Personally from a background of refereeing and also being involved with scoretables I find your comments refreshing. I have accepted and dealt with abuse when confronted in person, however, I find abuse in an anonymous manner to be rather pathetic.
IMO volunteer coaches should also be quarantined from abuse. This can particularly be the case with junior teams.
I believe your idea of bullet points has a great deal of merit. Possibly someone may put forward a better manner of grading posts.
Look forward to the results.

'593 is exactly right. I absolutely want to encourage potentially interesting discussions without it becoming negative and personal.

Good post Isaac,

I find the level of vitriol around what are essentially volunteers really poor form. To be fair I have basically no idea who they are talking about most of the time but it seems pretty agenda driven.

I am not one of these who gets into "if you are not part of the solution then you are the problem" type thinking but on the whole these people, coaches etc, are just making a contribution. Its not a glamorous job for many I am sure.

By all means let us continue to bag the following:

- GWB for having too many logins
- Bear for his motherhood statements

etc etc....

People are entitled to an opinion and some constructive debate but some of the dialogue has made me switch off from those posts especially when the coach has just started in the role.Give the person a break and let the coach coach!!!

Quote from above "I think any Anonymous (or pseudo names which are anonymous anyway) posts that refer to people with enough details that they can be named, such as Coach of certain club, Ref of a certain game or Committee person of a certain club should be banned".

I agree to the extent that if you are not prepared to have the comment you are intending to make associated at least with the consistent "anonymity" of your usual and consistent username(s), then it is certain IMHO that what you are wanting to write is not something you even want associated with that level of anonymity. - so it is probably not really a worthwhile post.

I do see a difference between Australian sarcasm or dry wit and trolling or encouraging verbal violence.

I.E. if I'm happy to have the comment associated with "very old" then I've probably put some level of self-censoring into the post , if I'm puting it up as Anon 4563 then I've probably decided that what I'm writing is not something I'm going to be proud about.

I'm not certain a second level of anonymous should be proscribed, but it should certainly raise a flag re me running a risk of getting deleted ( either the post or My account ;)

I think any Anonymous (or pseudo names which are anonymous anyway) posts that refer to people with enough details that they can be named, such as Coach of certain club, Ref of a certain game or Committee person of a certain club should be banned.

How would a moderator (mostly just me) be expected to deal with this when they don't know every single individual (player, referee, administrator, coach, etc) in Australian basketball at every level from professional down to junior and social? Or when someone is using initials, or a nickname?

And what about sentiment? Just negative posts or all posts? "Coach Joe and his Harriers lost 87-95" is negative. What about posts that someone considers reasonable and someone else doesn't? There are usually a thousand posts a week and no one reads them all. There are legal reasons that posts don't pass a gateway of approval - you'll notice that Facebook, Google, YouTube, Twitter, etc don't pre-approve posts outside of spam-protection.

Isaac - maybe you should make the rules that if anyone who feels aggrieved wants to enquire about the real identity of a poster you will supply it, rather than only on a court or police order. Maybe that will stop a lot of the petty,bordering on slanderous comments, that some of the threads sink down to.

Maybe you don't understand the technical side of things, but it's almost never possible for me to identify someone. Unless they provide their email address (and that's easy to fake), all I have is an IP address and a timestamp. To identify someone from that information, you need to involve courts/police/lawyer. It's usually possible to narrow down an IP to state and ISP, and very rarely to a business, but generally nothing that will identify someone conclusively.

I am one of very, very few people on here to use my real name. There are definitely ways to improve Hoops and encourage better discourse, but ultimately the toxic posts on Hoops come from people within the basketball community who should take responsibility for their contributions. They are almost always from adults, though you'd guess otherwise from their writing sometimes.

Anyone disagree that volunteer coaches/admin should be discussed in a different manner?

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Separately, there is currently a "sin bin" function for posts whereby sub-moderators have access to temporarily hold posts for review - I give this to people who tend to have a login and stick to a username, but don't notify them. This privilege level cannot edit or delete, only shelve a post until I check it. If you would like to help with this process, please create a login, use a consistent username and email me. Once your access is upgraded, you'll see "Sin Bin" as an option next to "Report this post".

And HO for his dry and diagnostic, sometimes over stated editorials of everyone's one liners...

Funny guy my mate HO, hope he is over 18, or what I have posted wouldn't be proper :)

Some ideas may work, not sure exactly how you will monitor and police this Isaac, but I am for it.

Part of the joys of being a mod is wading through through the grey areas that loosely sit between constructive criticism and abuse.

As for the "discussion topics" on junior coaching. I tend to skim these threads as they are generally in the mode of - parent has axe to grind.

No way of knowing generally on whether they have legitimate gripe unless you are involved, so the post ends up being a vent.

There was a post recently on zones being played in U14 which could have been a genuinely good thread. What I took from it was rather than fix the issue of it being a court supervisor issue and how can it be policed, was dedicate some time to training on running a couple of zone breaker offences. Id rather have spent the time on ball skills or shooting, but so be it.

Id love to read more threads on the benefits of a shuffle offence over a motion offence, running horns over low post, do we coach juniors to switch on defence, or run under or over the screen, or if its situational on the player, how do you explain this to kids that are 10-15?

Sadly, its way more popular to start a thread called "Delly is over rated", or discuss how div 2 players are making state squads, without having any understanding with what is happening in training sessions at club level, or that loosely worded term of "potential" of a player that may have grown 4 inches in the last year.

As for negative comments on junior refs. Its laughable really. Some of the 14 year olds that are reffing are doing great jobs, only to be getting a serve from kids parents both on court and in threads. As I say to the kids, the day you don't make a mistake in a game is the day you question a refs call. Leave it for the coach to do.

chewie - those are the sorts of discussions I'd rather see too. Feel free to start things like that more often. Much better seeing that than having to delete the latest Delly troll.