i wonder what it is like being a moderator???

[psu-noob]

hmmmmmmmmmmm.............

[Tahldon]

I imagine its a bit stressful, having to read the lot of silly topics that come up and act accordingly.

I'm too lazy to even want to imagine what it's like. I sure wouldn't do it..

[beatrixkiddo]

Like this:
http://i54.photobucket.com/albums/g83/mr_wizard_album/ZergRush.jpg

[ABDUR101]

You tend to euthanise puppies and kittens to releive stress in your spare time. Other than that it's all handing out warnings, checking sig sizes and banning people. =]

[Sayara]

I've admin a few places in my day; but there nothing to being a mod here.

The amount of people and the unbiased judgement you must provide is insane!

You mind as well be a Ryna-Bot to do this job.

[Sinue_v2]

I used to mod some of the forums over at PSX2Central back shortly after the PS2 first launched. I think Dante wrote about Forum Moderators being one of the mid-levels of hell. Like an outskirt to the city of Dis. It's the equivilent to an internet daycare centery where there are 3000+ screaming children and only about 10 people to watch over them.

[Sekani]

The larger the forum, the more you'll HATE the job. This isn't an official site at least, so the ones here have a lot more leeway in how they choose to handle things. I was a moderator for the EGM forums before they moved over to 1UP.com. What a joke that was. I'd only want to be a moderator again if I get to be a total smart-ass and insult every stupid person that I banned. That would be fun.

[Nai_Calus]

Tedious, frustrating, a pain in the ass and something for which you need balls of steel, the patience of a saint and the emotional involvement of a computer.

Small forums can be worse than big forums, depending on the subject matter and demographic group. I used to run a small forum for a high-drama fandom populated by large amounts of teenage girls. Every time I tried to, you know, actually do mod-type things I got whining, including from my co-admin, that my 'nazi-ish' mod style was 'driving people away'. My nazi-ism? Telling people to stop spamming outside of the spam forum, moving threads that belonged in spam to where they belonged, telling people who were making personal attacks to stop and telling people not to post blatantly sexual artwork. ALL of this was in the forum rules. After a while I lost interest in the fandom and stopped posting at all there other than to do moderation, and the bitching got so loud and whiny that I said fuck it and closed the forum. I knew most of them IRL, which made it worse, since a good number of them should have known better, based on experience with them, but I guess the internet just makes people stupid.

I have a great deal of respect for the mods here and the shit I know they have to put up with.

[Katrina]

I'd imagine like playing grade school principal, without the paddle and cheap suit.

[Powder Keg]

I moderated a codebreaker forum years ago for a while. This place gets about the same traffic as it used to, as long as you know what you're doing it's no problem, but it's only suitable for people who come here everyday and have a lot of time on their hands.

[Wyndham]

I was a mod at 3 boards, one of them I had full priveliges. It wasn't easy, but I got to do funny stuff.

[Niered]

On 2007-08-15 04:16, Pixiesugar wrote:
I'd imagine like playing grade school principal, without the paddle and cheap suit.



Damn. Here I was thinking it couldnt be ALL bad.

[KodiaX987]

Moderating, hmm? Or rather, babysitting a legion of 6 year olds who have a problem with authority.

Here's stuff we got in #psow that was pretty much considered the norm:

-People thinking we were Sega.
-People thinking we made PSO.
-People thinking we managed the PSO servers.
-"wen iz teh survur gunna b bak on?????!?!?" As if anybody fucking knows.
-Exploding temper tantrums after a single kick. One of them even got angry at the bot.
-People so hellbent on staying that they change their hostmark or IP for the sole purpose of getting back in.
-People who consider themselves hackers, and who come back after a kick and claim they evaded it.
-People who come in, ask a question, then leave 15 seconds later.
-People who arrive in the middle of the night and claim we're boring because nobody's talking.
-People who insult the first person they see.
-People who couldn't type a coherent sentence if their life depended on it.

And of course, whenever it's time to actually "moderate", rather than getting a thank you from the members, you get a shower of curses and death threats from the guy you just banned.

[Kylie]

Yes, an opportunity to brag about my experience! http://www.pso-world.com/images/phpbb/icons/smiles/anime2.gif Kidding, it's not really that big of a deal to me, though I am proud because anyone would be after achieving a goal. Anyways, I've been doing message boards for over three years, and I started out by modding and co-adminning on some ratty, old anime and FF boards. Then I opened up my own Resident Evil board, that reached a collective amount of individual members of 600-800 (pretty good for a single themed Invisionfree board). I closed that board for various reasons and accepted a position on the copyright team at the Invisionfree Skin Zone (230,000+ members and about 3.5 million posts). I did that for five months, then I became the manager of the copyright team for a little under three months, until I retired recently. http://www.pso-world.com/images/phpbb/icons/smiles/icon_smile.gif Moderating has its highs and lows, but I think it's fun and worthwhile, knowing that you're helping a community grow.



<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: Kylie on 2007-08-16 10:12 ]</font>

[Sord]

No doubt it would be really annoying, being completely unbiased about people I would find pretty hard. I know i could restrain myself from using mod powers on someone I dislike, but to be mostly unbiased in all posts to keep a good moderator image would be tough for me. As for reading everything, that would be annoying depending on the forum. I already read every post in FKL, but I could really care less about a lot of rant threads. Off topic normally isn't that bad, though plenty of stuff talked about I could care less for. Lounge and Site Related seem relatively easy, most just seem to have threads moved to or from them.

Not sure about the rest of the place, I don't visit outside of Community except for fanworks. Heard PSU General is hell though.

[Axispoint]

On 2007-08-16 04:50, KodiaX987 wrote:
And of course, whenever it's time to actually "moderate", rather than getting a thank you from the members, you get a shower of curses and death threats from the guy you just banned.



These forums have always had good mods and they actually work to mod things. I used to post at a site that had no mods at all. Total hell-hole. I finally stopped going there, because other then the fact that I thought the owner of the site was an idiot, I never agreed with not having moderators. Stupid move, especially on a site like that (site for a semi-famous music guy).

Funny thing, though, about those people that get mad when they get banned: they evidentially can't take responsibility for their own actions, which is why they got banned. Though I wonder how much of that is a product of the recent generation, as it seems that parents never want to take responsibility for the things kids do ("oh, it was because they played that grand theft auto" instead of the obvious question of why said parent let the kid play the game in the first place). And looks like it's rubbing off on the kids, teens, etc.

I know not every kid is like that and the ones that aren't tend to be the ones who don't get banned, because they think ahead of the consequences of posting something offensive and/or bannable (sp?). And don't do it.

I think though, that there are a lot of good posters here. Just sometimes a bad egg might stand out, but overall, I've noticed the people here tend to be pretty cool (I read more then I post O_O).

Oh and:


KodiaX987 wrote:

-People who couldn't type a coherent sentence if their life depended on it.




This is a pet peeve on mine. I accept it on games, but on message boards, when lazy people type u instead of you and all the other shortcuts, it's irritating. It's a message board, not a chatroom. You have plenty of time to write your message and if you're in that much of a hurry, mark the page and post later. I do admit I've seen some posts on here I could hardly understand O_O. And that's considering I don't even see typo's most of the time. The grammar was just that horrible. http://www.pso-world.com/images/phpbb/icons/smiles/icon_frown.gif

However, I do realize how thankless a job being a mod is. Same thing happens to cops, too. No one thanks them for keeping the community going smooth (safe). They would rather spit on them and call them names. Guess it just goes to show that being disrespectful to authority is not just a message board thing (though I would imagine, with the anonymity of the internet, that it would be a little worse then what cops get). http://www.pso-world.com/images/phpbb/icons/smiles/icon_frown.gif



<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: Axispoint on 2007-08-17 14:04 ]</font>

[PJ]

I don't see why people feel the need to be unbiased.

Not only is that very hard to do, but it's not like many places mods bother to keep themselves unbiased.