Quote:
Originally Posted by Z-man
jeffgrant: what you propose is interesting, but if those requirements were placed upon the moderators here, then I would respectfully resign as a moderator. There are two of us who primarily moderate the OT sections -- Todd (Nostatic) and I. We don't get paid for our work, and we both have full scheduled outside of these boards, believe it or not. Thus, we don't have time to read everything, or as you suggest, read and then approve appropriate content and delete inappropriate content.
|
To be clear, I didn't really propose anything... I was just relaying how another board runs.
And I totally understand your position, and even stated that I didn't think that those other moderation "guidelines" would fit in around here. I was simply providing some food for thought, is all.
None of us who moderate on the other site get any kind of payment, and the site almost breaks even thanks to the banner ads that we have.
There are about 4 of us who basically volunteer our time to do the full-time moderation, because it's worth it. (I also happen to do the site programming and hosting administration because I run a software company out of my house, so it's easy for me and I have the time). We also have a number of other "part-time" mods who moderate various special-interest areas of the forum as subject matter experts; our fairly active military threads are moderated by a member of SPECOPS, technical boards are overseen by myself, sports boards by another, etc.
I would argue that there can be no such thing as "self-moderation" though... to me that is the passive moderation I referred to, and allows the infighting and poo-flinging we've mentioned earlier. In other words, the mods don't actively moderate in order to keep threads in line or on track, they rather observe and deal with the major issues that break the terms of use and let the other things fall where they may.
Semantics, more than anything.
Again, not recommending that the style of moderation I described be applied here, just offering insight into how it's done elsewhere.