Official thread to discuss moderation policies

Speaks much more strongly than the post I made - thank you.

Hardloper wrote:

Why not ban them and every IP address they've ever thought about using?

Banning IPs can frustrate an unsophisticated poster, but seems futile and undesirable.

The IP used by someone can change unintentionally (DHCP refresh from ISP), or intentionally (new VPN) endpoint selected, and can be shared with others - at any given moment, or over time.

$35 US to join LRC per year on the message boards.

If it's your first year of running, you don't have to pay.

You have to use your real name to register so LRC knows who you are.

Only those in the forum can view the posts.

My screenplay thread is getting out of hand.

You mention things people would not say in real life.

People would value the community more if they payed a fee.

I would not send someone to this site who was into running.

Too much negativity.

Just for one day, require registration to post.

I've been joining 'other' boards, and there's nothing going on. This place is the only running-related board where something of value might appear. It's more and more rare as time goes on, but it's here.

Just for one day, leave that "Only registered users may post in this thread" thing up.

I was on a sight that monitored every post. There were quite a few moderators, and they would often delete posts and most of the time give a reason why. Moderators would nominate future moderators from knowing their posting subject knowledge, etiquette, and a general feeling for how the other posters respected him or her.

good point tx. I have no issue with the moderation here and I'm a minority (Asian). I thought you guys were all friends (brojos, tx, malmo, etc.).

For what it’s worth, I am here in part because this message board is a rollicking good time. Whatever changes you make, please don’t compromise that.

I used to post on a site called IMDB because of my love of following and binging TV shows and then IMDB's message boards got shut down because it became too labor intensive to monitor all the boards. That would be disastrous if LetsRun couldn't keep their boards running for that problem. As a community, we have to accept that the staff probably can't do it all

Ok7272 wrote:

I used to post on a site called IMDB because of my love of following and binging TV shows and then IMDB's message boards got shut down because it became too labor intensive to monitor all the boards. That would be disastrous if LetsRun couldn't keep their boards running for that problem. As a community, we have to accept that the staff probably can't do it all

Exactly. And many here have said they'd help.

the gentleman wrote:

Okay, then if we can speculate as to whether Wejo dopes, we should be able to do the same abou Malmo. And anyone else. Or does it depend on the personal preference of who is being speculated about? This isn't a purely hypothetical question. It will affect the moderation policies of the boards.

There is no point to constantly start threads discussing malmo's doping etc. It has been discussed. There is no point to hijack threads to discuss it.

I can't condone any of those posts. I would say they are examples of where our moderation failed.

I don't have a problem with Coevett saying doping is rampant in Kenya and Ethiopia which he often does, but it does not need to become an issue of race.

TxRunner if you want to become a moderator email me.

We did make changes to the backend that make it easier for us to add moderators.

Wejo, I've never seen any of those posts. Can you verify that they are real?

1. It seems suspicious that we would have missed so many REPORTED posts.

2. If those posts were real then I would have been all over your back about giving him at least a one month vacation.

3. It also seems suspicious that the poster would have saved those posts without date or thread titles.

malmo wrote:

Wejo, I've never seen any of those posts. Can you verify that they are real?

1. It seems suspicious that we would have missed so many REPORTED posts.

2. If those posts were real then I would have been all over your back about giving him at least a one month vacation.

3. It also seems suspicious that the poster would have saved those posts without date or thread titles.

I copied and pasted a couple of the quotes into the search function just to check. Both ones that I looked for are real and came up in the search results.

For example, "To be frank, I would guess that at most 5% of white runners are doping, whereas amongst elite African/Arabs the figure is closer to 95%" appears here:

malmo wrote:

Wejo, I've never seen any of those posts. Can you verify that they are real?

1. It seems suspicious that we would have missed so many REPORTED posts.

2. If those posts were real then I would have been all over your back about giving him at least a one month vacation.

3. It also seems suspicious that the poster would have saved those posts without date or thread titles.

Are you for real man? Jesus. I don't want this to turn into a thread about Coevett but all you have to do is literally google the username and a piece of the quoted text and you'll see that they're actual posts.

A while back (sometime around January 29th, I emailed myself a cached version of my own comment after the thread was deleted) there WAS a letsrun thread about him and I posted the following before the thread was deleted. I thought Coevett had been behaving better since then, but a bunch of the above posts were apparently more recent. Here is an edited version of what I wrote and was then deleted (and yes I give the threads and yes they're still up):

I've also noticed that Coevett seems to be caught up in race. I googled his username and looked at the first 20 threads that came up (others might have been deleted, I dunno), and found these posts (I know it's pretty crappy to quote a bunch of posts that someone wrote in the past, but these were all written in the past year and a half):

1. In this thread he uses the verb "sired", which is usually used for animals, to talk about how many siblings a Kenyan runner has, and he also says "It's no wonder the Kenyan population is doubling every 20 years and that they can't keep track of birth certificates":

2. First, how is being gay stunning if it doesn't matter? Second, on the second and third pages of this thread he talks about Britain becoming an "Islamic republic" and how "Islam is a threat to western values".

3. Discussion of different groups of people here is a form of racism (East Asian "nimbleness", etc):

4. Every other comment is about whether or not a runner is black or white:

In general there are a lot of threads where he talks about how today's top African runners are doping but the GB athletes from back in the day weren't. I don't think there are necessarily problems with this. Here are two examples:

1. In this thread he's accused of being racist but I think he's just really bad at articulating himself (and maybe trolling):

2. There are lots of posts like this one where he talks about African doping:

I get sick of this stuff sometimes so I decided to try to be a bit more specific by googling. Coevett: It's one thing to talk about doping and where/why/how it might be happening, but it's another thing to inject race into every other thread. Please try to tone it down?

malmo wrote:

Wejo, I've never seen any of those posts. Can you verify that they are real?

I've seen most of those posts myself. I've also seen multiple posts pointing out the black dildo post to mods that were deleted.

Wejo you say you don't condone those posts, but you do. This is your site and your moderators often protect posts like this despite being reported.

I have started multiple threads complaining about specific posts like this and they get deleted immediately. The disgusting and blatantly racist posts that were being complained about remained up however. Sometimes for days, sometimes forever.

It is impossible that this is an issue of oversight, of lack of awareness that they exist.

If you delete 10 posts pointing out a racist post it's completely impossible to say you didn't see it.

Of the top of my head there was :

1: post celebrating the death of a 'beaner' , (including a graphic picture), skewered on a piece of rebar that was allowed to stay up for at least a full day while multiple threads pointing it out were deleted within minutes.

2. A post making a joke about a poster having no black people hanging from his family tree. Reported and allowed to stay up at least a full day while multiple posts pointing it out were rapidly deleted in minutes.

3. There was a Gronk post clearly implying that he was smarter than all the black players because he was white. It remained up for days while complaints about it were rigorously deleted in minutes.

4. A page long post explicitly detailing a plan to murder every liberal in this country, including descriptions of how to trap them at choke points in cities and mow them down. this post may still be up. It was up for about a year last time I checked. It was reported multiple times and had multiple threads created about it.

I can go back and show screencaps for all of these, and many more, but honestly what's the point? I've done it almost a half dozen times for each of those posts already and countless others, but you deleted my posts. Why do you suddenly pretend to be concerned now? The issue has been pointed out hundreds or thousands of times before by people. Are you really going to pretend you don't read your own website?

For me, the issue isn't necessarily, the number of racist posts on this site, though that alone is disturbing. It's the fact that I've explicitly called out all these post multiple times and the moderators have repeatedly and consistently protected reported racist posts like that while deleting any post complaining about it. It's absolutely disgusting and beyond a reasonable explanation or defensibility.

It's much harder to overlook the random racist post and dismiss it as some blowhard, when based on the moderation history, there's every indication that the post may have in fact been created by the site itself.

It's really hard to take a thread like this sincerely. I half suspect this post will be deleted like it is every other time.

Most of the time you eventually explain it away racist posts lamely, 'oh sorry didn't see it, sorry that was up for so long.' Why not remove the moderator responsible for keeping it up and obviously protecting it for so long?

(and again, I only looked at the first 20 hits so take it as a sampling)

I'm sorry, I don't see how this is racist:

David S wrote:

(and again, I only looked at the first 20 hits so take it as a sampling)

Wasn't there one where he predicted the medalers at the next Worlds or Olympics and every single one of them was white, including people ranked nowhere near the top 20 in their events.

I mean , that post alone is not egregious, just one more idiotic example of racism and race-baiting in a posting history full of them, but it's just funny that this is the guy that Malmo decides to plant his flag behind as a 'victim' on this board of 'false' accusations of racism.