(Site is a graveyard - How can boards save itself?) Any update?

I'd be sitebanned if I said what I actually want to say 😉

I've posted a few times about where I think a lot of the issues are and I quickly get turned on!

To keep it simply (and not risk a siteban) this is a forum where the minimum membership age is supposed to be 16. Now, I don't believe there are that many 16 year olds on here. So if we assume that the members of this site are pretty much exclusively adults, then expecting moderators to babysit and referee childish spats and arguments and name calling and intolerance and abuse and blaming the MODERATORS because other people are posting these posts is ridiculous. I have a son. As a toddler he used to blame me if he did something wrong. He once spilled something and looked at me and told me it was my fault because I didn't tell him to be careful. HE WAS 3 at the time!! (I laughed and told him he was responsible for his own actions!)

Posters here trying to blame the moderators for the behaviour of other adults remind me of my 3 year old toddler - although he grew out of it.

I mentioned earlier receiving an abusive PM after asking (not warning) two posters to stop bickering. I was told that maybe we should post a notice to let people know sending abusive PMs isn't allowed (?!?) Seriously?? That needs to be spelled out to adults? Teenagers would know that sending abuse online is not very clever.

The types of posters who will send abuse, troll, bait, etc will do it if there's a big moving flashing banner across the top of the site asking them not to. Because that's just who they are. I think any adult on here who can keep a straight face while also claiming that basic human manners and rules of decent interaction needs to be explicitly spelled out to adult men and women are themselves trolling!

There is a very good reason that the CA forum is short on moderators. None of the sensible people want to touch it. Which leaves the regulars and there is nobody from that list who could handle the role. You need to be level headed, you need to be calm, you need to be able to hold your own against posters who will do all sorts of mental gymnastics to try twist what they said, or what you said, or what someone else said to prove how everyone else is wrong and they're misunderstood. You need to have a thick skin, and enough of a loyalty to this site (a site that so many here seem to find so much fault with, dislike so much, find nothing positive to say about it but yet can't stay away!) to offer your free time to referee puerile arguments from adults who really should know better and just cop on.

That's what I think.

We don't have any strict criteria for our mods, there's no defined list of things that a potential mod must display or not display. We don't require potential mods to have clean records, we don't require them to hold any particular views, we don't require them to be totally impartial on the subject matter (which is pretty much impossible). Every single potential mod is judged on merit.

There has to be a minimum standard as we (and users) have seen plenty of times in the past what happens when the wrong person gets made a mod. We don't always get it right.

The list of criteria that Big Bag of Chips laid out is a fairly low bar.

Something like this would be my preference. I suggested it earlier in the thread. As you said, maybe just in CA for the moment. Other areas aren't quite as troublesome. Warnings could come with short sharp bans, building up to lengthier ones. It is clear to everyone that poster behaviour in CA/IMHO is a huge problem, the huge problem, on the site.

Tougher warnings and bans in there and no DRP should clean the place up fairly quickly. People will either: get banned, stay away if they don't like the rules, or clean their act up.

I'm not seeing any downside!