This message was self-deleted by its author

[MineralMan]

460. I'm pretty sure the review policy went into effect immediately.

From what I can surmise from Skinner's post in ATA, he and the other admins value civility highly. The review and time-out stuff is based on alerts that lead to hidden posts. Most hidden posts, based on my own experience with being on DU juries, are hidden for incivility, primarily.

Maintaining civility on any discussion forum is always difficult. I've been on dozens of discussion forums on many different topics, and civility has been an issue on all of them. Even on forums having to do with something as innocuous as fishing or boating, keeping conversations civil is difficult. Some sort of moderation is necessary on every discussion type of site.

We've all seen what happens on unmoderated comment areas on news sites. DU, too, has had to find a way to deal with problems of incivility, and the current alert/jury system is pretty much unique to DU. It lets the community on the site moderate the site. The new review and time-out policies are nothing more than a fine-tuning of that system.

If a poster gets several posts hidden within a short period, the admins review that poster's behavior, and while that review is going on, the poster can't post. That has happened a few times since the policy has been put in place. Mostly, the poster's status is returned to normal after the review.

The time-out thing, which doesn't actually begin until late December is another thing. In it, posters who get five or more hidden posts within 90 days get a time out until they have four or less. Hidden posts drop from view after 90 days, so the system is designed to help DUers self-regulate in terms of civility and other issues.

How well will those things work? That's impossible to say, I think. Only after they have been in place for some time will it be clear how well they work in achieving better civility. But most DUers almost never have posts hidden, so neither policy will cause them any difficulty or restrict their ability to post. Just a few DUers will see any impact from the policies. How they react if their ability to post is restricted will be up to them, I suppose.

The issue of "Alert Trolling" gets brought up a lot. But the admins can see who has alerted, so that's certainly within their ability to detect and deal with. Does it exist? I don't know, but I believe that the admins have said that it hasn't been a problem. None of us can see who alerts on our posts, so we really have no idea. We don't even know that an alert has taken place unless a post is hidden.

I think the system works pretty well, but I'm just a DUer and have nothing to do with how this site is administered.