Originally by: CCP Mitnal

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We changed our policies in December when the Community Representatives came on-board to make bans require fewer warnings (2 warnings = 14 day forum holiday rather than the previous 5 warnings = 24 hour timeout).

Whether or not this has had an effect I'm not sure, although the perception of the community, if I'm not mistaken, is that discussion is lowering in quality.

To me, some threads seem to be an exercise in whom can get the one-liner in the quickest or repeat whichever internet meme is going the rounds. Others are a distraction for bored people at work who troll their way through the day and are quite happy to admit to it.

However, each thread has to be taken on its merits and it can be very difficult to work out the fake posters from the real ones.

If we were to lock every thread - and there have been days when CAOD, for instance, is a sea of locks, this does not look good either for the posters or for us and demands to drop the ban hammer everywhere whilst tempting at times is the same. To over-moderate is just as bad as under-moderating and what people tend to want from moderators is consistency.

Now consistency, taking into account different tastes, cultures and upbringings is very difficult to achieve but we try our best and I'm afraid that being too aggressive would backfire just as much as being too lenient.

We do lock many threads, we do remove an awful lot of posts (and face the inevitable questions about phantom moderating, people generally hate to have their posts removed) and we do filter and are aware of the traffic individual forums have when driving threads into other areas.

Moderating is a subjective discipline and everyone has and generally is only too happy to share their opinion with you. We don't get it right 100% of the time but we aim for at least 14%

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