How can you appease a moderator?

Good question. I asked a humorous question yesterday about what to do about a well-functioning iPhone, which was also flagged and banned. It had received 4 great question points, and multiple funny answers before being removed. I tried to fix it, but never heard back.

We can’t see the Question you linked. :-\

All Removed Questions are followed by an email with mention as to how they don’t fit the Fluther Guidelines. Did you see the email?

And the mods, in my experience, will bend over backwards to help you with re-crafting the Question.

Have you tried contacting them for help with this?

I did see the email and all it said was that wasn’t a quality question. for goodness sake, the question before mine was “Do you do drugs?”

@rob: You can’t see the link? When I click it in the question I can see it.

The original question was “What do you crave”?

I couldn’t agree more about the ratio of sophomoric questions to more “legitimate” ones. By my estimate, its at least 80:20.

Basically, it comes down to this: It’s their site and they can do what they want with it.

@syz: I understand that, but for what purpose would it be removed. I mean, I am only contributing to the collective…

It’s an open-ended question, like a poll.

They typically don’t like those. Sometimes they get thru anyway. The mods are just regular people applying some really loose guidelines as they interpret them.

Seriously, though… try the contact page. I’ve personally witnessed some incredible bending-over-backwards by the mods to accommodate some very thick-headed people. They very much want you to have a positve experience.

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Oh, and no, that link just takes me to the “Nothing to see here” page.

Thanks Rob, but the questions “How old are you”, “What is your favorite cartoon” and “Do you do drugs” seem a bit more obnoxious.

And, I did use the contact page. They said sound and fury would contact me…

maybe someone who has an iphone has big fingers and flagged it by accident.

@sueanne, agreed. Policy is applied a bit unevenly at times, depending on who’s got the watch.

< < Surprised more of my stuff isn’t flagged.

I’m the one that removed it, so I will answer:

It was a judgement call. The question is essentially a poll, and is completely open-ended. The Fluther Guidelines clearly frown up such questions, but we don’t necessarily remove them all. The reason I removed yours, but left in tact many similarly open-ended questions was simply one of response time. We will typically allow open-ended questions to remain if many in the community have moved to answer it.

In fact, I would have removed ALL of the questions that you are comparing yours to, had I caught them before they had more than 10+ responses.

There is an already-voiced concern among some in the community that questions that can be answered definitively are being drowned-out by open-ended questions such as yours. Personally, I think there is a balance to be found between the social and the intellectual sides of Fluther.

@Sounded. The poll questions draw such quick interest because everyone has an opinion on drugs, their age, what car they drive, etc. Fewer people can answer the more definitive questions, which is why some of those have only a handful of responses.

Take a quick look at What Is Fluther? and tell me how poll questions further that goal. I’m quite serious here. If I’m wrong and poll questions further that goal, then I will happily change my tune.

The idea of this site is that it is an opportunity to have questions answered by “ordinary experts.” Knowing your age, whether you have done drugs and what type of car you drive doesn’t allow you to “share your massive brainpower with others,” nor does it give the community the opportunity to be those ordinary experts.

By contrast, asking about what to expect as you age, the effects of drug use or maintenance issues to watch for on a particular car all fit perfectly into that description.

If the last message was to me, then you’ve gotten my message reversed. I am 100% against open-ended, chat-room types of questions.

My mistake, Shilolo, I was reading that as a defense of poll questions.

Thanks for the answer. I’ve only been on Fluther for a few days and after looking at the What is Fluther I now understand what you are seeking. I think that keeping to that goal is a bit bland, but so be it. If I don’t like it I can always become flutherless.