Maybe you can sticky this for a bit? Some of the more genuine posters that we'd like to attract are occasional visitors. It may take a week or so to get good feedback from a broad sample.
[sticky]
Kirk here - Let's discuss how to improve PSR
-
I've only started checking out this place recently but I wonder whether there might be ways to incentivize registering. It seems like there is very little benefit right now to it, but if a larger percentage of the users on here were posting under the same alias all the time I feel like it would improve the general tone of the place.
I'm a grad student, and I like that there is a place online where other polisci people talk about stuff. Right now, there is absolutely no reason to register; I'd be worried about security, getting sh!t on for being a grad student, and being one of the few people registered. No idea why I'd do it. On the other hand, if there were a bunch of registered users posting on the threads, and it became a little more normal, I totally would! I'm not really interested in trolling, just looking for advice occasionally and interested in sharing my opinion sometimes.
-
I would like more aggressive moderating. In the past, I have found this blog as useful source of information about the job market and publishing. There has been so much stupid stuff recently—the guy who wants to share his lust for undergrads, the guy who wants to talk about psr "memes,' the racist threads—it doesn't seem worth my time to weed through and find useful information. Also, my guess is that relatively few people are responsible for the useless posts. Is there any way to limit the posts to things that are relevant to the profession?
-
Drop the salary wiki -- which has been active for 5,096 hours and not used once -- and replace it with a grants wiki. This would be a listing of available grants / funding sources, with info on relevant subfields (e.g., elections, security, whatever), deadlines, application requirements, web links, etc.
-
"Request a thread to be restored" function. Mods do a lot of ideological censorship and label conservative/republican viewpoints as racist too frequently. I would like to be able to report that and hold them responsible for the lack of political diversity on this forum.
-
I like the idea of having a separate politics thread. I would, however, also like it to be more clearly communicated that this blog is for discussions about the profession of political science. If you want to rant about current events without actually referencing political science/theory literature, then you should be posting in the comments section of Politico. Not here. Making this clear would probably result in fewer complaints about censorship from the moderators.
-
Elea:
I've only started checking out this place recently but I wonder whether there might be ways to incentivize registering. It seems like there is very little benefit right now to it, but if a larger percentage of the users on here were posting under the same alias all the time I feel like it would improve the general tone of the place.
I'm a grad student, and I like that there is a place online where other polisci people talk about stuff. Right now, there is absolutely no reason to register; I'd be worried about security, getting sh!t on for being a grad student, and being one of the few people registered. No idea why I'd do it. On the other hand, if there were a bunch of registered users posting on the threads, and it became a little more normal, I totally would! I'm not really interested in trolling, just looking for advice occasionally and interested in sharing my opinion sometimes.Yes, anonymous registration would be a good middle ground. Then we could have ongoing conversations across threads etc.
-
Some mechanism whereby posts/threads that get sufficient "nay" votes are reviewed for deletion. Could have a thread that reaches a certain threshold moved to a non-post status until a Mod reviews. The garbage piles up far too quickly for anyone to establish appropriate norms of behavior.
Similarly, have a system whereby a comment that receives, say, more than 5 votes and votes are more than 3 or 4 to 1 nays/yeas is automatically made invisible until reviewed by a mod for deletion or return.
Both would go a long way toward automatically restraining bad behavior, and would take advantage of "user moderation" for periods when the mods are asleep or doing something more productive than trying to restrain trolls.
Strongly disagree with this sentiment:
We should be able to argue fiercely, and sometimes be insulting, about the professional lives of established academics; this should not be censored.There is never an excuse to be insulting. It's unprofessional. It doesn't matter if the colleague is a graduate student, an assistant professor, or a full professor. Yes, full professors are shielded more, but what reason would you ever have to be insulting about someone's professional life?
Comments about someone's personal life and personal insults have no place in a job rumors forum. It escapes me why we as a profession have this need to behave so boorishly when compared to behavior in other disciplinary job forums.
-
Kirk: We need to destroy psr in order to save it. Also, pretty shocking that people on here are holding up ejmr as an example of some sort of civil discussion board where there's little "clutter" relative to solid info. Have you guys been on there recently? Vicious compared to what goes on here. I don't necessarily think that's a problem. If you come to an anonymous internet site you probably shouldn't expect professionalism and civility. I'm still not clear why anyone would post rumors here. You really have to be a child to be so keen to divulge a secret that you spill it anonymously online.
-
Drop the salary wiki -- which has been active for 5,096 hours and not used once -- and replace it with a grants wiki. This would be a listing of available grants / funding sources, with info on relevant subfields (e.g., elections, security, whatever), deadlines, application requirements, web links, etc.
I've dropped the employer/salary wiki.
The grants wiki sounds interesting, I will start another topic to assist with designing this.
-
Kirk: We need to destroy psr in order to save it. Also, pretty shocking that people on here are holding up ejmr as an example of some sort of civil discussion board where there's little "clutter" relative to solid info. Have you guys been on there recently? Vicious compared to what goes on here. I don't necessarily think that's a problem. If you come to an anonymous internet site you probably shouldn't expect professionalism and civility. I'm still not clear why anyone would post rumors here. You really have to be a child to be so keen to divulge a secret that you spill it anonymously online.
Why do you even post here???
-
The threads about teaching loads (e.g. 2-2 vs 4-4) seem to bring out the worst in people, usually involving criticism of small institutions in out of the way places. I'm not sure banning that topic would work, but perhaps flagging it? We are trying to set a more positive tone!!