What would you think about this:
Minimum number of administrators, that concentrate on the site operation issues (topic promotion, banning spammers, suspending people that cannot play in the sandbox without throwing sand on everyone).
Thread monitoring and moderation by the originator of the thread - to keep it on topic and bounce out people that are continually off-topic or abusive (with a report to admin to keep them honest). I monitor my threads, you monitor yours.
This would work best with a "track changes" method that would keep previous versions of any edit, so that past versions could be viewed by anyone interested (possibly auto-linked to the edit message for example), or the way changes are detailed on wikipedia.
Or it could be a very simple system - the thread monitor gets an additional button like the edit button that shows up for your own posts, and it (1) automatically hides the whole post (what you would likely want to do for off-topic or abusive posts), (2) has radio-buttons to pick to record a brief message for the reason ("off topic" "abusive" "other"), and (3) reports the operation to admin (who moderated, what thread, who was moderated, the reason).
Less work for admin, less all one-sided moderation.
You were a moderator (briefly), what do you think?
Enjoy.
Join the effort to solve medical problems, AIDS/HIV, Cancer and more with Team EvC! (click)
we are limited in our ability to understand
by our ability to understand
RebelAAmericanOZen[Deist
... to learn ... to think ... to live ... to laugh ...
to share.