I have a huge amount of sympathy for the mods. I think I’ve mentioned before in a similar thread (these do seem to crop up every couple of months...) that I was once a moderator on the official forum for a reasonably well-known metal band. It was very hard striking a balance between what was seen as banter and in-jokes, and what tipped over the line to unpleasant behaviour that brought the atmosphere of the entire forum down and made many of the… ahem, less dramatic members of the community start avoiding the place.
The problem was that if the moderators enforced the rules rigidly, there would be mass moaning that the place was sterile, and that it wasn’t right for a metal forum, it’s only banter, etc. But if we left it, stuff would start to escalate and then we’d have to have a crackdown and put up reminders for the rules, then there would be moaning that we were making the place sterile. And there were situations where it wasn’t black or white – sometimes things were a bit fuzzy, and it came down to individual moderator judgement (or we discussed it and put it to a vote). Sometimes past behaviour is taken into context too. It can make the moderating seem a bit inconsistent and therefore unfair, but unless you want something like /b/ on 4Chan, you have to draw the line somewhere. If you’re trying to draw in a broad audience and have advertisers (or a band) to please, sometimes that line is quite lengthy.
In short, you’re all a bunch of moany moanfaces. And now a lolcat.
mrsconsequence better provide me with ample wedding/hotel sex to make up for missing out!
