Voted for the brainstorm!

I propose the radical approach i always proposed: A self-regulating forum without moderation per se, rather supervision of a per-post rating system (+ and -) for every user. Like i previously said, in a network things sort out themselves pretty quickly. In any case, the use of dedicated human staff is always a failure (in my opinion).

I voted for the brainstorm.

However, sometimes I really think that TMO should do what StackOverflow is doing.

The existing moderator team would be sufficient. Post a set of rules, and enforce them. Then you don't need an army of moderators with some kind of bizarre military hierarchy.

Honestly, if all it takes to cause someone to throw a tantrum and 'leave the community' is a couple of trolls, no community that relies on such people is going to survive the internet.

Also, this is garbage: Ad hominem stuff should be moved, in my opinion, to Off Topic, and Off Topic shouldn't show up at all in the active posts sidebar. But 'attacking' people's work is too vague, especially when there are content-producing moderators. All it would really take is one hypersensitive moderator who made a crappy application to drive his or her forum into being a useless monoculture.

In short, he's not even complaining about malware linking or commercial spam. He's complaining about fake firmware threads and porn threads, which aren't against the rules, because there aren't any listed rules. Instead he's proposing a handful of people be able to delete stuff arbitrarily. That never ends well.

The only way andrewfblack's proposal would work is if the moderators were elected, so they had some incentive not to be drama queens, and there were an actual set of listed rules. I think you'd find that with nearly 25 moderators to elect, there won't be a large enough body of members to take interest in the elections, and I also think that the mods we have now would be able to do a better job if the forums had some hard-and-fast rules.

moderators should not have an "area" - sure, they might have their favorite places but if push comes to shove a troll is a troll and moderation is required wherever it occurs.

you might think of the areas covered normally to arrange the final number (how did you come to that as well, it should be easy to fluctuate either side of a normal working set)

agreed more has to be done even whilst each individual moderator i have seen has done excellent individually and the style of the high profile moderators should be followed as they generally make the right on the spot decisions.

(ps downvoted the first brainstorm choice because it would not have helped the case this morning where texrat was left moderationless because it was out of his area, he did excellently under incredible pressure)

No tantrum thrown, no statement about leaving this community.

If you're going to wantonly slam someone, at least do it factually.

Not sure what you're talking about. I was referring to this:

My apologies. But I still haven't seen any tantrums thrown by moderators... despite the frustrations of the role.

Maybe I phrased it badly? I meant to imply that 'leaving the community' was the tantrum. I have never had any problems with the mods here... but I do think that mods shouldn't be restricted to one subforum, and I think at least a loose set of user-accessible guidelines would be helpful.

The base ruleset here is common sense + ethical code + no politics + no religious talk. This is not any website with a closed forum where you have your playground. We are here at an open source community website attached to a commercial product.

It took me about 1.5h this afternoon to clean up the mess from RC leakage including flamewars and people getting personal on each other afterwards. This is fun I can tell!

Banning people is only one klick away but I take the time and offer a chance to apologize. If people would calm down before they post it would save much time from all of us. There is no point in getting personal over here.

Noise, useless and other posts doing no good to this community will get moved or deleted like at any other community website too. Again, point your fingers at me if you want to blame someone, I take it. The SNR is getting worse everyday, either you do something about or moderators will find it on their own randomly. Make use of the "Report This" function! I got about 20 reports today which isnt much I guess but complaints all over the place.

Impossible things will be handled immediately, miracles take a little bit longer.

For the moderation structure: TMO needs mods based on sections as noone can keep track all over the place, if I find something not for my section I use the uberSearch function and merge all posts I find to the section they belong to. This is slow but it works. For not giving random people power over TMO globaly it is a good way (thats how it is currently handled) to hand out subsections duty and have a look how they behave. I used to report posts for merging a lot. Improvement there would be a change of the delay set to something like 20 instead of 60 seconds or remove it for moderators at all.

Setting up a rules page is up to the council I guess or at least it should be verified by it. Policy Agreement checkbox for signup page and an announcement showing in all sections is the best way to get everybody on the same page.