The Role of Moderators
Moderators are ultimately chosen by me, Kara. However, nominations from users play an essential role in me considering someone for the job. People I consider for the job meet these requirements:
1. They have been a part of the site for long enough to understand how things work around here.
2. They have shown that they care about the well-being of the site and it's members and want this site to stick around for a long time.
3. They have a good sense of right and wrong that closely correlates to mine and have proven that they stick to their beliefs on this, even in the face of conflict.
4. They have shown themselves to generally promote peace among members instead of causing conflict, hurt, and unrest.
Rest assured, any user I contact about being a moderator on this site is one that I trust. I know that nobody is perfect. But over-all, I trust that these people have good intentions, an ability to "stick to their guns" even when their views may not be the most popular, and a desire to see this community strengthened.
If you have nominations for moderators, please contact me. If there is a moderator that you feel is not cut out for the job, please contact me on that also. If you want to do so anonymously (without the moderator knowing who sent the message), you may do so, just let me know in your PM. I will, however, pass along all messages I recieve (without your name if that's what you desire) about moderators to that particular mod because I believe this is only fair...and if there is a problem, this would be the only way to rectify it.
That being said, here are the roles I ask the moderators to play on this site:
1. Delete all spam.
2. Delete duplicate posts.
3. Follow the site rules/policies and help to enforce them. Enforcement may be done publically (a reply to the offending post) or privately (through PM) - whichever the moderator determines to be the appropriate mode of action for each particular case. Then post a message in the private moderator section of the forum (only available to moderators) so the rest of us know the issue is being delt with and the user won't recieve PM's from all of us.
4. Remove offensive material from user posts (perhaps links to porn). User posts are only to be edited in extreme cases. When a post is edited, mods are to copy the original post and put it in the moderator forum so the original is saved in case there is controversy regarding the editing of that post. A message should also be placed in the post being edited saying that the post was edited by a moderator.
5. Lock entire topics that have gotten out of control. Instead of deleting or editing entire topics that seem to have gotten out of control, mods should lock them, and post in the moderator forum about the issue. The mods and I will then collectively make a decision about what to do.
6. Move topics to the appropriate sections if they happen to be started in the wrong place.
7. Split topics into muliple topics when there seems to be multiple discussions going on in a topic and the splitting of a it would make it less confusing.
8. Create sticky topics. If the mod sees a topic that would be useful or of interest to always appear at the top of each section, he or she can edit the first post, and change the type to "Sticky" so that the post will always be among the first in the section. After some time, these topics can be changed back to "Normal" type to be sorted with the rest of the topics, and different ones can be changed to "Sticky".
If you would like to comment on this post, please start a topic in the "Please Help Make This Site Better" section.
To see who the moderators are, click here.
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