I know it keeps appearing and disappearing for me too.
I had difficulty finding this thread the other day. I finally located it by clicking on “Forums” then scrolling around until I found it under “Top Forums” on the left. This is one illustration of the difficulties the site overhaul caused. You have to look in three different places, “Highlights”, the “Discussion Forums” bar on the right and the “Top Forum” bar on the left. Plus the latter two aren’t available from the “My Bookmarks” or “Latest Posts” pages, which are what a lot of people use as their landing pages.
When people who have been here for more than ten years and are among the site’s top posters can’t find a thread, even one they’ve been posting on, you know there’s an issue.
Sorry if this is a little off-topic, but perhaps it’s related in that I think site users are much less worried about wading through long threads than simply navigating the site.
I am curious as to why it’s okay for some posters to continually refer to those who advocate for a stepped opening as ‘sociopaths’. While at the same time making reference to that type of name calling is deleted.
Odd
Thank you! I don’t know if I ever saw this when it was posted. So CC is minus texaspg and skieurope. And some of the mods never seem to be in the Parent Cafe area. I think it’s been ML (and occasionally Erin’s Dad) who are the only ones who moderate the Parent Cafe, since skieurope is no longer active.
If mods aren’t supposed to participate in the threads they moderate, then ML shouldn’t participate in any of the Cafe threads? Is this true (or is this another “exception” that CC is going to make)?
Yes indeed. I can’t use the site without creating [my own index](http://jlericson.com/vanilla-cat/college-confidential.html). That’s not an option for most people! We really need better navigation available for everyone.
Reading this thread has really helped me understand what’s going on. People who have been on the site for a long time tend to us a few features to help them navigate:
[ul]
[] [Latest Posts](College Confidential Forums)
[li] Bookmarks (gather mostly the on-site feature, but maybe browser bookmarks too?)[/li][] Notifications (the bell icon in the topbar)
[/ul]
If that’s the way you navigate the site, one massive thread is pretty handy. Everything related to COVID is in one place makes it easier to find (or avoid).
Until I got the feedback in this thread, I wasn’t really aware of the depth of the navigation problem and how it incentivizes what we are seeing on the site.
[In case you were wondering, I’ve been reading and thinking rather than typing on this thread. That’s just how I operate.]
Yes there is! And I was going to use it, but it’s not working right now. (This isn’t a surprise really. We are facing some technical issues with the way the site is hosted at the moment. Fixing the underlying problem is our topi priority since it will allow us to fix some of the other issues you all are experiencing right now.)
I’m hoping to post a poll next week to get a feel for how the community is split along the “too much” and “too little” moderation spectrum.
The ignore button is a valuable tool for people and I agree it can make a big difference. But it only makes a difference for the person using it. I don’t know the right balance here, but reporting rude content has the potential to make the thread better for everyone!
I was moderating threads I participated in due to the recent heavy moderating load. I won’t do that any more but to be fair, you can’t object if those threads aren’t moderated as quickly as you would like.
Have any of you responded to the site’s request for volunteers to be moderators?
On the subject of threads that are more akin to personal blogs, I’ve read several that followed an individual’s student’s journey, but while the large majority of the posts were for, to, or about the OP, I learned so much vicariously from their journeys. And if I"m not interested, how hard is it to just ignore a thread?
Isn’t there technology that would allow objectionable posts to be moderated by the readers themselves? I feel sure I’ve seen this type of crowd-sourcing when the post is hidden if a certain number/percentage of users flag it. Otherwise, I can imagine one or two easily offended folks constantly flagging comments that do not phase others. Again, I don’t see why folks can’t just keep scrolling, unless it’s a more personal attack.
The only time I’ve been offended is when adults are snarky to students. This is not the norm, fortunately, but it irks me to no end - we need to remember these are 16/17 year old KIDS. Before choosing a college, their biggest independent decision might have been what movie to see or what prom dress to buy. I think this deserves more attention than worrying about largely adult-oriented COVID threads.
Reading through the responses to my post, I’ve thought “What if we just let people have an unmoderated forum and leave them be?” And then I looked around at when that has been tried here and on other forums and realized that would be extremely cruel. It never ends well as much as we all would like to think we can handle the responsibility. An unmoderated community is only as civil as its least civil member.
The terms of service and the rules are really important. But I don’t think the current version is serving the community well. Early on in the original COVID thread, the moderators told us (Sorin and I, I mean) about posts with long quotes. At the time, I felt the information being shared was more valuable than trying to enforce [the one or two sentence rule](https://www.collegeconfidential.com/policies/rules). So I asked that those threads be given a little leeway. I see now that was confusing and unhelpful.
Instead I think we need to change the rule to allow a little more nuance in interpretation. If you need to quote three sentences to get across the point, that’s fine! But, of course, that’s not what we did. We asked the moderators to let some things slide in that thread and didn’t communicate the change to everyone else. I can’t promise this won’t happen again, but I will try to do better.
I sometimes see a challenge to moderation and the patience of the community when we have non-neurotypical students posting on the site, particularly those with ASD, who may be unusually blunt or post things that wouldn’t normally be considered appropriate. I’ve seen a few thread where these go off the rails and the OP eventually has to be banned, and others where irritated posters end up piling on the OP, resulting in the thread being shut down. On others posters, usually parents, are able to keep things kind and on track if the OP doesn’t get too combative. This isn’t a criticism of anyone’s behavior, just an observation as long as we’re talking about moderation.
Hi @mathmom ! Good moderation depends on understanding context. With a dozen replies, a moderator can read the thread and make a decision with reasonable certainty they have the full story. With a thousand replies, they need to have some shortcuts (unless they’ve been following along the whole time). Breaking up the threads makes it possible for moderators to get up to speed without sitting on a thread.
It reminds me of when I was a boy and our family would go on a road trip. I have two brothers and we’d get into fights in the back seat. It was impossible for my dad to know who was the instigator at the time because he’s driving. So he had a simple rule: whoever got hurt was at fault. Now the rule was not a good one, of course. I suppose it worked one time in three. 
I was invited to be a moderator years ago and considered it, but I didn’t feel that I could moderate with rules that I felt were too heavy handed. I don’t mind participating under those rules, but I didn’t need to feel bad every day for warning people for silly stuff. I’ve gotten two warnings in my time here. Once in the ranting thread, where I said exactly what I’ve said in this thread, and once for completely spurious reasons. I was unaware that someone had created another thread on the same topic. That warning was withdrawn, but it did make me wonder about that particular moderator. Not you ML!
@CCadmin_Jon Ah. When I was a aol moderator I read every single post, every single day. So length was not an issue.
I think one of the reasons posters felt it was okay to violate the one or two sentence quoting rule was that all of the news outlets were allowing free access to coronavirus articles, so it didn’t feel like posters were “stealing” content. IMO even in these cases credit should be given to the original source by adding a link, but that’s a minor issue.
I didn’t see any reminders about the rule on the thread. I think a reminder or two might have taken care of the problem. Most of us read the site rules many years ago so in most cases we’re just following general common sense civility rules, and those to which we’ve been alerted, such as the ban on the bridge-dweller term.
An additional strategy I’ve had to resort to to find a thread if the “latest posts” doesn’t work (gee— posts about college decisions are actually rising to the top!!) or the notification bell doesn’t work (to find it) is to find my homepage, or a post of mine, and then go into my “replies” to find the thread… assuming I posted in it. Its also clunky and not an easy way to find something.
While the covid information was interesting, the massively long posts with multiple long quotes made the thread virtually impossible to read on the phone. We discussed with Sorin when the new format was launched last year the challenges with the amount of scrolling that was required. So, while the content was interesting, from a readability standpoint, especially on the phone, it was problematic. JMO.
A moderator could read some preceding posts to the reported post if it sounds like it might be something context related. They certainly don’t need to read all 1,000. Many offending posts aren’t context related. Name calling and spam for example.
In the list of things that need to be fixed with CC, worrying about mega threads still seems to be very low on the totem pole in terms of value added, IMO. You are definitely short on moderators. Relax some of the rules a little. Get some new volunteers who will be active moderators or better yet hire some. I think it somewhat unfair to expect volunteers not to participate in threads but agree with previous posters that it also makes it harder to be impartial.
Make sure you are reading these posts and looking at what gets liked and doesn’t. I feel like you have a preconceived strong bias against large threads and it is swaying your opinion vs. what you are hearing from the end users who you need both for content and ad revenue.
Much Covid content comes from news blog format as well. With that format, there is nothing to link to for a particular item. Again, understanding the context is important to formulating opinions and ideas around perceived “problems”.
Hi @sevmom! I don’t think we’ve met, but it looks like we got off on the wrong foot somehow.
I don’t know if this is what you intended, but this reply looks an awful lot like an ad hominem argument. In particular, I read it as an attempt to [poison the well](Poisoning the well - Wikipedia). By pointing out that I’m new, suggesting I’m insulting people and so on, you can avoid engaging with the content of what I’m saying. On top of that, it’s a signal to other people they can ignore me too!
Several people have mentioned in this very thread they don’t feel I’m listening to them. Maybe that’s true. (I’m certainly trying, but perhaps not succeeding in hearing.) The comment you left (whether it was your intention or not) made me think I shouldn’t bother to listen to people here at all! If people are so quick to dismiss my ideas, maybe I should just ignore them. Fortunately I thought better of it.
I hope we can start over. If not, I would appreciate if you let other people make up their own minds about me. Thank you.
@CCadmin_Jon , I posted that comment earlier on, before you came back to further explain some of your postions. I was frustrated at the time, and I don’t believe I was the only one who was . I think your more recent posts have been helpful and show you have been listening. Sorry to offend you with my earlier post .
@sevmom: No problem! Glad my comments helped.
Wow! How is it that I haven’t seen this thread until now? It’s kind of not surprising, because since the revamp, it’s still not easy to find out what new threads are currently going.
@CCadmin_Jon , I appreciate your candor. I haven’t read all posts in this thread. I am a longtime poster. I agree that the revamp of this site back in June(?) was a total disaster and for a good while, a LOT of very helpful longtime users didn’t post much, or left permanently.
As far as site design, I STILL find it difficult to navigate, and there isn’t much rhyme or reason to how to find stuff. But at least @CCadmin_Sorin tried hard to communicate to the PTB what some main issues were/are and some major problems have been fixed.
@MaineLonghorn , I’ve never seen where CC has asked for moderators to volunteer. Can you link please? And thank you for your hard work, don’t know how you have time!
Anyway, re moderation and the topic of your original post, I personally would love it if every conversation didn’t have a COVID19 tag. I made a post last week to let users know that a college was going to have a student host in a live Zoom QA. I tried to tag the post with the name of the college. No luck. It only suggested “popular tags,” which I think were limited to COVID19 and Class of 2020. Well, that was pointless. Why allow tags, then not allow a user to actually tag a thread!? I’ve seen threads tagged COVID19 that have NOTHING to do with that, and maybe the poster is just asking about a particular admissions question, or a single college, or whatever. So then maybe a busy moderator has to waste time untagging a thread when it gets flagged.
What’s frustrating is that it seems CC rolls out new “improvements” that are not improving anything. But I’ll log on in the morning and there are five posts all advertising window screens from some Indian company, and I flag one, but can’t flag any others, unless I wait five minutes. But when I first flagged, I didn’t realize there were actually five of the same post, so then IF the moderator gets to the flagged post, they may not realize there are several of the same post in different forums. And the other posts may or may not be removed in a timely fashion. CC needs to allow longtime posters to flag stuff more often.
I also feel that CC doesn’t “care” enough about experienced posters. They could be utilizing the combined wisdom of some of us, but they don’t seem interested in doing that. I get that you need to students to come here. I don’t think anyone can deny though that the most useful advice, in general, comes from the old timers here. There are students and parents here on CC who simply wouldn’t be going to college without the collective wisdom this forum provides.
I watch quite a few college decision reaction videos, and I’m telling you that many kids do still use this site, so keep it a useful place for them to come back to. It’s going to be hard to get it back to where it was, and looking at Trackalytics supports that statement. I will continue to use CC for now, but sometimes I do feel like it’s not quite worth the effort that it used to be.