Everything in Moderation

During the entire reorganization process of GOWT last Fall, one of the major sticking points involved moderation of the discussion forums. A few of the committee members wanted the whole moderation process to be mysterious and secretive. They believed the moderators needed to be anonymous and that their actions didn't need to be justified or documented. It appears that those people won out in the design of the moderation system.

There hasn't appeared to be much need for moderation on the GOWT forums since they reopened in December, but is that because all of the "bad" people went away...or is there some other reason?

JUST LAST NIGHT...

In a response to Prontopup's droll photo narrative of what happened at the 2 GOWT events that took place in Memphis on Saturday, I posted the following:

"Great story, but you left out the part where cgeek handed out the final coordinates to a puzzle cache that wasn't hers. Sorry I don't have a funny picture to go with that."

Yeah, I know it was a snarky comment, but it made me laugh. It is also an accurate statement of something that happened at the time of the first event and was mentioned in the logs of the "spoiled" cache.

I went home after posting that, but apparently shortly afterwards, my post was deleted. Since I was not informed of violating any posting guidelines, I can reasonably assume that the individual who deleted my post did it without talking to anyone first.

The forum guidelines basically say that you can't complain about moderation practices in the forums. If you attempt to appeal a moderator action, no one would be able to know what resulted from such an appeal.

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My question is this: If there is no accountability regarding moderation practices, how does the average forum participant know whether a post was moderated/deleted due to inappropriate content or simply moderator bias?

Answer: They don't. They have to rely simply on gossip and hearsay.

The forum guidelines were designed more to protect the forum administrators and moderators from harassment than the posting rights of the average member (or non-member). I know this because I personally was responsible for the customization of the guidelines. The GOWT posting guildelines were taken from the FARK.com posting guidelines and modified to fit GOWT's needs. It took all of 10 minutes to do. I was happy with the work I had done because I was reasonably certain at the time that we would have competent administrators and moderators. That was a BIG mistake on my part to assume that.

There was a lot of compromise during the reorganization process because we needed the cooperation of the Executive Committee in order to move forward. In the end, did we REALLY move forward?