic).

>Some posts within the forum have showed moderators getting in let me
>say combats with users (the network administrator stated that the one who
>insults or does something like this behaviour would be banned).

I don't understand anything here, maybe you can enlighten me and tell me which thread are we talking about.

>I guess that a moderator should not react to user's intimidations.

ok I can accept that this is something not clear cut and where we can have different opinions.

as I told you prefer not to use moderation power except in extreme cases, as such users who personaly abuse us are not going to be automaticaly banned (I think we can accept this as a decent policy).
now sometimes a person is personaly attacked in a way that may harm his image, he IMO should be allowed to defend himself.
in most cases this has nothing to do with the person being a moderator, he is attacked on other grounds.
again I repeat, I post just like any other members and the ame rules apply on me, if someone was to suddenly accuse you of "being a stupid annoying person who never posts anything of value and keeps talking about things he does not understand and posts too much because all he cares about is his post count", will you just ignore him??
maybe you can do it, thats something I might admire but even if you can ignore it I'm sure you can see that many would not just ignore and will choose to defend themselves.
now if the reply was on the form of another personal attack instead of clearing one's image then it would be unacceptable.
if the moderator was the one to start such an attack then it would be unacceptable.

I doubt this ever happened, if it did please point me to the thread instead of talking hypotheticaly.

>Take an example The GImp 2.0 pre1 post. Again this is just an example.
>Nothing personal to any moderator.

what is this an example of??
Uniball sent what I admit was a vague rhetorical question, probably he assumed that what he meant was clear, but it was in no way intimidating or relating at all to his moderation status.
he just said
>are we a software anouncement forum?

this is exactly similar to saying
>are we a quizes and riddles forum?

which I'm sure was said and accepted by many, what it means is he thinks the number of software anounecments is growing and that this is not strictly part of what should go on on the forum.

it is as I repeated many times an opinion which he is entitled, I would have prefered if he made a more complete argument.
note that this was in no way a personal attack.

however the first thing that happened was what I consider a vieled personal attack.
>habdin: Get ready for the next Katoob update.

which is saying that Uniball is being unfair, he thinks software anouncements are out of topic unless it is his software.
note that this is actualy a personal attack, it is not addressing uniball's opinion but is adressing uniball's conduct.
I find this extremly unacceptable, but since it was followed by a smily and since I thought there was mutual respect between uniball and MaherG we decided to take it as a joke, after all uniball did not make his argument clear.
so far so good.

now since I shared Uniball's concerns I chipped in with my opinion, and a complete argument and an explanation of when a software anouncement is in my opinion a good thing (TM) and when it isn't
I made a couple of complete nonsese software anounecments to demonstrate that this practice could be taken to an annoying extreme, and to point that there exists such a thing as freshmeat whith the sole purpose of tracking software releases.

note that my argument was completley ignored, there is absolutley no evidence anyone read it at all (which is fine I suppose but is begging the issue, how can we discuss in a civilized way if we're not listening to each other).

anyway it seems whats good for MaherG is not good for us, I make a non-personal joke but it is not accepted, ma3lesh I'm a bad joker and people don't always get my jokes.

then Uniball makes another point, that this was a prerlease anouncment which added no major feature over the previous beta releases so in his opinion is a complete waste of time to post about in Linux-Egypt, he elaborated on this, and actualy said that anouncing a stabke release of Gimp or the Kernel and dicussing their added features is good and welcome thing.

note that again selective reading is applied, for instance MaherG says that we shoud be allowed to post about major releases of the kernel and the gimp (which uniball already said he agreed with anyway, man is this frustrating or what).
Uniball used an somewhat offensive tone in this post when he said
>Oh my, instead of coding something usefull i had to read and reply to this
>nonsense

note he did not say, I had to reply to these stupid people or these dorks or anything like that, he just commented on the content of the thread.

but again he is faced with a personal attack in the form
>Mesh 3eab ? Were you raised to do something like that ? Is this what your
>parents taught you ? I *hope* not.

this time there is not smily, and this time is pushing it.
and even if this was supposed to be joke it was directed personaly at a certain person (questioning his upbringing no less) and was not followed by a public apology or a even a clarification that this is a joke.

at this point Uniball did reply in what I think is unacceptable although understandable manner, MaherG for some reason decided not notice that he started it and was completley surprised by a reply of personal attack.

note that the moment another moderator found out about this the thread was closed.

yes the example you are waving at us is actualy an example of a moderator interfering and using his moderation status against another moderator.
it is my understanding that the Uniball, and MaherG resolved the problem between them and apologised on IRC later.

SO WHAT IS YOUR POINT, WHAT IS THIS THREAD AN EXAMPLE OF???

if you think a moderator never does wrong think again, we're only human, the important point is that when we do wrong we are not left to do so freely, and this is exactly what happened, otherwise it was stating opinion.

Alaa

For starters, There were Katoob announcements done before. I addressed katoob as a joke and as an example for software announcements made by Uniball and other members too, you can search the forum to find out.

So in short, I didn't start it ya Alaa.
If and only if I did start this flamewar, I would have admitted it and not done what you described as "decided not to notice", Im not that kind of guy who denies his actions regardless of their nature.

Maher

certainly you decided not to notice that I understood your reference to katoob was a joke.

and certainly you are ignoring that both me and Uniball did not claim no one should make software release anouncments at all.

and sorry show me the bit where someone else started PERSONAL attacks.

Alaa

MaherG, I know you are a good Linux fighter just like me "If I can say this about myselaf". I know that we resolved this on IRC "thanks again :)"
Nothing personal between us I think.

I have no farther comments about this thread as I totally agree with alaa's opinion.

Yep, Nothing personal.;)

cheers,
Maher