iansjack wrote:
And I have to strongly disagree with your assertion that those who contribute to these forums have some right to dictate to the owners, and the unpaid moderators, how they should do their jobs. If you have a problem then deal with it rather than appealing to authority.
Oh of course we don't! Please. Nobody is claiming that we have a
right to dictate. We have a right to
speak up and complain, and that's what we're doing in this thread. If this right is taken from us, that's the
worst form of censorship -- the inability to speak up against authority.
As you said, Chase has the right to dictate here, and he can either listen or ignore to people posting here. But if people do not complain,
there will be no change, just like in real life.
About heavily moderated forums: heck, nobody is asking for moderators to micro-manage all aspects of the forum. Again, there are lots of actions that moderators can take before removing posts and banning people (I have covered this in my previous posts already, it's getting tiring). For example, when Combuster was still active,
both me and bzt received a warning for getting into a heated argument. Did that make the forum stagnate? Is that form of moderation really problematic? Does it induce censorship? And do not make this only about bzt (even if the thread was likely created as a reaction to him). I was speaking up against moderation issues long before people complained about bzt. The issue is not that any particular individual is not banned fast enough, the issue is that post-Brendan, all moderators are too either inactive or too hesitant to speak up. Heavy moderation (= controlling the content of people's posts) is not desirable, but
some form of moderation is needed.
We probably do not need bans at all, if we have the right amount of "soft" measures.