Have Staff Mods destroyed the forums?

Tisk tisk Bobby . You do it too.

Well, ok. 

You are a mod then you can convince Staff to reopen the group.

If you did that, you will be invited for TROLLU and you will be LEVEL 10.

Your membership will honour TROLLU, since you will be  TROLL-MOD, the first one.

When? Please give me a single instance of what could be called "harassment".

Please note that harassment is different from simply disagreeing with someone over something related to the group. Harassment is different.

Please see the definition here:

Wow. That dictionary sure included a worthless example of using a word in contextually in a sentence: "the report cites three separate accusations of harassment."    I give them a D-.

don't tell me i'm the only one that found this funny.

(i know you laughed, too)

You can block staff members?

Oh goody-goody. Al my problems are solved (typo not intentional; pun also not intentional). 

It's a prison camp you can't escape from -- you must take your laptop or phone with you everywhere you, with chess.com running on a browser, and you are unable to do anything besides take part in chess.com.

There's no freedom of speech except that you post in the forums.

Sheesh

Once again, with feeling...

Good idea.  If you are going to have an obsession, that is a good one.

Mine is See's Candies "Victoria Toffee."

first, i'm glad we have staff responding here, which is not always the case.

secondly, robbie, there was no need to write your subsequent post, almost apologizing, as your meaning was displayed well.

your post here sums up rules and staff decisions quite well.    

the fact is that, while tos is spelled out clearly, off topic is supposed to be unmoderated. many of us have seen you can't have it both ways. some staff will lock topics and direct certain conversations to od. but, not everyone wants to join od due to most every discussion devolving to religion.

the issue is, and always has been, what is allowed?

in my years here, i've seen the rules change, but, the decisions made by staff vary.

just my two cents here: staff need to distance themselves emotionally, read what people write, and determine if it's offensive or against tos. to that point, a political thread can easily last outside of od without being locked or deleted if the posts are not only relevant, but, make a clear point about any political situation without obvious biases thrown in.

As long as people are calmly stating their opinions and having a discussion, and it does not devolve into angry fighting, it can and should be allowed. 

+1 on your post AlCzeverik. 

Bet you staff are going to delete that for mentioning the word a**hole. 

Although the forum title of Off Topic says it is "Unmoderated and uncensored", the stickied post from Erik in that category makes his perferences clear. "Off Topic" occupies a strange sort of twilight hinterland between the regular forums and the Open Discussion group (which I've just realised is different to Debate+ - whoa, you learn something all the time...), so sometimes a religious or political thread will get locked, and sometimes it won't. A major factor is the tone with which posts are being made in a thread: another is whether someone reports it, which is what happened to the Vrexit thread when someone pointed it out to Crystal Moon.

Chess.com is definitely putting more effort recently into moderator training and support, so you should start to see more consistency from them: they operate more on a collegiate type system rather than a hierarchical one, so there's no one person that they report to, and that person is definitely not me, although I have (and will continue) to help out every now and again. If you've got concerns about a particular moderator then the best course of action is to report it to the Support team via the normal channels.

Hope that helps!

Unfortunately, being part of the pic we can't really edit it like we would in a normal post - personally, I think it's sufficiently low range and relevant within this specific context that I doubt that any of the Moderators would act on it - the Support team might if someone feels strongly enough about it to report it via a ticket.

I think part of the problem is that OD is dominated by the sort of people you normally try to stay away from, but private groups don't usually have enough members for a full discussion.

I think there was a need because my original post veered into a personal criticism of crystalmoon rather than a purely objective constructive criticism of moderation in general and I didn't want crystalmoon to feel bad.  It turns out that she appears pretty much bullet proof anyway :D 

Kinda like Kaynight on a saturday night as hes doing the back crawl up Princes street.

Bless! :P

Hello Crystal Moon and thank you for unblocking the thread. I haven't seen it for over 24 hrs and wasn't even aware that it had been blocked but will take a look.  Thanks also to others who 'campaigned' to have it re-opened

I wasn't aware of the slanderous comments refered to but would have blocked the authors had I seen them. My intention from the start was to have a meaningful debate without personal comment, but focusing on the issue as there were good, and bad, arguments on both sides.

I scrolled back in the Brexit thread and can't find anyrthing recent that fits the description by Crystal Moon.  When it did occur a while ago the guilty people were blocked.  Have I missed something?

Wrong thread. Look at When a Mod violates TOS - do nothing? instead.