CiF: Beyond Praise, Complaint or Parody

The Untrusted pointed out a spot of possible deletions on the WADDYA thread, which involved whether The Guardian would publish anything from ordinary people, which led me to trundle over there to see what was going on.

Having said that we should start copying and pasting posts which look like prime deletion candidates, this is what I did.

The sequence was this:

PaulBJ

15 Jun 2010, 12:56PM

Jessica

I think it would be a good idea to have a Peoples Panel on Poverty in Britain. Panelists would be peope who are classified as long term relatively poor by British standards.People who are either stuck in mimimum wage jobs and/or long term recipients of State benefits.

Obviously anonymity would have to be guaranteed as some people may be working in the 'Black Economy' to make ends meet.Whilst others may be claiming benefits as a single person whilst secretly cohabiting with a partner.Additionally the poor are often denied mainstream financial services so are vulnerable to the loan sharks.

There are so many different angles to this that could be explored.However the Right wing media has done a pretty good job in either demonising the poor or reverting to splitting them up into the categories of 'deserving' and 'undeserving.'And clearly there are also a few regular CIF posters who are inclined to blame the poor for their predicament.So if a few people who are chronically as opposed to temporarily classified as relatively poor in Britain are prepared to share their stories it could prove to be enlightening all round

zounds

15 Jun 2010, 3:45PM

An article, in the Guardian of all places, advocating (essentially) the removal of the right to strike. I honestly never thought I'd see the day. My granddad must be turning in his grave. What with the tone of comments these days, when you get articles like that it's hard to see what differentiates this paper from any other neo-liberal rag.

[Article: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/jun/15/trade-union-strike-immunity]

Then this from carnivalesque:

PaulBJ

I think it would be a good idea to have a Peoples Panel on Poverty in Britain. Panelists would be peope who are classified as long term relatively poor by British standards.People who are either stuck in mimimum wage jobs and/or long term recipients of State benefits.

This was actually suggested a year or two ago, at about the time that the Global Economic Meltdown had moved from being a twinkle in the bankers' eyes to a mess in their collective underpants.

No, you didn't miss it. CiF did not pursue the idea, perhaps because nobody at The Guardian knew any poor people to ask how it felt to keep being robbed by the rich from generation to generation.

Don't hold you breath.

zounds

An article, in the Guardian of all places, advocating (essentially) the removal of the right to strike. I honestly never thought I'd see the day. My granddad must be turning in his grave. What with the tone of comments these days, when you get articles like that it's hard to see what differentiates this paper from any other neo-liberal rag.

Yes, don't try looking too hard for something which is not there.

How about combining the two, CiF, and just parading a group of stupid poor people on these pages to be laughed and spat at?

The Daily Mail might even stop your losses and buy you out.

_________________

Obviously, the comment by carnivalesque was not allowed to live to tell the tale.

Bring Out Your Dead!

Just a quick thought, which I put on UT earlier.

If you are posting on Comment is Free and finding your work disappears faster than you can keep putting it up, you can dump it here for safekeeping.

I will try to post something to kick the day off every morning or thereabouts, so that there is a thread for people to either copy and paste the efforts of others who are making intelligent contributions to CiF or, of course, their own.

Either way, we all know that Comment is Free moderators are always very ready to censor and ban and far too impressed with their own perfection to offer an explanation to those whose efforts pay their wages, so once your comment disappears from CiF, it is gone for good if you have not taken the trouble to keep your own copy.

Think of it like the virtual bin into which your work is thrown, but one in which you can ferret around and find the pearls you and others have been casting before swine.

The Life and Death of Henry III

The expected lifespan of a mayfly is supposed to be less than a day.

The lifespan of a good poster on Comment is Free seems to be about the same, before the moderators see the potential for unapproved lines of thought and ideological dissent, requiring the need to delete posts in order to deprive that particular producer of free content of the will to bother.

After that, it is just onto the next until everyone who posts comments on CiF only ever thinks of conforming with the approved pattern and there is only choreographed and manipulated artificial dissent to give the impression of actual thought, to harmonise the robotic chorus from the CiFerati who have been stamped with the Matt and Jess seal of approval.

This is HankScorpio yesterday on The Untrusted:

Anyway, fuck it. HenryTheThird just posted a doozie on Barbara Ellen's thread.

This is 13thDukeofWybourne today: 

Oh, and I am enjoying HenrytheThird's posts. He/she is shaping up to be a promising young poster.

This is Alisdair Cameron today:

I agree with those praising HenryTheThird: he (?..you never know) is eviscerating the Observer's big-name,big-salary columnists one by one today in a very clinical fashion.

This is Atomboy, in the same place:

Yes, so no surprises, perhaps, that by the time I get to have a look on the thread to see what is going on, HenryTheThird has been deleted virtually out of existence.

Perhaps we should all just take to copying any posts which seem too good to last and pasting them here or elsewhere, linked to the place from which they were snatched to safety before the moderbators attacked them with virtual scissors and knives.

Let me just run this by everyone again:

We do see a consistency in moderation, don't we, in the sense that good, intelligent posters get deleted wholesale and idiotic spouters of verbal sewage get patted on the back and invited back to virtual dinner-parties by the lackeys and servants at CiF Towers?

Why would anyone want to be a member of that stunted and grotesque artificial social clique?

And back to Alisdair Cameron:

Just checked and you're dead right, Atomboy. HenryTheThird has had 5 deletions this morning, and not one of them to my recollection contravened any purported talk policy, but they all embarrassed the paper and its columnists. Wouldn't expect anything less from the august Guardian Media group.
Ah,well, it's their funeral.No point in getting worked up about their moderation, since their judgement is demonstrably flawed in so many ways.

So, a brief word of warning to any putative HenryTheThirds out there:

If you have something interesting and intelligent to say, don't bother posting it on Comment is Free. They really don't want to know.

If, however, you can chuck out forty one-line posts a day of utter inanity, you will be welcomed with open arms.

All The Stars Are Out Tonight

This needs to be prefaced with a confession. I started this blog (and you, too, can have one up and running in about five minutes, so it does not require a great deal of thought) under the impression - the misapprehension - that I would somehow forever be bothered about the fate and fortunes of Comment is Free (or CiF to its friends).

The simple truth is that I now could not care less, to the degree that it hardly ever crosses my mind to make the one idle, thoughtless click which would take me back to its pages, teeming with the furious activity of people living life on a tiny scale. 

CiF was buggered and bludgeoned, beaten into senselessness, neutered and strangled by Matt Seaton and his imbecile acolytes, all obsequiously aided and abetted by the clamouring wannabes of WADDYA and those achingly desperate to acquire a blue sticker to prove that they had become the monitors and gatekeepers of the CiF ideology.

In wanting to iron and hammer out the imperfections, they smashed out all the character and quirkiness it once possessed - the very reasons which made people want to go there - and skimmed the surface into ultra-smooth bland banality.

The first time I had a comment deleted, the initial reaction was not affrontedness or outrage, but simple curiosity. Why would they bother to delete something which was just a poor joke as an addendum to an earlier, more detailed post about an article besotted with the virtues of a Victorian woman, who happened to be what could very loosely be described as an explorer?

The reason the joke was deleted became clear. If every one of the six billion people on earth read the comment; if they all studiously avoided and ignored the obvious humour; if they were all, each and every one, rabid, swivel-eyed and frenzied followers of a particular religion; if they utterly missed and misinterpreted the flow and context of the comment; if they  blew it up out of all proportion, egged on and bribed by invading aliens - then, it was possible, (remotely, statistically vanishingly and stretching the robust elastic of probability to snapping point) just possible that perhaps one person over the course of a million years might be slightly offended.

The other fact was that, in the earlier and longer comment, I had stupidly suggested that, rather than lauding the dubious achievements of an aristocratic female from another age, perhaps we should look at the plight of ordinary people in the here and now.

No wonder I was done for. Wimminz, class and rubbing the nose of CiF in the fact that it basically hates the poor.

Anyway, that has been a roundabout way of saying why I am not bothering much - well, hardly at all - with this blog.

A few days away from CiF and you wonder why you ever cared.  A few more days and you forget it exists.

However, I do look at The Untrusted and it has been noted there that CiF has had to close WADDYA for the weekend.

I do not yet know why. After all, WADDYA is the flagship of the sinking CiF and Guardian fleet. It is the place where Kiz and Bru daily display their viciousness and spite and challenged intellects and then run screaming to JessicaReed if anyone says anything they dislike.

People have said that JessicaReed has had a fit of pique and has taken the WADDYA ball away from the ruffians below the line to teach them a lesson.

The lesson they might learn is that there is a great deal more to life than posting inanities and publicly displaying your own stupidities, obsessions and bigotries on WADDYA.

It may work for a day or two, Jessica, but anything longer than that and people will just wander off in droves.

Which is something which CiF and The Guardian really cannot afford, either financially or in terms of saving the gulping, glugging, gurgling HMS CiF from sinking beyond the heroic salvage of whoever is going to replace the disaster of Seaton.

PS I will post here some of the comments from UT about this.

Everyone's A Critic: Everyone Can Be A Moderator, Too

There have been occasional claims made by various people on CiF that anyone can make comments disappear simply by using the Report Abuse button.

The claim from the staff has always been that if a comment is reported, it still has to go through the scrutiny process of the highly-skilled moderators and pass the various tests under their gimlet-eyed gaze and the stifling heat of their red-hot intellectual rigour before it is eventually jettisoned into the virtual dustbin of history.

Yeah, or just, you know, disappear without trace within seconds.

Of course, if it was true that anyone and everyone, idle passers-by and addicted CiF-junkies alike, could just depopulate the threads of comments simply because they felt like it or for malicious reasons or just because they clicked the wrong button, it would not so much dent the credibility of the whole lurching CiF charabanc as smash it to pieces and write it off completely.

So, having spent a few scattered moments of boredom, head resting on fist and eyes vacantly staring into the middle distance and randomly pressing the Report Abuse button - sometimes giving a curt reason, sometimes a snipped quote, sometimes a contrived turn of phrase and sometimes just leaving the forlorn little form blank (but always on comments which had no reason whatsoever to be deleted, given their almost offensively perfect innocence) - it can now be confirmed to the world that anyone can zap anyone's comment off the face of CiF without any training or special skills and, more importantly, with no reason whatsoever and with no intervention from the moderation team.

Of course, if you have written a good post and it then gets deleted, you might think it is both acceptable and morally justified to make a principled stand and enquire about what happened and why.

Yes, the problem, though, would be that we already know that emailing the moderators may only prompt an automatic, useless and actually provocative reply. We have been told that they are too grand to be bothered replying to mere contributors of free content.

You could try posting a question on the thread from which your poor little comment has been whisked away and murdered. Oh, except for the fact that we have also been told that all questions about moderation are off-topic and will be deleted.

Welcome to the Catch-22 world of CiF, where it is madness to complain because you have to be mad to post there in the first place.

Here are some words of wisdom from Matt Seaton from the thread which was supposed to celebrate four years of CiF censorship but ended up as a howl of protest and outrage over CiF's idiotic and useless moderbation techniques and proved Seaton (who accused JayReilly of being the "polemicists' polemicist") to be the luvvies' luvvie - and, incidentally, never actually answered JayReilly's question when evidence was brought proving that CiF moderation is an ongoing online catastrophe.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/mar/17/comment-is-free-is-four

@ Triffid100:

Nobody's going to stop you talking about moderation, and maybe it feels good to share gripes, but my response is going to be the same all day and every day: moderators follow our Talk Policy and transparent procedures when making decisions about infractions of that policy. The rules are not hard for users to follow. 

Yes, moderation is a human system which involves making judgment calls in a very fast-moving and dynamic environment, and users who feel hard-done-by are able to appeal their decisions. But our moderation staff are highly experienced and well-trained, and we have great confidence in them. 

The bottom line is follow the Talk Policy, stay within the rules and you will never even know the moderators exist. How hard is that?

....................

I accept that many of you wanted to air dissatisfactions with moderation, and I'm aware that I've not been able to say much that will have altered critical perceptions of how we do modding. I wouldn't say that we've exhausted the topic for all time, but I hope at least you feel that whereas complaints about modding in other threads will usually be treated as off-topic and deleted, here we have given full rein to the issue and you have had your say. As with everything, moderation remains a work in progress, and nothing is going to change overnight, but we do understand its importance and we know it needs all the investment of skills and people we can get. But we also see it as only one dimension of our community interface, and we'd love to move to a point where the issue just didn't loom so large as it does for some of you.

........................

No contradiction intended certainly. I do think our moderation in its general operation is as transparent as resources permit: the rules are clear and stated and mods interpret and apply them as fairly as possible. The limits of transparency arise in specific instances: judgments about banning being one, correspondence between a user and moderators over an appeal being another.

...............................

Putting that aside, the general point is that I'm not willing to debate alleged political bias on the part of moderators, because their political impartiality is simply a given. It would be a disciplinary matter if a moderator was acting on a partisan ideological basis. And that would be incredibly stupid, too, because it would be rankly obvious within the first 15 minutes.

As for individual complaints, I assume you mean over deleted posts. This is where we all have to be realistic: this site generates thousands of comments every day. Moderators are having to make hundreds of judgments about deletions every shift. They are under considerable pressure. Is their judgment flawless in every case? It can't be. But neither will it be grossly wrong; and looked at in aggregate, over time, it will be fair and reasonable. We invite appeals by email, and guarantee that all are read, but the sheer scale of the enterprise means that there cannot be a judicial process for every deleted comment as of right for users. My general advice is if you get a comment deleted, you probably have a good idea why, so move on.


You make a good point. I don't think our columnists should have to put up with mere ad hominem abuse and it is against the guidelines, as you observe. Sometimes, bad posts don't go fast enough (moderation resourcing being inevitably limited), and sometimes, perhaps, too much presumption is made in favour of free speech, with Gdn columnists just expected to be as tough as old boots and able to put up with some heckling. But you can help us by using the 'report abuse' button.

As for rightwing trolls: well, I think we have to accept that Cif is open for business to anyone who wants to visit and we're not charging the price of admission that is the £1 people pay for the newspaper. On the other hand, I think it is salutary for all us Gdn types to be exposed to views outside our comfort zone and to realise that there is a battle of ideas out there and we have to take the world as we find it, not as we might wish it to be.

So, trolls should get modded out of sight. But rightwingers? Bring 'em on: let's have the debate.

................

There endeth the lesson.

This is interesting, though:

"...there is a battle of ideas out there and we have to take the world as we find it, not as we might wish it to be."

Isn't this the very thing which The Guardian, CiF and the Matt Seaton All Stars have continuously and deliberately tried to achieve - peddling their ideology and clearing the ground of dissent in order to push it without impediment or hindrance from the filthy scum who (used to) make CiF worth reading?

Mr Chekhov to the Gulag, Please!

Chekhov has this to say over on The Untrusted:

BTW: I've thrown in the towel on CIF.

They are obviously expecting me to go back with a grovelling apology, appealing for a reprieve. Well they can go and fuck themselves.

I stuck with CIF from the outset and gave it the benefit of the doubt but the Mods have ruined it.

Pity really but I suppose it was inevitable since the whole thing is run by Oxbridge fuckwits who haven't got a clue what it's like trying to survive at the "coal face"

And later:

I haven't been banned "technically". I'm in "pre mod" for calling Lord Adonis to account for his scaremongering article on splitting the left wing vote.

I didn't contravene their talk policy so there is no reason why I should have to make a grovelling apology to be allowed back in and I don't intend to do so.

Incidentally, no one seems to have missed me, and there was no collective indignation at my being ostracised, unlike Lord Summerisle who was actually banned.

However he wasn't banned for his usual reasonably thought out wisdom but for this:

"Which part of your brain do you need to have removed to become a moderator"

Anyway, like I said, It's a shame. There was the makings of a sort of on-line community on CIF and they totally fucked it up. Maybe they did it deliberately. Who knows?

Sorry, Chekhov. Obviously, you just didn't quite make it into the Air-Kiss Gang.

The Banning of Jennifera30

If CiF is going to publish an article called "Rape as a Weapon of War", it seems likely that it will draw some impassioned comments. After all, this is what CiF is doing - trying to maximise comments and page views in order to get as many advert clicks as possible, in order to stop losing money hand over fist. It is simply a numbers game and a money-making ruse.

Anyway, it seems that Jennifera30 made some comments, which everyone seems to agree were quite reasonable. In fact, they were so reasonable that they led to an almost instant ban.

Pretty standard practice as far as CiF is concerned: ban the sensible posters to clear the ground so that the mouth-frothers and the air-kissers can rampage unimpeded.

So, Jennifera30 pops over to The Untrusted to ask whether this is the normal reward for providing free content for the multi-million pound media behemoth which is Guardian Media Group and discovers that, yes, it is actually company policy.

Meanwhile over on the cartoon car-crash which is WADDYA, people are clamouring for the moderators to explain why they have banned yet another poster who has not broken any rules.

Obviously, they can always fall back on their status of Papal Infallibility, conferred on them by Matt Seaton.

The problem is, if the idea of making a noise when anyone is banned catches on, rather than just the sweethearts of the lower-level staff and the social misfits who need the fix of WADDYA to function, CiF will have to open up a new section just to deal with it.

Unless, of course, the new editor decides to overturn the abuses of the Seaton regime and actually bring the moderators into line, rather than pretending they are untouchable and hiding behind their skirts every time the CiFerati get on their hind legs and squeal.

Matt Seaton: Moderators Cannot Be Wrong

Matt Seaton declares that there can be nothing wrong with the moderation on CiF, for the simple reason that the moderators are exemplary in everything and not to be questioned. 

"...I'm not willing to debate alleged political bias on the part of moderators, because their political impartiality is simply a given." 

We can all sleep soundly now we know that there is nothing wrong with moderation - because the people who do it are perfect.

Ahh, bless!

The Seaton comment:

@ MozP:

OK, how about unaccountable, politically motivated and inconsistent with anything in the Community Guidelines.

Why won't you debate this topic? Why won't you discuss individual complaints. Why is the moderators@ email address pretty much ignored? Why are you so scared to address the issue? Both you and Georgina run away as soon as the issue is mentioned. Stop it. Do your sodding job properly.

Hi MozP. Can I ask you something: would you speak to someone face to face in that fashion if you want them to do something?

Putting that aside, the general point is that I'm not willing to debate alleged political bias on the part of moderators, because their political impartiality is simply a given. It would be a disciplinary matter if a moderator was acting on a partisan ideological basis. And that would be incredibly stupid, too, because it would be rankly obvious within the first 15 minutes.

As for individual complaints, I assume you mean over deleted posts. This is where we all have to be realistic: this site generates thousands of comments every day. Moderators are having to make hundreds of judgments about deletions every shift. They are under considerable pressure. Is their judgment flawless in every case? It can't be. But neither will it be grossly wrong; and looked at in aggregate, over time, it will be fair and reasonable. We invite appeals by email, and guarantee that all are read, but the sheer scale of the enterprise means that there cannot be a judicial process for every deleted comment as of right for users. My general advice is if you get a comment deleted, you probably have a good idea why, so move on.

But you know what? Since I'm here adddressing this now, why don't you give me a specific instance and I'll look into it? That's a one-off offer for this day only. Tomorrow, I'm going to run away again and hide behind the moderators.

Lord Summerisle Banned from CiF

This posted on The Untrusted, but no doubt there will be more in due course.

Lord Summerisle said...

Hi all. I can't hang around long as I'm at work and this site can be problematic. I just wanted to tell you that the mods, in their infinite and most glorious wisdom, have banned me. That's all I have to say for now.

16 March, 2010 09:04

This is shaping up to be a glorious 4th birthday for CiF.

JayReilly and the Smoking CiF Censorship Gun

JayReilly posts this over on The Guardian's Comment is Free Waddya thread. It pretty much confirms what we have all known for a very long time: The Guardian employs censorship to control the message it broadcasts from its supposedly free and open blogs and comment sections.

Interesting debate. Smellthecofee - when was it exactly the UT lynch mob came for you? I dont recall it, not doubting your heroics would just be interested to read the details. I dont think i've ever been rude to you before at all. Which misogynists are you referring to? The UT is i think actually mostly female posters, 100% of whom are feminists.

Very sad news, the Duke's passing. He is also leaving the country soon, and has just written an excellent piece at the UT on Adam Smith. Since he is leaving CiF and the country and is a very widely liked poster here maybe the Graun could publish his article here (its better than most of the stuff published here anyway).

As for moderation on fem threads, well, i've had more deletions than hot dinners, most of them overtly partisan. In one post (notable only because they actually explained the deletion to me) i spoke of how elements of feminism care little for "equality" but rather special pleading and rights grabbing for women, to elevate women to superiority without any regard to equality at all. I made the effort to make clear it was elements of feminism i was speaking about, not the whole movement, i cant remember the thread but in the context of the debate it was very measured.

So shocked was I by the deletion of my effort that i emailed for explanation, and got a rare response.

"The comment was removed as the implication that feminists are predominantly concerned with women's superiority over men was considered offensive." (quoted from their email)

Thats political censorship, no ifs and buts. There was no abuse in the comment, nothing off topic, nothing ad-hom, nothing but a view on a political (and very diverse) movement. And they deleted it. Not only is this political, partisan censorship (not "moderation", its censorship) but they actually admitted as much.

Imagine being deleted for implying conservatism was for the rich, or Labour for the rich, or secularism being concerned with X, or liberalism being concerned with Y. Thats political censorship.

There is no other political ideology/movement that is deemed so sacrosanct that non abusive criticism is "offensive".

I have also spent two spells in premod for discussing moderation. Question our censorship and we'll put you in premod. Nice.

Atomboy's Resignation Letter

It seems that various people are abandoning the good sinking CiF ship.

I had certainly not intended to come back here to comment and am doing so now simply to add my name to the list, along with 13thDukeofWybourne (noted by chekhov) and MontanaWildhack.

There may be others but I think chekhov is right about Wybourne - although it is his choice entirely and we may both be wrong - and Montana has made her own declaration.

When we had the great moderation debate around the banning of JayReilly and many others, I felt that we were allowed to speak and then told what we were going to get.

We have had a number of people recently questioning the vast discrepancy between the stated moderation policy and the way it is actually seen to operate. There are many people who seem to think this is just sour grapes or sporadic fits of pique and not a matter of principle which is central to how a site like this operates. That is their choice or their lack of perception and they are welcome to whatever positions they occupy.

Georgina recently wrote a piece celebrating CiF's forth birthday. Perhaps those of us who brought up the moderation question were simply regarded as churlish and bad-mannered spoilsports to ruin the party, but the question was raised and again left unanswered.

As long as the moderation remains inconsistent, apparently malicious, apparently operating to an agenda outside the stated community guidelines, apparently motivated by each moderator's own prejudices and feuds and as long as this apparently officially sanctioned hidden set of rules operate as a form of censorship and crowd-control, why would anyone want to be part of CiF?

During the moderation debate mentioned above, many people, including MrPikeBishop said that they regarded CiF as a community. MrPikeBishop said that he regarded many of his fellow posters as friends. The official line tended to seem to want to play that down.

A community is more able to be flexible and accommodating to foibles and mishaps and allowing its members to stray from the accepted line. If CiF is not that, it is simply some kind of moderately open forum for debate and it will only have credibility if it can be seen to be operating to guidelines which are both acceptable and consistent. It is failing to do that.

Whether or not you like the editorial style or the people chosen to write or the apparent use of the site as a propaganda machine or sounding-board by politicians are all separate issues.

At the moment, CiF seems to be like an incompetent parent. It wants to be firm and consistent, but by the time it has been on the bottle for half the day and is becoming frazzled, bedraggled and at its paranoid wits' end, it simply lashes out and keeps forever proving itself unable to master the task.

Anyone who chooses to walk away from CiF knows very well that they will not leave a ripple and will not really be missed.

You simply get to the stage where you also know that you will really not miss CiF.

So, given the context of the other farewell letters and news above, this is me signing off and walking away, in all my various and mutating instars and avatars.

Atomboy

Celebrate CiF's Fourth Birthday

Georgina Henry, the Executive Comment Editor (apparently) at The Guardian asked us all to join in the celebrations for CiF achieving the grand old age of four.

"Comment is free celebrates its fourth birthday next week, which in internet years is practically geriatric", she said.

Amongst all the non-existent party food and fizzy drinks, there was a sour note, however.

Speedkermit had this to say, first quoting Henry's lopsided view:

Bit by bit, this is helping us build a community that spends less time discussing our commissioning flaws and moderation practices and more time contributing positively.

That's very dismissive of genuine grievances. It also betrays the sad-assed truth that what counts as 'contributing positively' on CiF is whatever the moderators say it is on any given day. The most damaging aspect of this policy is that when you invite commentators such as Alistair Campbell, Peter Mandelson or David Cameron to write disingenuous electioneering pieces - with the inevitable result that they are met with a barrage of vitriolic abuse - that you feel obliged to censor the bile according to your own subjective preferences and give the appearance of being insufferably partisan. It doesn't do you any favours at all. At the risk of being moderated, the moderation policy on this site is a farce. Sorry I can't be more 'positive'.

---------

It seems that some people just cannot help spoiling a party, even when the whole point of the party is to pretend to the world that there is nothing wrong.

CiF Moderation Watch

For those who think that the moderation at The Guardian's Comment is Free has a tendency to lurch and veer from its stated policies and guidelines and enter into the byzantine territory of arbitrary, malicious, politically motivated, mindless, haphazard and personal, this is the place for you.

Don't just sit there and take it.

Copy threads which you think are going to end up looking like a bombed-out wasteland after the moderators have wielded their deletion button and put them up here when you see that CiF moderation is nothing like it pretends to be.