Comments on: When Moderation Goes Bad

By: Tim Hall

Tim Hall — Tue, 06 Aug 2013 21:28:10 +0000

This site doesn’t have the volume of comments to make moderation that much work. It’s very, very rate to have to deal with abusive comments, usually it’s just a matter of deleting spam and allowing non-spam by first-time posters (Everyone’s first comment is held in a moderation queue).

And this is a personal site, so it’s entirely to me what I do and don’t allow.

By: Michael

Michael — Tue, 06 Aug 2013 21:02:01 +0000

And this is why I have a website rather than a blog.

Moderation in all things is hard work and I don’t have the time or inclination to do it well.

By: Tim Hall

Tim Hall — Tue, 06 Aug 2013 18:57:01 +0000

This comment isn’t intended as a slam on all moderators on all forums. One of the rpg.net moderators comes over as a combination of a thin skin and big ego, which doesn’t seem to the right temperement for the job.

I can think of big forums (RMWeb being a good one) which seems to get the moderation right. (I’m amazing how heated model railway forums can get – it’s toy trains, FFS!)

I’ve seen too many communities fall apart through bad moderation, often when people ave been incapable of seperating their “moderator” and “forum poster” hats.

By: Abi Sutherland

Abi Sutherland — Tue, 06 Aug 2013 18:43:02 +0000

It isn’t if making conversations run smooth for their own sake feeds your soul. My largest mod gig has over 50,000 registered members, and an active population in the thousands. The mods there are not complete jerks who want to power-trip (well, apart from me, of course, but I keep it well-hidden). It helps that the board owner is perfectly willing to remove any mod who goes sour.

But it’s also impossible to make these communities work without banning a certain proportion of the people. Quite simply, there’s no online community that can hold everyone. So you make choices. And the people you boot or ban are the heroes of their own narratives, too, and generally have what seemed to them good reasons to do what they did. So when they go elsewhere and complain about the place, it’s got the ring of truth.

There were certainly people in that thread who, based on their contributions, might not have lasted long in any community I mod. I don’t know about rpg.net, since I don’t hang out there — but many gaming communities are notorious cesspools of sexist abuse, and many of their members like it that way and resist changing.

But it’s a big internet. There’s space for a lot of different communities on it.