Originally Posted by
CMK10
Hogwash. The way I see it: there are 10,000 or so active posters here speaking in approximately 100 forums about thousands of different topics. The posters all differ, the subject matter all differs and the moderators all differ. There will be different issues in different forums and a uniform moderation system could not work.
If you know something different or have a solution by all means share it. Especially if the Community will be better off.
Originally Posted by
sbm12
I tried for several years while I was a mod. I was eventually fired for such efforts. They don't want to change, even when presented with broad collections of facts showing the problems and how easy it would be to address them.
You say that the users in each forum need to be treated differently. Why? If I post in three different fora then why should I need to play by different rules in each? Are they not all part of the same site and, at least in theory, covered by the same ToS??
I am not sure what the desire to have uniformity is all about, but with over 100 forums with anywhere from 0 to >1000 posts per day and over 100 volunteer mods, you'll never get 100% uniformity.
That being said, I think there are two different issues:
(1) enforcement of the TOS / "hard rules":
I think there has been an overall trend for mods to enforce those in a similar way across FT. It obviously can be challenging at times, but the mods have spent and still spend a fair amount of time to ensure consistency across FT. Believe it or not, mods will often even ask their fellow co-mods for advice before dealing with certain TOS violations.
(2) enforcement of guidelines / rules open to interpretation:
Moderators in different forums take a very different approach when it comes to enforcing "guidelines" - such as deciding what posts are "off-topic" - and I think that makes perfect sense.
Here's a fictitious conversation in the Fairmont forum:
A: I'm going the Banff Springs for my honeymoon trip. What suite would I get when using a suite upgrade cert.
B: Congrats on getting married!
C: +1
D: You'd get a one-bedroom excutive Valley View Suite.
A: Great - thanks. On a related note: What's the best restaurant in Banff?
E: I highly recommend xyz restaurant.
Based on the guidelines I could delete the posts by B and C as being off-topic and move the last two posts to the Canada destination forum (or delete them as well). However, since it's a rather small forum, I usually won't do any of that unless the thread drifts too far OT. The same somewhat relaxed approach just wouldn't work in the AC/AA/UA forums and mods will intervene more often to avoid OT posts.
The moderation style will obviously very much depend on the volume of posts, how civilized the forum is to begin with, the number of participants and how good the members are at getting the thread back on-topic without any mod intervention. I don't think there's anything wrong with each forum having a slightly different culture.