Bonum Certa Men Certa

Techrights IRC Moderation

Summary: On IRC moderation and lack of moderation in comments

ALTHOUGH we never deleted comments in Techrights, we did have to kick people out of IRC channels. This was either because they spammed/flooded the channels (vandalism), viciously and vulgarly attacked another person there (attacking with threats, too), or sought to generally harm the medium and made their intent very clear.



I was often accused of being too tolerant of people who were disruptive in IRC. I was never accused of being too trigger happy. More recently, in the main IRC channel (#techrights), almost 10 operators were appointed to deal with the issue and this makes the site more community-run than ever before. Approaching 15,000 blog posts means that we post nearly 10 posts a day, on average. To concentrate on getting the stories out and not moderating or feeding trolls we do need to take at least some minimal measures to protect ourselves from saboteurs. It is regretful that we have to ban particular people from IRC, but without doing it there would probably be no IRC channels.

We will resume posting right after Christmas. Now it is time to rest and organise some stuff. Maybe we will also redo the site's layout. A week ago I celebrated my 30th birthday (photo below). For the curious, in the darker shirt it's Mike, my best friend. The other guy is my friend Joey.

Birthday party

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