Originally Posted by Jenbel

Just a bit of revisionist history!

In the beginning, moderation could be discussed more freely on FT. However, it was observed that to do so, didn't make many of the dissatisfied more satisfied. They were dissastified because they profoundly disagreed with the approach to moderation, often because they had been on the board since the beginning and their viewpoint had never changed from that of it being a small board with a handful of members where we all had a thrilling time discussing how great we were. They wanted to carry on being able to post what they wanted where they wanted... along that route lay madness.

And, since moderators were unable to defend themselves - they (as I wasn't one at the time) found there were a large number of outright lies being put out, which could not be refuted due to Randy's restrictions to the mods on discussing discipline with anyone other than the person disciplined and possibly other mods/Randy. These lies sounded terribly oppressive to those who didn't know the real truth, fostering ill-feeling against the moderators - who could not speak back/give their version/post what had actually happened.

Given the choice between allowing these types of conversation to continue to no good effect, or allowing mods to openly speak about other people's discipline, or banning conversation entirely since this is a board about points and miles, Randy chose the third course.

All that meant was that those who were still dissatisfied tried to use TB as an outlet for their dissatisfaction. As a result, and because Randy thought that moderation policy should be independent of popularity contests, TB and moderation were separated.

In a way it is sad. A large amount of dissatisfaction arose (IMHO) because those who were dissatisfied were such because they were not in control of the board, and many of them did not appreciate that loss of control. Yet because of them and the hue and cry they raised against ALL moderation, we lost all ability to discuss moderation honestly and openly. Moderation isn't perfect and it would be great to be able to discuss members' views on some issues (and indeed some of us are able to do this when we reach a point where we are unsure what the forum users want - cf. the thread in Cbuzz on commercialisation of dos).

But at the same time, when you volunteer to do a task to assist/help, only to find someone is willing to lie to everyone else about what you said to them when they overstepped the rules of FT, well forgive us for being human and not wanting to waste our time engaging in trying to refute that kind of lying spin which tells us how evil and capricious we all are.

Sadly, as moderators know, not all people do act reasonably when approached reasonably. Some really, really, really cannot ever admit they overstepped the mark, don't like being told no, or that they behaved badly - and will continue to attempt to argue for the rest of their time on FT that it was all the mods fault... of course not theirs'! {Edited by moderator to reflect changes made by OP in her original post}