And why was my title edited?
Scott
Your title was asking one question, while you asked a completely different one in your actual post. Your title seemed misleading / inaccurate. I’m glad Mitt edited it.
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The intention of the poll is to see how many active devs there are on Sitepoint, as the title suggested. The fact the poll is asking a different question was to be able to get the number and still be somewhat interesting. Or should I have had the poll be,
Are you a dev?
Yes
No
Scott
You’re doing a PHP dev call (in the title), and from the results you’ll be able to tell how many are active on Sitepoint.
Exactly and why the title was what it was.
Scott
It was still misleading 
.
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Misleading? I was perfectly clear about what I wanted and why the poll was what it is. I wanted to know the activity of the forum, not really what people think of their own PHP prowess. The change to the title is making the poll misleading to what I really wanted to know.
One could even get the impression, the team here doesn’t want others to know the activity is mediocre at best.
Instead of changing my posts, more should be done to get more activity here. 
Scott
Note: This is me speaking personally, and not on behalf of the staff or SitePoint.
The forums staff is, generally, made up of unpaid volunteers. Remember that when you go charging them to do more marketing. We’re spending our own free moments at work or home trying to get things done here, and of course the Advisors and Team Leaders and Admins are doing the most.
Luckily, anyone can contribute to the efforts to get more active traffic to the community, including you (that is, if you want to do more to get activity here instead of throwing out barbs at the people who work to keep it running). Feel free to share posts and discussions, start new discussions, invite friends or co-workers, or post or re-post content on social media to assist in the venture.
One could even get the impression, the team here doesn’t want others to know the activity is mediocre at best.
That’s absurd, as the conversation in this thread isn’t being censored, so people can feel free to see your poll results and discuss, although as I said before, your single thread and poll are hardly metrics of forum activity. Additionally, I sincerely hope that developers, generally, are intelligent enough to be able to look around and gauge how active a community is all on their own, without your guidance. There’s nothing to be hidden.
Misleading? I was perfectly clear about what I wanted and why the poll was what it is.
Your thread asked how many PHP devs were active. When clicked on, the thread did not mention that at all, and instead asked what skill level you were in PHP. Those questions are obviously not the same, ergo, it was changed for clarification. It’s my belief that you’re just making big deal out of nothing for whatever reasons motivate you.
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I’ll only add one more thing to what Jeff said, as his response was well written.
Keep in mind, not a single part of Staff altered your title, that was the community. TL 3 have the ability to recategorize/edit a title (much like Stack Overflow permits those with higher reputation points to do moderating tasks too.
So although it is fun to blame staff, this isn’t fair to us staff (feel free to blame your fellow community members though). 
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If you look at the edit history, it was a staff/ team member, who changed the title. Someone who regularly takes it upon himself to censor/ edit posts too.
This is to everyone.
My intention was, I think perfectly, but I’ll change my stance to now say, “fairly clear” with the title as it was along with the text and thus the title was unnecessarily changed.
My intention was to find out the number of devs active in the PHP sub-forum of the Sitepoint.com forum (not all of the activity of the whole forum) and I definitely didn’t want to know the self-assessed levels of the devs here. That was just a little “fun on top”.
So, through the title change, the intention of the pole has been changed to something I didn’t want it to be.
Maybe I could have written my post clearer, but I definitely wanted to know the number of active devs in the PHP sub-forum.
If anything, the person concerned with me confusing users, or whatever the issue was, could have asked me to change the title or the post text and not do it on his/ her own. Censorship or editing user added content is never a good tactic and should be used as a very last resort and only when it absolutely necessary. It was definitely not absolutely necessary here.
As for the team here spending more time getting more activity onto Sitepoint. That is part of running and especially being a part of a community. Although Sitepoint sell services and products and offers a free service with the articles and forum, it all isn’t a natural binding community experience (which is an issue for Sitepoint, like the article comments being in Disqus). That means more activity by the team and the users is needed to help build the community. Or, is that not wanted here?
I do what I can myself. If I see a thread of possible interest to other devs, I post it to the social networks I frequent. But, I am only one. Everyone else, especially the team, should be doing it too and to say, “I am doing in enough just being a mod” is total crapola.
Maybe the admin team here could think about pushing the Discourse devs to add a sharing system to Discourse to make spreading (of what should be) the fun here easier?
At any rate. My suggestion is to stop editing my content, without my consent.
Scott
No. Wrong. @Mittineague (who did the title change) is not a staff member. He hasn’t been for quite some time. He is a member of the community. A regular member.
The community disagreed. I have yet to see a single person come forward who believes your stance wasn’t ambiguous.
The staff can’t control the members here; those who have earned TL3 get privileges.
And staff cannot make any promises in regards to not editing members posts.
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Why does his user title say “Team Leader”?
If it was ambiguous, it still doesn’t make the censorship of my post right. It just means I needed to be clearer in my intention. The post (still) doesn’t communicate my intention.
So any other member with this priveledge can change my content on their own, without warning?
Scott
Because he used to be. It just hasn’t been changed by Mitt.
Noone likes misleading / incorrect posts. I’m sure we can all agree on that.
Which Mitt took it upon himself to correct.
You mean the thread title? Yes. Post content? No.
TL3 isn’t easily earned though; so generally the ones who have earned it are very valued members who generally know what SP aims for.
Mitt, being ex-staff, has an even better idea. Speaking for myself, and not staff, I am glad Mitt took it upon himself to better this community.
You throw around the word censorship since it leaves a bad taste in peoples mouths. This wasn’t censorship, however. You need to stop using that word since you aren’t using it properly.
We both know how much you hate when people use words improperly (cue SRP/SOC).
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You mean this
or
or
I did and I stand by my statement, members of staff are located on the following group pages
http://www.sitepoint.com/community/groups/admins/members
http://www.sitepoint.com/community/groups/teamleaders/members
http://www.sitepoint.com/community/groups/advisors/members
http://www.sitepoint.com/community/groups/mentors/members
Can I change it to “PHP Dev call - All who are active, how would you rank your skill level?”
I don’t see any censorship, otherwise, there would have been further changes, what I see is clarity. Altering the title to better represent what is being asked/collected/sought out. Whether the alteration makes sense to you is still important, but you could have gone about this in a far better way than crying wolf. You could have simply asked for it to be altered to X which included what you felt to be important and still added more clarity to the topic as a whole, for example.
And something we’ve done from day 1 and continue to do.
That I’ll pass to @Ophelie. I do know why they switched back to Disqus, but I was hoping that work was going to be pushing ahead to help ensure that remained a very temporary process.
I’m not sure where this comes from? The staff do far more than simply “mod”. In fact, we really don’t need to do a lot of modding here, but rather deal with flags by other members. Spam gets flagged by the community and dealt with, things that are inappropriate, wrong category, etc. We rarely seek out and initiate any moderating, most of it is community driven now.
Consider all of the “Help me Please!!!” topics and if we were to apply that rule everywhere. We’d have a bunch of useless topic titles and a ton of waiting for response PMs. It just isn’t going to happen as the amount of work that then entails is extensive. Instead, if your title gets altered and thus loses part of its meaning (to you), just flag it and let us know of what you would like it to be. We’ll gladly work with you to ensure the proper intent is maintained (we do our best and I’m sure the community members who have reached TL 3 do as well to try and keep the initial intent).
You seem to have a chip on your shoulder and that led to an outburst, which in all honesty, wasn’t the best way to handle such a trivial change.
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Then it needs changing by someone other than Mitt.
Yes, I agree with that. But, like I said, I wasn’t trying to mislead and I don’t think I was and it was fairly clear, I wasn’t intentionally misleading anyone.
What do you call changing a text, so it has a different meaning than what was originally intended by the author? And this is simply avoiding the subject and putting any fault on me. Changing people’s content without their consent and changing the intent simply isn’t right, especially when it isn’t necessary. It is a mild form of censorship.
If it is only the title and it is a hard privilege to get. Ok. Still, this should be a privilege reserved for proper team members, especially so team members can’t weasel out of the activity by saying, “Sorry, we have no control over user X’s actions.” That is just not right at all.
Thank you! Please do.
And please change the first sentence to.
The number of active PHP devs here at Sitepoint has always interested me.
And thank you for pointing out the sharing possibilities. I didn’t know they were there. I always right click on the post number to copy the link.
Scott
Done and Done.
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I don’t understand why though. The community is self regulating for the most part. If someone screws up, we will fix it. This wasn’t a case of Mitt screwing it up.
Does it really matter if @cpradio edits your title, apposed to Mitt?
Of course. It doesn’t change the fact that it was .
That isn’t censorship. As cpradio said, it’s clarifying.You’restill getting the same end result.
You’re fairly active. And you don’t have TL3. We have several staff who have trouble regularly keeping TL3. That should tell you it’s hard to get for the average user. Aka those who get it generally love SP.
My words should not be confused. We cannot control what Mitt, or another TL3 person does, but that does NOT mean that if they screw up, we will not take swift action to correct it.
TL3 can only move posts, edit titles, and edit thread tags. It’s very minor modding ability. So nothing bad can really happen. We can’t control what TL3 users do more than we can control what you post. But you bet your a** that if things get out of control, we will take care of it.
I think he is referring to the Title Mitt has still. Not the fact that Mitt altered the Title of his Post (at least in this particular context).
Which is a job for @Ophelie and @ralphm to discuss.
Oh, sorry, that wasn’t my intent of my prior response, but rather it was to draw focus that it wasn’t the staff who did the editing. We have to still look over scenarios where a member may step out of line (even TL 3), but the appropriate channel to initiate such, is via a Flag. Flag your own post and make your claim if something wrong happened, we’ll evaluate it and get back to you (that much I can promise).
I think you misunderstood me. I meant his user title needs changing.
Which I said I could also agree with. And it is now properly resolved.
Right, it wasn’t repressive. But, the action is still censorship. Just like filling black spots over genitals.
Two points. Are you a team member? Because, I would have never guessed.
Secondly, he shouldn’t be allowed to screw up with activities normally reserved for team members.
Thank you. Well handled!
Scott
I’ll do that next time for sure.
Scott
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