Yeah, I've always done practice recordings of my talks before my actual talk, but they're often still works-in-progress and I've always told myself to record a talk AFTER I get home, incorporating lessons and feedback from the talk itself, but often I just decompress and quickly forget the talk and never do it. Today I forced myself to do it and I'll do this in the future for my talks that don't get recorded/rebroadcast.

Hey Ariel, here are some answers:

1. I considered it very early on but then realized selling software would put me in the software support business and that along with programming isn't my strong suit.

2. We haven't noticed daily trends, but definitely we see trends through the year. We get a lot of shenanigans around holidays, I assume because people are stressed out about cooking a turkey/getting a dozen roses/buying presents. Mondays are our highest traffic day of the week though.

3. If I understand your question right, I think we usually stick to moderating behavior.

4. We remove users pretty rarely for being jerks, because like you said it's very hard to codify why someone is a jerk without a list of 10,000 rules. We talk to people over email and if they continue bad behavior we have tiered time-outs, of one day, one week, and then forever, and typically we give people the day off for something bad they said or if they're freaking out all over the site. They get a week if it continues and eventually if they still can't shape up, they may get the boot.

Thanks, Matt!

Thanks!

(And I also hope for useful Wordpress plugins... )

David, I'll agree with you that what we do with silently deleting off topic, offensive, or otherwise malicious comments isn't perfect. We came to the compromise of not showing comments only after considering the alternates.

The obvious alternate is putting a line where your comment was that might say "this comment has been deleted by a moderator" and I've seen that on places like Gawker sites and Youtube, but when you make the bad comments a click away, you are not only still letting derailing, off-topic stuff stick around on your site but you are *giving it a permanent home* which leads to all sorts of consequences.

In my ideal world, maybe members could see each and every comment that was deleted, and by whom, and you'd get an automatic email as the person that posted it saying your contribution was removed from view. But those kinds of things create a huge new customer service sort of avenue where we'd have to start engaging in about 50 new email conversations as people that disagreed would want to know exactly why their content was deleted, and when answered could appeal and ask it to be restored and I've spent entire days on dealing with a single user over a comment and I can't imagine the workload of dealing with them all.

So the compromise is that we silently delete stuff that doesn't meet community norms and we have an active and large FAQ of what normal community behavior entails and there's a whole wiki of tips and additional info to keep people up to date on what the community norms are.

Honest question here: If you got an instant notification that your comment was removed, would you have still be dissatisfied or would you have been ok with it? I know transparency is almost always a good thing, but if I imagined the site operating in the ultimate way I described above, I'm not sure if contributors to the site would be happier with moderator actions even if they were better informed about them.

I think you're missing the point a little. Or at least, missing my point.

Ultimately, it comes down to what you want to do with people who are breaking the guidelines. Do you simply want them gone? Or do want them to stick around, but be better behaved?

Currently, all you're doing is revising history, and hoping that eventually they get tired and leave.

It wasn't a big deal that you deleted my comment. And I don't care that other people can't see that it was ever there. I may even agree that they shouldn't see that it was ever there.

But *I* should know that it was deleted. And, even more importantly, I should know *why*. Maybe I thought it was important, but just worded it badly. Maybe it was just a typo. Maybe I misread the post I was replying to. Maybe I genuinely was being a complete asshole and deserved it. I don't know, because I got zero feedback. I didn't even know that I had been moderated, and I can't even remember what the comment was about.

I understand that this might increase your workload, but don't you think that comes with the territory of running a "benevolent dictatorship" style community site? Your choices are - let the community directly moderate the site, or hire more moderators. Ultimately, won't better-educated users cause less of a problem anyway?

How many people don't click the FAQ link? How many people don't even see it? (I was vaguely aware you had one, but looking at the front page right now, it took me a few seconds to find. It might be at the top, but it's buried in a Wall Of Links.)

Maybe you email the FAQ to every new user, I don't know, I joined in 2001 and can't remember what happened.

This is a good question. I used to run a large community and built a tool for moderators (one of many) which let them automatically send a canned message (from a list of choices) to a user telling them why their post was moderated. All this seemed to do was give the user someone to start a dialog with (the moderator) about how they didn't do anything wrong and how they were being unfairly persecuted, etc etc. This was such an drain on the moderators and really made their jobs so emotionally difficult.

It's funny because at first the canned messages were really "matter of fact" in tone and people complained about the tone and that the moderators were cruel and power-hungry. And then we made them super friendly with smileys and all and it still didn't help people's reactions to them.

I think really it's a no-win situation. People are going to get upset no matter what if they are moderated.

But I do think when I put myself in the shoes of a user, I'd much rather be notified in some way. I also think it's very important that the notification include something like:

"We realize that it might not at all have been your intention to break any rules or cause any controversy and if we have acted in error, we hope you will understand how difficult it is to keep a community like this running smoothly."

This way if a moderator does moderate someone who really just made a totally innocent mistake, you don't hopefully won't turn that person off to your site forever.

David, if it's any consolation, your last deleted comment from a couple months ago was removed because it had a dead link (it appears you put in the html but forgot to paste in the URL).

I'd say we're ok with the status quo of people emailing us to ask why something was removed but not yet ready to dive into emailing everyone pro-actively when we delete stuff during the course of the day.

Kevin, I described the tools and process for making the video here:
a.wholelottanothing.org/2011/03/apple-keynote-feature-request-easy-recording-of-your-talks.html

(I've submitted the idea to Apple through their feedback form and via friends so I'm confident we'll see something like this added to Keynote someday soon)

If you read the comments on my blog post, it sounds like with ScreenFlow on a mac, you could record your slideshow and insert your talking head into a PowerPoint presentation.

I just used iChat because it was all integrated and worked pretty well as-is.

Thanks David! I'm a big fan of your work, you shoulda said hi after!

I had planned on introducing myself, but ended up having to leave early. Next time we're in the same town, we should meet.

The fact of the matter is, that none of the software you listed is specifically made for just “community” based sites. Thus the core of the programs aren't prepared for—and in my mind shouldn't come with—the tools to moderate a large cluster of people. However, Drupal, with a few additional modules and configurations actually gives you plenty of good controls over users and the moderation of their content. I believe there are even starting to be distributions of Drupal that will install and preconfigure everything you need, it just isn't in Drupal's core.

Kristian, I think the real question is this: why would a CMS NOT include better user management tools and comment management tools in its core?

p.s. We use Drupal on dooce.com and community.dooce.com, so I'm well aware of Drupal. I'm not so happy with user management. Needs a bunch of hacking to get it dialed in and still doesn't have all the great features Matt talks about here.