Tiberath wrote:

It doesn't work at all, that's the point. If I want Nadrew's attention, I'll reply to Naderw's post. It's how these forums work. Anyone who's not doing this is using the forums incorrectly.

See, Nadrew just posted a reply to the last post in the thread, even though it wasn't much directed at it. That's how most posts are made from what I've seen.

EDIT: There were 12 posts between his, and the very first one. Meaning, if any in that chain were deleted then his post would also be lost.

Did you read my edit? It said this:
"EDIT: There were 12 posts between his, and the very first one. Meaning, if any in that chain were deleted then his post would also be lost."
exciting! isn't it =o

SilkWizard wrote:

Without a clearly defined set of standards and rules for moderation, the mod team will continue this behavior indefinitely. "Rules" around here are based upon the whims of individuals with no accountability.

Incorrect. They have accountability towards Tom and towards eachother, and this has continually functioned fine for a long, long time. If posts are mismoderated other moderators bring it up, discussion ensues and all are made wiser. If a moderator is in doubt, they'll ask others to get their opinion. Occasionally, if a Moderator participates in a thread themselves, they'll ask someone impartial to consider moderating it. These are some of the best moderated forums I've seen, especially considering the audience at hand. OTOH, rules are easy to hide behind both for moderators and users. They tend to encourage slipping past them, especially for long-time users. Strict rules tend to encourage not understanding and knowing your community, something that comes out to a negative in a smaller community such as this. There are no spam-related reasons to have uber-strict rules.

Coincidentally, almost all sensible forums ban all forms of discussion on moderatorship. And while its not kosher to be doing here either, at least you get straight answers instead of the thread being closed at the OP post and the OP being warned/banned.

However, I do believe there once was a set of 'common sense' guidelines, that many of us never understood where went and why they weren't brought back. While long-time users have a clear idea of what the community tends to accept, new users don't have somewhere to look at what is generally acceptable and what isn't.

Falacy wrote:

Overlords (forum owners, whatever) should be able to set a list of reasons for why a post is being deleted, a topic is being closed, or moved, or whatever (spam, flame, off topic, etc).

we have that already. it's how we can double-check each other in the event of an obvious mis-handled moderation action.

it's only available to BYOND moderators in the Developer forums.

since the majority of member forums are run by one moderator, it doesn't make too much sense to add a history function to member moderation actions, since they ought to be able to keep track.

for more than one moderator, the member blog owner can provide a private section to discuss mod actions amongst themselves. that's basically what we do.

on the other hand, a member-level mod history list is not an entirely bad thing, other than adding to the size of the forum database.

Whenever you close/delete/move a thread, you can leave a comment. Then, click the View History link in the top left. Same for banning users.

See here.

[edit]
It seems you were talking about a specific list of reasons, in which case, no, we don't have that (and I don't think the major dev forums do either). However, the standard input box we do have should suffice.

A publicly accessible list of clearly defined rules would be nice to have.

Stephen001 wrote:

The rules are not clearly defined, so this is somewhat impossible. If you think it might get you in trouble, you probably shouldn't be doing it.

A good rule to apply anywhere.

So basically the situation is 'at the discretion of the moderators. Not that that is a problem, all the moderators on BYOND were very well picked and are very level headed.

It is still nice to know the general guidelines of things.

For example, are there any times you will give out punishments for making pointless / off topic posts?

What about direct flaming or things of that nature?

Stephen001 wrote:

Yes and yes.

Yes, except the punishments you give (if any) are random, and randomly handed out on those offenses to begin with, which is why there should be actual rules, both for users and moderators. And why are we bumping a 3 month old topic <.<

We can lay rules out if you like, but it doesn't especially mean they'll be enforced any more consistently than moderator discretion is currently.