Well that will be it folks

Originally Posted by Mick

Well, this brings a dilemma. I recently was deleting MANY posts from one member who would make blatantly insulting posts. This went on for quite a while and kept getting worse - to the point admin and I agreed that SOMETHING needed to be done. I asked the person to not make insulting remarks which apparently offended that person. Now we have a member leaving over "bashing or flaming". I try to at least skim every post and this was much less derogatory than the other posts.



I am open to suggestions.

You're in a tough spot, Mick, and you have my sympathy.

One of the hardest things about the moderating function is to pass judgement those things that fall into that gray area of "attitude", because in large part, they set the tone of the forum. Some forums thrive on conflict, because that's what they're there for, and that's why members keep coming back. A site like this though, which exists mainly for the exchange of knowlege, can suffer from too much conflict, or from just a few members that bring a consistently bad attitude.

I help out with a forum, and we had a member, very knowlegeable, but very outspoken, who had a way of rubbing others the wrong way. He was asked, on multiple occasions, to tone it down a little, and the result was that he elected to quit participating instead. Some others lamented the fact that he'd left, but among the mods, our opinion was that the site was better off with him gone. What it came down to was that the standards we applied, in order of priority, were, 1) What's the best for the site in general?, and 2) How much moderating time is this guy worth? (We'd been asking ourselves the second question for a few months before things came to a head, and were frankly relieved once he'd gone.)

One other result of that ordeal was that we made it a policy not to host dramas over members leaving. The guy in question posted a thread detailing why he was leaving, and when we pulled it right away, that really pissed him off. Of course, he was not the type to quietly slip out the back door when he could stomp out through the front, because, well just because that's the kind of guy he was. He didn't play well with others. Now, it's still an open question of how many members left earlier because of his attitude, and how many may have left because they thought we'd run him off. I know there were a couple of those. But you know what? The forum is still there and doing fine.

Dunno if that was any help or not...