Thanks to Londondrz

Please join me in thanking @londondrz, also known as John, for his time and effort volunteering on the moderating team here at SE23.life.

John joined the team in July 2016 and has put in an untold amount of work to keep things civil, even stepping up to single handedly moderate the (now closed and often heated) General Politics section.

This leaves @oakr and @applespider on the mod team with myself. In the coming months we will be considering the size of the mod team before we replace John.

Once again thank you John, and good luck!

Hi John

I’ve said it privately, but let me publicly thank you for all your time on the forum, I think you’ve been moderating from when I signed up and this forum has been hugely useful to me and many others, and you’ve been an important and constant factor in that.

Thank you for your help and guidance when I first joined the moderator team, and when I rejoined again late last year when Mike took over.

Mostly thank you for your ability for discuss things with us, and whether we were in agreement or not, to be able to have frank conversations after which we could all continue as normal - I really appreciated that…and as @ForestHull says thanks for moderating the politics section which I refused to do, an almost impossible task.

I wonder how much time you’ve actually spent moderating over the years, no doubt many weeks if not months full-time if it all added up and documented like a job! I’m not sure everyone that’s always known as so much is unseen and / or all those little bits add up!

Good luck with everything and enjoy your break from social media (we all need it sometimes!).

Al

Thanks John, you will be missed !

I did try and pull some stats, but it’s impossible to guage. However, John has visited the site for the equivalent of every day for something like 4.2 years!!!

Thanks again John!

Thank you John!

I have noticed how things have changed immensely during those 5 years since you started in 2016 and I can’t imagine how challenging it must me to moderate a discussion forum under society’s rapidly changing ‘rules’. Just a quick example - last Wednesday, the University of Manchester released a new ‘Guide to Inclusive Language’, which tells its staff to avoid biases, slang or expressions that can exclude certain groups - so ‘man’. '‘woman’, ‘mother’ and ‘father’ are no longer appropriate and are to be replaced by ‘individuals’ and ‘guardians’. Mother’s Day is out then - and I cannot get my stupid old head around that!!!

Give me strength.

Ha!

We’re obviously too far the wrong side of 25 to be able to see what the hell is/was wrong with Mother’s Day.

Thankfully, so is my dear Mum!

Thanks @Londondrz. I know we haven’t always agreed on everything, but i appreciate your involvement in some tough moderation decisions.

As for University of Manchester guidelines, i had a read through and they look incredibly sensible. Of course nobody is saying that we can’t say ‘mum’ or ‘men’ but we shouldn’t let assumptions get in the way of communications - particularly from educational organisations.

One good example of problematic language is when you might recruit a company ‘chairman’ - whether you like it or not you are building in a gender bias. Or how about when children are sent home with a ‘letter to mum’ it assumes that they haven’t recently lost their mother to cancer. You’ll notice that we are rarely asked to include our Christian names on official documents (as a child i was nenver entirely sure what i should put). Some people (including me initially) have even been confused about the inclusivity of the se23 mums facebook group.

It isn’t just about making language inclusive, but about making it understandable to all. But it really doesn’t mean that you can longer refer to your ‘mother’.

I still remember a scene in a TV documentary about 40 years ago in which an elderly gentleman had been either a witness to a crime or a victim of a crime — and the beat bobby took out his note book and asked, “What’s your Christian name, Mr Singh?”

Even “first name, last name” can be confusing, whereas arguably “family name, given name” is clearer. Is ‘Wu Chen’ Mr Wu or Mr Chen? I always tried to politely clarify when introduced to Chinese colleagues and contacts in a previous job.

I’m sure @Londondrz is reading this with relief he no longer has to worry about moderation of such sensitive issues

I’m sure. I’d forgotten this was a thread about @Londondrz when I was replying to recent posts!

@Londondrz, we haven’t always seen eye-to-eye but I know moderating is a time-consuming and thankless task. So — thank you for all the time you’ve devoted to this site.

Good luck to you beyond the dot life bubble. With fewer concerns now about the highs and lows of SE23, hopefully you’ll be able to focus more on your (not so) new life in Norfolk. Stay well.

While we give thanks to a departing member of the moderator team, I also wanted to add additional thanks to @clausy who for a while also served as a valuable member of that team providing excellent balance to both moderation and discussions. For the many who have noticed his absence from the Forum, I’m thrilled to say he is using his spare time and continues to be an excellent asset to our community IRL as the chairperson of the Forest Hill Society, and through the volunteer work work he does with Lewisham Food Bank and most recently as part of the vaccination team at Jenner Medical Centre.

We’re lucky to have had people like this who have given so much to the Forum and outside of it as well.

Absolutely. It’s a time commitment for little reward, so I’d like to add my thanks to Claus, both for welcoming me warmly to the team and for helping run the forum for the benefit of those with an interest in SE23, members and otherwise.

His other deeds are of course also worth congratulating, no doubt about it! The volunteering at the Jenner, and other centres, has been one of the most heartwarming bits of community goodness of recent times - a fantastic effort by Claus and all involed, volunteers and staff alike!

all around! Thanks for all your time put into keeping the forum running - and don’t be a stranger.

Great to hear @clausy is still giving so much to the community; was thinking that he’d been quiet lately.

well done

Thank you all. It has been a pleasure being a mod on here. Yes there have been interesting times but those are far outweighed by the positives.

This is a great site that serves a great community.

John

P.S. The reason I am going is that I am removing myself from all “social” media. I am seeing the detrimental affect it is having on my kids and myself and as such have decided that, in my own words “If you don’t like the TV program, turn it off”.

Cheers @Londondrz
We modded together for quite some while and through some very trying times. It isn’t always easy and I appreciate the time and energy you have put into making the site what it is today. Always even handed and a source of humour - you’ll be missed.
I understand your withdrawal from SM - I think a break from it can do us all a world of good.

HI Michael - I hope you are well.

I respect you as a very thoughtful and intelligent man, so a can’t argue with your opinions on this. But, even though I’m from a single-parent background of halfway homes squalor in the 60s and, of course, knowing that we were way poorer than everyone else (not least because I was the only kid in my class at grammar school having free dinners), I never wanted anyone patronising my family, which may possibly be the reason why my opinion is the polar opposite of yours. (By the way, my step-father died from cancer in 1971 when he was 31 and teachers assumptively mentioned my parentS or my father but I knew they didn’t mean anything by it).

Take care though, and I hope to see you around some time this year (fingers crossed).