It's nature has changed from a sometimes chaotic but open forum to something more personal, a very limiting give and take between piqued individuals and even trite nannying. Closing off threads rather than letting them exhaust themselves eliminates the authenticity of the exchange. It will only take perusing a few more Nannied threads before you will lose the interest of followers like me who have posted perhaps now thousands of posts since the 2007 rebid debacle motivated this anonymous forum. Thanks for your efforts and consideration. I for one do not hold anyone but the author responsible for the posts in an open, very lightly monitored forum
Comments
Firstly, you do state your case well.
However, this blogs has always been moderated. Scooby and now myself scan the postings and remove those violating blog rules. Note well, we remove only the rule violators, not those that we disagree with - as moderators we take as neutral a stance as possible.
What changed over the weekend was the moderating mechanism, not whether we moderate. Now submitted posts are queued up for approval vs. us going through post-submission with a hoe to weed out bad entries. This method preserves anonymity - which the blog users voted strongly in favor of.
The advantages are stronger filtering of rules violators, cleaner threads since there won't be gaps from weeding out offenders. The disadvantage is a slight bit more work by the moderators to check the queue. Posters should understand there is a delay now from submission to appearance on the blog, which we'll strive to keep short.
The trolls of course will hate this. They'll cry out about free speech and control. No entries are going to be killed off any differently, just Scooby and I get to work on them before they go public. The trolls will get zero publicity and the rest of the blog users get a less drama-ridden blog - i.e. a good thing.
Trolls will argue about how their postings are fun, contributing to the entertainment value of this blog. In my opinion, sowing anarchy and strife may be fun for the poster doing it, but disrupting the blog is about as entertaining as pulling a fire alarm as a prank and about as despicable. It's gotten bad enough that stronger measures are needed, so here we are.
I feel some guilt suggesting this, since I was the one who suggested having it to preserve anonymity in the first place -- back when I was an employee and mid-level Lab manager who thought the blog was a valuable window into the reality of the Lab over the hype...