In the beginning evcforum was a place to discuss science. There were relatively small numbers of messages per day.
Things diversified to include such as the "Coffee House" and the various theological forums. Active topics per day and messages per day went way up.
During all this we had a number of admins doing an uneven job of covering things. That was all we could practically do. Being moderators wasn't that we were getting paid to work hard and cover every thing. And we pretty much operated in isolation of each other. You had to call them as you saw them, without the luxury of much consultation with the other admins.
Ideally, the membership should strive to be self moderating. But instead, we had too many members wanting to push the fringes of the guidelines and in general be uncooperative jerks.
I think many members think that being in the forum and posting messages is some sort of right and privilege. It's not. We are all merely guests at Percy's place.
I think one major problem is that the "General Discussion of Moderation Procedures" topics got way out of hand. Ideally, a member could post an issue there (as in, one message), and the various admins could consider the matter. But it got to be to much of a debate topic itself.
I think the various admins were too slow to issue suspensions. It should be, you knowingly do violations, or in general be a jerk, you get a suspension. No endless warnings which don't seem to work very well anyway. The forum moderation system should not attempt to be some sort of finely tuned legal system with all kinds of due process. Make it "behave or suffer the consequences".
In short, Percy/Admin has simplified the moderation system. For him, a kind of a "My way or the highway" system.
Please note the Admin quote at the end of my "signature".
Or something like that.
Adminnemooseus (ret.)
Edited by Adminnemooseus, : Change "in" to "is" in the subtitle.
Admin writes:
It really helps moderators figure out if a topic is disintegrating because of general misbehavior versus someone in particular if the originally non-misbehaving members kept it that way. When everyone is prickly and argumentative and off-topic and personal then it's just too difficult to tell. We have neither infinite time to untie the Gordian knot, nor the wisdom of Solomon.
There used to be a comedian who presented his ideas for a better world, and one of them was to arm everyone on the highway with little rubber dart guns. Every time you see a driver doing something stupid, you fire a little dart at his car. When a state trooper sees someone driving down the highway with a bunch of darts all over his car he pulls him over for being an idiot.
Please make it easy to tell you apart from the idiots.
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