We want LI to be one of the friendliest places on the internet, where lawyers and law students help each other with their career related queries and occasionally discuss other stuff that might affect their lives too. In other words:
1. Be kind, respectful and helpful to each other.
2. Be bona fide, truthful, genuine and curious.
3. Assume the best intention of others.
Therefore, in using the site, you must agree to do your best to uphold these community guidelines.
Note that what you find here is written and moderated by anonymous people on the internet.
Therefore everything you read here is very likely unverified, rumour, speculation and/or downright false.
In continuing to read anything here, you must therefore agree not to take anything you read here as factual and that you will exercise due caution, diligence and common sense before acting on any information you may come across here.
You also agree to report any inaccurate or malicious comments with the buttons. Moderators take action within 24 hours, as required and appropriate under law.
Our full terms and conditions apply too.
Do you solemnly agree to all of the above?
Also, no.
I don't think the volume of comments or their content is so much or so complex that it ought to take anything more than 20-odd minutes every 6-12 hours or so to publish most of them. Instead, it takes days, even during a crucial period like the CLAT time where there is actually some use for this website.
I personally think it would be better if the site just shut down for good rather than running this facade of a discussion under some horribly under-skilled and uninterested moderators. Now, I'll go out on a limb and bet this comment of mine is either left unpublished for days or is flagged and not published at all. What a joke.
I have been observing some highly erratic behaviour on the part of the moderator(s) here. I am not talking about the standard of moderation or bias, which can and has been debated ad nauseam in other threads. I am merely talking about the practice of moderation itself.
First of all, it is clear that there is no guarantee now that a comment once posted would at all be published regardless of how clean it is. Please do not contest that point, because I myself have posted numerous helping comments across multiple threads without saying anything bad or nasty, and about 60% of those have been published. The rest remain unmoderated for 3-4 days, after which they become indistinguishable from comments that have been deemed unpublishable because of content, and eventually, they drop off the picture altogether.
2. Secondly, I understand that the lack of staff and dedicated moderators is the primary reason behind this, given the new IT Rules. However, that does not excuse the highly erratic behaviour of whoever is currently moderating. Let me explain what I'm trying to convey here.
Let us assume that the moderator can spare 30 minutes a day for moderation. Logically, they should use this time by going to the earliest unmoderated comment and work their way through. If that means that new threads and newer comments would have to wait for some time to be published, then that would at least become predictable. If someone has some urgent thread, then that can be marked suitably during posting and it can be prioritised accordingly. Instead, what is now happening is even comments to threads requesting urgent advice (quite likely during the CLAT phase) are staying unmoderated and unpublished for days, and instead new threads are cropping up.
The other part of the story is that surely those 30 minutes can also be more or less structured? For example, if you clearly mention in a pinned post that the moderator would be unfavorable unavailable during the weekend, then people won't waste their time posting something on Friday night or Saturday morning, because by the time moderation happens next on Monday, these comments would mostly disappear in the subsequent crowd and never get published. Again, this is something I'm saying from personal experience.
These are just some genuine concerns and suggestions that I have raised and made here. I fully understand that we cannot demand prompt and effective response and moderation on this forum currently because of existing constraints. However, even if someone is volunteering to moderate unpaid, and can only spare a little time, adopting some of the practices that I mentioned might streamline the process and render it more consistent, which will benefit the users, especially those who still use this forum to seek genuine help and advice. I happen to believe that despite the recent increase in trolling and political and religious mud-slinging here, coupled with the usual juvenile law school rivalry, the number of help seekers and those who are willing to provide useful advice is not very insignificant either.
Sincerely,
A veteran LI reader.