All those locked posts

[Just Katie]

Yes Tourangelle, I agree with Gay that there are indeed different types of people.  However, I cannot get my head around the fact that some people are so sneaky.  I can agree with reporting advertising and also trolls but what we are seeing is tedious complaining resulting in mods running all over the place trying to please everybody which I think will eventually have a detrimental effect on the forum as a whole.

[Christine Animal]

Tourangelle, France is a big country.  If someone else comes on here with the same service as I might be able to give, it doesn't bother me in the least.  You are not the only teacher.

 

[opas]

Christine , the forum has a no advertising policy, I think that is what Tourangelle was getting at.

[Viv]

[quote user="KatieKopyKat"]

I am sorry Tourangelle, but the way I have been brought up is to get yourself out of your own scrapes and I think it takes nothing more than a spineless wimp to go backstabbing to authority.  Its the way I am. 

OTT? No, it just gives me the creeps that some adults find it necessary to go crying to mummy and finger pointing.

Tedious scraps? Never! Just an explanation of my intentions and maybe an apology.  (Which by the way I am also big enough to do).

This is how I act in the real world.  I have never run to my boss pointing fingers and making things worse but smoothed things out myself face to face in an adult manner and then shook hands.

As someone in a management role myself, tedious whingers give me headache.

[/quote]

To be honest Katie, having nailed your colours to the mast so graphically above, it would certainly put me off trying to resolve things with you by PM, if I ever felt that I needed to.[:)] And I guess this is what puts some people off PM ing.

Before you joined there was a discussion where one member stated that they had blocked messages from certain people who they did not get on with to avoid any further unpleasantness. I don't know if this option is still available.

[Just Katie]

Viva,

Just because I have made it clear that I don't like all the things you have hightlighted with so much effort, why would you be put off from pm'ing me with a complaint?  You really have surprised me.

[Albert the infopikey]

Tony F Dordogne wrote : "It's gall Katie, not gaul "

I expect she's trying to stay on topic about France. :-)

[zeb]

I for one enjoyed the old days before the advent of mods.

Anyway, on Friday nights all the adverts appeared and on Monday mornings Eleanor removed them all! This went on for years and certainly didn't cause me any grief. What does though is this incessent whinging, bickering, backstabbing, reporting (or not) and banning etc. Oh, and sometimes, sheer endless provocation until the poster responds nastily and so gets banned!

It was never like this before. The forum was informative, interesting, sometimes argumentative but always addictive. Just think for a few minutes about all the old regulars who never post here now, they can't all have gone back to the UK. I bet many of them are just bored to the back teeth with LF, or been hounded off, and have moved on to other fora. Lol - they are probably all running regional sites for Frenchentree.com!

[The Riff-Raff Element]

[quote user="KatieKopyKat"]

I am sorry Tourangelle, but the way I

have been brought up is to get yourself out of your own scrapes and I

think it takes nothing more than a spineless wimp to go backstabbing to

authority.  Its the way I am. 

As someone in a management role myself, tedious whingers give me headache.[/quote]

Just out of curiousity, would this be the response that you would give

to a subordinate who came to you with a concern / complaint about the

behaviour of a colleague? I'm all for robust management, but I can

imagine that perhaps (in these litigous times) being so blunt might be

frowned upon?

[Just Katie]

No Jond, of course it wouldn't.  Like what the mods have done here I would follow all company guidelines, I would have to but some of the timewasting complaints I have to listen to when I could be something more important just wear me a bit thin.

[Quillan]

We have said before that we want the Report button used because it creates a log in the moderators section which can’t be lost. In the past members have emailed individual moderators, emails get lost, deleted, moderators leave and when a similar event arises and the same person complains about the original person we can go back and see in the logs.

This has come about because information was lost about a very serious accusation made a year or two ago. The person who had raised the issue no longer had the information and neither did we. Likewise it was said that many complaints had been made to by this person to the moderators over the years, they had but to individual moderators, some who had left, some who had changed PC and lost their emails etc and no record was available. I am sure you will agree to take such a serious step as to ban somebody from the forum you require proof of the accusation. So the facility to report problems came with the forum software and Archant have decided to use it. We would like to think that those that have used this facility have been happy with the result. I should also mention that the moderators have to raise a report if they action something they find in the same way as any other forum member (they are also not allowed to action their own reports) they just can’t go round locking, deleting or editing posts contrary to what some might want you to think.

The moderators are only interested in reports where a person has clearly broken the rules given in the Code of Conduct. If we feel this not to be the case then nothing will happen (as has been the case on more than one occasion). As KKK knows herself she received no ‘strikes’ just asked not to do it. Archant has since decided to encourage this sort of chat (we did inform KKK personally of this) but only in the The Lighter Side Of France part of the forum something Archant was totally against initially. Archant will however still penalise those that do it outside of this section of the forum. Although only a miniscule example it shows that Archant does listen to the forum members.

So apart from asking people to use the report function of the forum instead of emailing the moderators nothing has actually changed.

Statically you may be interested to know that whilst the amount of reports are considerably up on last month the amount of issues on which  reports have been raised has dropped by quite a bit and even then a high percentage of the reports have been about advertisements.

So I am very sorry but there is no grand conspiracy amongst the moderators. They do not have total power, they are accountable to Archant who appointed them and they can only take action against people who break the Code of Conduct which I state again you all agreed to when you joined the forum.

We have explained on more than one occasion why we have locked these threads and that we intend to unlock them later. All we have done is protect our members from being taken advantage of as clearly by some of the comments both in this thread and elsewhere many did not spot what was going on.

Is the information actually being sold, we don’t know for sure at this stage but we know because of questions asked in at least one other forum that it was offered and if it was accepted by anyone is a different matter. We gave a link to where this information could be found very early on in this thread.

We have not as yet received a reply form either of the two login names concerned so it is highly likely that they will both be banned for having more than one login (Code of Conduct forbids this). This will result in the threads being unlocked (not deleted as claimed by another forum member) but you should all be aware that by posting in those threads you may later find the information you have offered in good faith has been sold on to a third party so in the end knowing this might happen the decision becomes yours. This is because although banned they will get emails every time somebody posts there.

What we do not want to happen is that people don’t reply to new members questions because they suspect that the person asking is the same person as the one banned previous under a different name. This would not be in the spirit of the forum and why should members have to even think about this when posting.

This situation is exactly why we have the Report button, if you suspect it might be the same person with a different login then PLEASE use the Report button. We can check things that members do not have access to and see if their suspicions are correct and take action where appropriate. By posting in open forum it just warns the suspect and they will be long gone before we can investigate the issue. Even more alarming what if you are wrong, a person has been embarrassed and accused in public of something they are totally innocent of. I am sure nobody wants to see this happen.

I now think the subject has been done to death and as such the moderators will no longer post in this thread. We will not lock it or delete it providing peoples posts remain within the Code of Conduct so you may continue to discuss this issue amongst yourselves but only within this thread if you wish. Thank you for taking the time to read this post. Have a nice evening.

[Tourangelle]

[quote user="Christine Animal"]

Tourangelle, France is a big country.  If someone else comes on here with the same service as I might be able to give, it doesn't bother me in the least.  You are not the only teacher.

 

[/quote]

No, I am not, and as a state employed secondary school teacher, I fortunately don't need to advertise. 

But as Opas so rightly points out the forum has a no advertising policy, which was indeed my point.

[Christine Animal]

There is something I have not understood.  Firstly, if you are state employed, it shouldn't then bother you if someone else offers their services.  So why do you report them?

Secondly, there is a no advertising policy, so why is everyone (who has one) allowed to put their commercial site at the end of every post?

Not that it bothers me.. just for clarification.

 

[Tony F Dordogne]

Or even use their web address as their name?

[Dick Smith]

Was that an apology? Didn't seem like it to me...

[Tourangelle]

[quote user="Christine Animal"]

There is something I have not understood.  Firstly, if you are state employed, it shouldn't then bother you if someone else offers their services.  So why do you report them?

Secondly, there is a no advertising policy, so why is everyone (who has one) allowed to put their commercial site at the end of every post?

Not that it bothers me.. just for clarification.

 

[/quote]

It annoyed me.  I'm interested in French, so I often go to look at the posts in "French language" first, I expect people to post comments and questions, not an ad, and I don't like wasting my time.

I've no idea to your second question, but the forum does have no advertising policy, it is the first thing on the code of conduct, do not advertise products or services on the message board.  I imagine the reason sites are tolerated is nobody forces you to click on a link, whereas if you go to look at a message, you expect to see a message not an ad?  I think there was some rule about only putting on one, but I can't remember.  I don't have one, so I don't really care, as I say, I don't have to click on them.

[Hoddy]

Your memory is correct Tourangelle. After a massive debate about web addresses some time ago, it was agreed that people could use one after their signature.

Hoddy

[dwmcn]

Dearie me! I have only been using this forum for about five minutes and this thread sounds remarkably like the Delphi Forum I use.