You and me both!
It is a worrying trend IMHO.
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I’ve had some very strong exchanges of view with a few members on here, but also had very constructive discussions offline with the same members.
There’s nothing wrong with disagreeing with someone provided it’s done respectfully. Just flagging a post because you disagree stifles conversation, healthy debate and understanding of divergent viewpoints.
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My main complaint about the Roon forums is that very frequently the topic I am reading veers off into somebody’s individual issue at best tangentially related to the topic. Then the other members respond trying to solve that guy’s problem. This can go on for a while completely derailing the thread. Of course, this is not a problem unique to Roon, this happens in every forum I’ve been on since Forum B at UCSC in 1980. My view is that I want the forums to be moderated rigorously and thoroughly to either hide or remove or move off-topic content so the threads become higher quality information.
Further, the overwhelming majority of moderation I have seen here has been correctly applied to off-topic comments. That is, I agree with the moderator’s decision in the vast majority of cases I have seen. They are doing a good job and they are implementing a good guideline - stay on-topic. Admittedly, I do not know what the Roon forums were like back in the day. Maybe they were better back then. My guess is they were better in large part because there were fewer members and thus fewer thread hijacking and off-topic conversations. Or, if there were an off-topic conversation it would have been handled right then and there by a self-policing membership rather than encouraging it by others who may not understand how that effects the quality of a thread. But, maybe it was better in the past because there were better guidelines or better moderators or better something. What was that something? If we can identify what we think will make the forums better or moderation better then we should communicate that. Just saying it sucks doesn’t really help.
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@Ronald_Record, I’ve said that same thing (or at least I’d like to think I did) across many messages, but never as succinctly as you just did.
There’s a thread on why manufacturers support MQA, that I moderated with an iron fist to stay on topic. It did stray at times, but really interesting insight did come out of it. However, I’ve never had so many complaints of moderation and censorship. Funny thing though, those were the people that never actually contributed anything meaningful.
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Not everyone has your talent, dude. Or good intentions, for that matter. Putative humor is often a way to camouflage negative messages and/or dog-whistles.
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My take on this is that you moderated it to fit your singular view of “stay on topic” and heavily by your own words.
Now if I have to think three times before I post anything to make sure it might fit in the op,s view of " on topic" which may very well be much narrower than mine or others it becomes a bit of a chore.
I could also be cold and say that " moderated with an iron fist" is not really moderation at all but rather censorship to fit within your seemingly intolerant view of how that particular topic should proceed.
And your actions may well be completely justified, I don’t know as I did not participate in that thread.
But just that statement of moderated with an iron fist is disturbing…
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Call it censorship, or moderation, or whatever you want, but that MQA thread is one of the few (only?) that doesn’t devolve into a discussion on the same 3 MQA complaints of conspiracy, DRM, and SQ. I’ll take that any day.
If you want pure freedom, you can see how that works out on 4chan.
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Strong moderation, even with its inevitable biases, it the only way a forum stays away from chaos. Some of us were collateral damage in classic cases: Usenet Ban a Slippery Slope? | WIRED
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As I said it may well have been justified in that particular case for the topic of that thread within your viewpoint of how you desired that thread to proceed and that is great your vision was acheived.
However real life is just not like that I am afraid.
Had a discussion in a bar lately?
Does it stay on the exact same subject all night with zero deviation?
Not any of the ones I have been involved in…lol.
But I get it, you would like your forums to be better mannered and more focused than the rest and that is admirable if if a little difficult to obtain without overly heavy handed actions.
Maybe I will just stick to posting in the music threads…
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I’ve often resolved to stick to simply music posts and helping out with support where I can, but I’ve always been rubbish at maintaining resolve. Perhaps time to again, if at first you don’t succeed, have another go and fail even more spectacularly 
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Of course not, it’s may 2021 
But seriously, the moderation is actually based on the bar behavior. If at a bar, a random person walks into our discussion about MQA manufacturers and starts going off on about MQA SQ, we’d walk away or avoid that person. We would not let that person derail our conversation. If a person was persistently negative, ranting all time, trolling/griefing, etc,
we wouldn’t hang with them, and if they were at the bar whenever we were, we’d stop going to that bar.
That’s actually the behavior you see happening here nowadays and what we’ve been seeing for 6 years on other forums. People leave forums because they are full of these “bad bar citizens”. In fact, didn’t you personally leave audiogon forums because they just got too toxic?
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Some good points there Danny which I agree with.
However I was not really meaning the obnoxious drunk( or not) who attempts to join our convo and derail it but rather just natural devolvement within our own group if you will, its just human nature especially when egos become involved as they always do no matter how well you all get along.
And I live in Florida which has appeared to ignore the existence of Covid-19 for months so bars have been open here for way too long buts thats another discussion that does not belong in this thread.
And yes you are quite correct that after 8 years and 13350 posts I left Audiogon because they had gone way too far the other way and were increasingly toxic and no fun to participate in at all.
Only been here one year I admit but it does seem to be a little more intolerant than I remember, cant honestly say at this stage whether that will turn out to be a good or bad thing but I am here for the ride and enjoying my days.
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Actually, I would not go to a bar you ran because you would be controlling all the speech. No one else would go either……
One of the differences though is that in that situation you know all the participants quite well; or at least we’ll enough to tell them to get off their soapbox and shut up…
Just this minute I’ve had a post flagged and hidden, there seems to be a policy that humour is not allowed here now
https://community.roonlabs.com/t/roon-nucleus-verses-apple-mac-mini-m1/127867/422?u=thebiglebowski
This place has certainly changed for the worse over the last year and I don’t see how the moderation is even remotely based on pub banter.
I didn’t flag it, but I can see what it was. You got flagged because your post was sexist, bigoted, and the sexual nature of the post made it completely inappropriate for a forum we host. If you can’t see that, we’d rather you and your brand of humor not be here.
Bar, party, social settings in general.
Yes! And if a random bar patron decided to soapbox, you’d tell them to buzz off. You wouldn’t let them take over. If the bar staff got too many complaints about someone, they’d throw them out.
We are well past “natural development” in MQA threads. 100% of them turn into the same soapboxing and personal attacks unless they are heavily moderated.
Maybe so, but let’s not generalize here. That one MQA thread was the explicit case for me to use that description of “iron fist” – and I explained it in my top post, that if it wasn’t iron-fisted, it’d just get deleted as a duplicate post. If however, the topic could avoid MQA SQ, then the thread could stay open as it wouldn’t be a duplicate. I didn’t close the other thread that posted that same video. I also didn’t participate in it. Maybe you’d like to read both threads and tell me which you prefer? I know you read the one I moderated… I don’t know if you read the other one.
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Outside of Roon forum, can Roon support issues be done entirely over email, using this form to initiate?
Like if I get banned one day but still need Roon help lol
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Yup! You don’t need a community account to contact our support team.
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I’ll try to not get banned but good to know just in case lol
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True but a lot of the value of these forums, for myself at least, is the assistance provided by fellow members as well as official Roon support.
So I would truly hate to lose that accessibility so I guess I better behave…
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