A Few Respectful Questions For The Mods

[frisky business]

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Dearest Mods,

I get it that your job is to basically be on Ass-Hole Patrol to keep PERB a cooperative and appreciative public community. So please, understand that all my questions are information-seeking, and don't read any veiled criticism into any of them. I doubt I'm the only one who's wondered about:

(1) Who are you guys? Hobbyists? SPs? Active? Retired?

(2) Is it true that you're volunteers? If so, why do this rather than, you know, chop beets and peel potatoes at some DTES soup kitchen?

(3) How do you become a mod? Do you apply? Are you recruited from the membership? Are you referred from the Volunteer Placement Bureau of Greater Vancouver?

(4) Why the prohibition against necroposting? (Reviving old threads.) If an old thread becomes relevant why not allow the history? It might help with enforcement if people understood the rationale. Neither TERB nor MERB ban it.

(5) How, exactly, is membership status determined? New Member to Member to Active to Well Known.

(6) What does a member's number of trophies mean? It shows when you click the down arrow on his name to the left of his post.

Thanks in advance,

Frisky
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[Forum mod]

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Dearest Mods,

I get it that your job is to basically be on Ass-Hole Patrol to keep PERB a cooperative and appreciative public community. So please, understand that all my questions are information-seeking, and don't read any veiled criticism into any of them. I doubt I'm the only one who's wondered about:

(1) Who are you guys? Hobbyists? SPs? Active? Retired?

(2) Is it true that you're volunteers? If so, why do this rather than, you know, chop beets and peel potatoes at some DTES soup kitchen?

(3) How do you become a mod? Do you apply? Are you recruited from the membership? Are you referred from the Volunteer Placement Bureau of Greater Vancouver?

(4) Why the prohibition against necroposting? (Reviving old threads.) If an old thread becomes relevant why not allow the history? It might help with enforcement if people understood the rationale. Neither TERB nor MERB ban it.

(5) How, exactly, is membership status determined? New Member to Member to Active to Well Known.

(6) What does a member's number of trophies mean? It shows when you click the down arrow on his name to the left of his post.

Thanks in advance,

Frisky
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Normally, we would prefer to answer these kinds of things in a PM, but maybe it wouldn't hurt to clear the air.

1. Mods come from all walks of life, many are retired pooners, or pooners from a different city. Over the years, there have been mods who are still active, but they really have to lead a double life. Too many mods on other boards (Not the TERB/MERB/PERB family mind you) have taken advantage of their position to leverage favors from providers. There have also been active/retired SP mods in some places but not PERB to my knowledge. Since the board ownership changed several years ago when the original owner passed away, there's been a move to more and more experienced/senior/retired pooner mods with as few ties as possible to the current crop of providers and it's cut back the drama by a ton.

2. 100% true, all volunteers. Everyone's motivation is different. In my case, I want to give back for some of the amazing experiences I have had over the years and help people while keeping the uglier side of this thing off the board. You have to want to protect and defend everyone, from the newest newbie, to the wily veteran, providers and pooners alike, keep the board as positive and productive as possible and weeding out the bad apples. You need a pretty thick skin, as most mods have had threats made against them, twitter threads devoted to them, even the odd stalker.

3. All of the mods stories are different. Some volunteered, by sending a PM to the admin, others were recruited for their experience and knowledge. For the most part, the mod crew here is pretty stable, we haven't had a new mod in a while and the number seems to be right. We really rely on the community using the report/flag system to direct us, there are just too many posts to read them all. If you wanted to volunteer, you would definitely need to explain why you wanted to become a mod, demonstrate knowledge of the scene and show that you are level headed, fair and able to be as impartial as possible. We have had some interesting volunteers pop up since I have been around for sure and 99.9% of them just get a polite thanks but no thanks reply. Just for clarity, lurkers, even long time lurkers need not apply!

4. The origin of necro posting rules here predates all of the current mods, it's been a thing on PERB for a very long time now. In general, it's an attempt to keep threads current. Some absurd examples have arisen lately, bumping a 18 year old thread to ask if the lady is still around, that kind of thing. Why the other boards don't have it, we would not know, each board has its own mod team, there is no overlap save the admins. There have been conversations over the past years about keeping the rule or dumping it, but it's always been around. Also bears repeating, we do not make the rules, only enforce them.

5. The titles are driven by the board software unless you over ride that, which anyone can do in the user settings. The key is post count, I don't know the cut off, but we have 15-20 year members with small post counts still called new members. Clearly, they aren't new!

6. https://perb.cc/xenforo/help/trophies/ - driven by post count and positive reactions to your posts.

Hopefully that helps explain the landscape. Just for clarity, all of this is my view, and I am most definitely not speaking for the other mods or the admin.

 

[PuntMeister]

Really enjoyed reading that.

Thank you,

Punt 😀

 

[lukom]

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(4) Why the prohibition against necroposting? (Reviving old threads.) If an old thread becomes relevant why not allow the history? It might help with enforcement if people understood the rationale. Neither TERB nor MERB ban it.
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You can always start a new thread listing the relevant points you feel need to be mentioned, and providing a link to the old thread for further reference and context. I've never done this before, but I think you can even tag members on to a thread, so if starting a new one you can possibly tag the members who commented on the previous thread if you think it's necessary to bring them in to bring in their input. You can also just message the members from the original thread, and all this of course within reason.

 

[MB Mod]

Necro posting was originally introduced when we were still PERB.CA and the servers were still in Canada, the addition of PERB to the group put a bit of a strain on them until they were expanded. Members were asked not to bring up old threads and not to stay logged in all the time. Then the servers were moved overseas and expanded and the rule became obsolete. During the format change a few years ago the original PERB rules were replaced with the rules from TERB which is why you can’t see it now. As Forum Mod said the rule is used to stop members bringing up ridiculously old threads about long retired or even deceased SP’s.

 

[Mr. J]

Many thanks to the moderator for taking the time to answer the questions. Great read, and talk about informative.

 

[Equity Market investor]

Curious about this and 2 questions I've always wondered about.

1) If old thread are not to be relived. Then why not just delete them ? Same as inactive members who haven't been active for let's say 5 or 10 years. Why not just delete them?

2) Out of the well over 100k members shown on Perb. How many are " real current active " members? Seems like it's always the same posters commenting in threads. You'd think even with a quarter of what is shown that are active there would be a boat load of different posters in all threads. Unless, I'm missing something? Thanks

As Forum Mod said the rule is used to stop members bringing up ridiculously old threads about long retired or even deceased SP’s.

 

[felixthecat]

1) If old thread are not to be relived. Then why not just delete them ? Same as inactive members who haven't been active for let's say 5 or 10 years. Why not just delete them?

Historic posts are quite useful IMHO to provide 1) legitimacy to PERB as a whole 2) a way to assess credibility of posters, e.g. coming back from a period of inactivity 3) tracking of repeated offenders - their style gives them away. Also, there used to be a number of unfair accusations posts get selectively deleted by mods/admins; you don't want to fuel those conspiracy theories.

Deleting posts, on the other hand, does not have many benefits. Server capacity is not a problem. Old threads are not coming at the top of the search and can be further filtered out in advanced search. Some potential benefits of clean-up would be: less confusion with search results when a provider name / number accidentally match an unrelated provider; maybe privacy improvement for retired providers. It's an overkill to delete posts just to avoid the necroposting rule, though.

 

[Equity Market investor]

Yes and no. Maybe in the lounge threads, sure. But in the review or 411 sections....Providers who have been absent ---or retired for that matter for 10 years per say --- safe bet they aren't returning. Those are useless!! My old handle name I had here many moons with reviews, comments etc are still viewable. Those are useless imho. Number 2) Perb isn't a government or bank agency where you have to provide ID for certain things. Posters can very easily create more than one account. In my opinion anyway. If they ( Ladies ) are still active and are no longer on Perb. The yes, I get what you mean.

Historic posts are quite useful IMHO to provide 1) legitimacy to PERB as a whole 2) a way to assess credibility of posters, e.g. coming back from a period of inactivity 3) tracking of repeated offenders - their style gives them away. Also, there used to be a number of unfair accusations posts get selectively deleted by mods/admins; you don't want to fuel those conspiracy theories.

Deleting posts, on the other hand, does not have many benefits. Server capacity is not a problem. Old threads are not coming at the top of the search and can be further filtered out in advanced search. Some potential benefits of clean-up would be: less confusion with search results when a provider name / number accidentally match an unrelated provider; maybe privacy improvement for retired providers. It's an overkill to delete posts just to avoid the necroposting rule, though.

 

[Forum mod]

There are certain tech issues and limits with this forum software, I freely admit I am no expert. Plus, just being candid, PERB is the smallest and least active of the 3 forums, so getting priority for the tech guys to either delete or auto lock older threads is a tough sell.

I don't have access to the analytics of the board, no mod does. Best guess is that we have a few hundred really active posters, a few hundred more occasional posters and thousands of lurkers who read the reviews and use the information and contribute nothing back. When they do post, it's almost always 411 and when given info, there's never a review to follow up or even a thank you a bunch of the time. Getting that last group to engage would make this place a much more useful and much busier forum.

 

[Equity Market investor]

Thanks for this info MOD. Obviously, TO is a much larger city, but, I always suspected that PERB was always a fairly busy board? No?

My Hope was always that there would more abundant massage ads here. For instance, In the Review section, there's certainly plenty of ladies reviewed. Add that to the so so leo-list reputation ...... you think they would come onto PERB? Maybe PERB isn't as large as I originally thought?

There are certain tech issues and limits with this forum software, I freely admit I am no expert. Plus, just being candid, PERB is the smallest and least active of the 3 forums, so getting priority for the tech guys to either delete or auto lock older threads is a tough sell.

I don't have access to the analytics of the board, no mod does. Best guess is that we have a few hundred really active posters, a few hundred more occasional posters and thousands of lurkers who read the reviews and use the information and contribute nothing back. When they do post, it's almost always 411 and when given info, there's never a review to follow up or even a thank you a bunch of the time. Getting that last group to engage would make this place a much more useful and much busier forum.

 

[frisky business]

. . . Hopefully that helps explain the landscape . . .

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Yes, very much so. And thank you.
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[vanperb]

... and thousands of lurkers who read the reviews and use the information and contribute nothing back. When they do post, it's almost always 411 and when given info, there's never a review to follow up or even a thank you a bunch of the time.

This so very much. It's impossible to squeeze even a "like" out of this group for posted information.

 

[lukom]

This so very much. It's impossible to squeeze even a "like" out of this group for posted information.

I get more DM's regarding inquiries on certain providers than on an actual thread. It can be someone who's been a member for years with relatively no posts, and they'll message me privately on my experience with an sp or if I ended up toftft with an sp I started a thread about. Mind you I too have messaged people, but that's also cause I don't want to necropost on a thread that just surpassed the 6 month period, other times the person who I'm reaching out to may have been vague on their details so I'll reach out for clarification. Examples of this are people who'll say the provider's place was a dump, and I'll ask for what they meant by that. More often than not plates in the sink and the smell of uber eats in the living room/kitchen area bothers some people, where the bedroom and shower is fully clean and no problems there...etc
I don't mind answering questions via dm cause my hope is these folks eventually share some Intel on their experiences down road, some have even give me a recommendation in turn just because I answered their questions.

 

[worldshaker]

I think its really great that you took the time to answer his questions. Good on ya, Mod!

 

[lukom]

You can tag someone by putting the at ( @ ) symbol in a comment, then start typing there handle without a space between the name and @.
Good luck @lukom !

There you go! Thanks 😊

 

[ModSquad]

I applaud everyone posting in this thread! It’s good to have an open discussion about certain issues around the site.

We are approachable answering PM’s too but a thread like this clears up many misconceptions about how the site is moderated.

 

[Cock Throppled]

I applaud everyone posting in this thread! It’s good to have an open discussion about certain issues around the site.

We are approachable answering PM’s too but a thread like this clears up many misconceptions about how the site is moderated.

Why the locking of threads because "that's enough of that", or "this has been discussed before"? Why are moderators interferring, rather than letting threads run their course? Every thread eventually dies out when the members don't participate, without mods deciding for them.

 

[Forum mod]

Why the locking of threads because "that's enough of that", or "this has been discussed before"? Why are moderators interferring, rather than letting threads run their course? Every thread eventually dies out when the members don't participate, without mods deciding for them.

Because many of those threads have either been hijacked to the point of no return from the original topic or have fallen into a flame war, or it is indeed a topic that has been done to death. Do we really need the 101st telling of what to do when you see an SP in public? When the horse is dead, leave it lay there, stop whaling on it is the gist. We are not closing threads for no reason, never have. If you disagree, send a PM and it will be reconsidered, but sometimes the answer will be no.

Please do refresh yourself with the rules, especially this part at the end:


These rules notwithstanding, we reserve the right to edit or delete any posts we believe are not in the best interests of the forum, its advertisers and/or its users.

This is a private board and your participation is by invitation. Please remember that membership is a privilege, not a right.

As a condition of membership, you agree to abide by the rules and by the moderators' decisions.

 

[westwoody]

This so very much. It's impossible to squeeze even a "like" out of this group for posted information.

Yeah it’s a pissoff when the same few guys ask the same questions over and over, but never post any reviews themselves or post any useful information.
Why would I help any of these leeches out?