I have some complaint regarding the moredation of the Mods sub-forum

[Darker]

Hello,
it's nice to pick more people to moderate the community. However, some may be inexperienced in the normal forum manners.
I have been using this forum to announce my Rim world editor. I have made a nice post and I've been updating it frequently. Suddenly someone has changed it completely so that it matched his idea of how it should look. Ruined my way of doing it.

This all was done without me being asked or warned (I'd do a backup if I knew rage-moderation happens here).

I've also noticed that this moderator tends to delete posts without noticing that there are replies to them - after the replies suddenly make no sense.

I understand everyone must learn, yet it's hard to accept I'm the one to be harmed due to someone's lack of manners.

Just a general quotation that explains moderation being done right:

Good moderator is never noticed.

[Jones-250]

Oh. I have not noticed this phenomenon around these parts yet, but I do know that it's quite common within "young" communities, which have somewhat inexpirienced moderators. Oh well. It's good that you brought this up. Progress can only be made by finding what's wrong.

[Rokiyo]

While I was personally happy for my own mod releases being tidied up, I do agree with several of your other points.

I believe that posts generally should not be outright deleted. Even in cases of extreme profanity or abuse, the strongest response should be to clear out the contents of post and replace them with a note from the moderator as to why the edit occurred.

Likewise, threads should only be locked where they are likely to incite other users into posting profanely or abusively. Off topic posts should be moved, not locked.

[Architect]

I kind of agree. I was really grateful the first time my mod post was tidied up, as it was the next thing on my to do list for them. However, every time I change the way I bullet point my stuff, he changes it back XD It's nothing major, but it is kinda annoying.

[Darker]

I'm suprised how calm you guys are - I totally raged out when he did that to me. It never happened to me anywhere and myself, when moderating, the only thing I did was putting *** where they were necessary.

[Rokiyo]

I saw his post specifying how mod releases should be formatted before he fixed mine, so I already knew ahead of time that I wasn't compliant.

I really don't mind having a bit of consistency forced upon us for mod releases, though the template could stand to be a bit more flexible... Yeah I lose some personal freedom, but it certainly makes reading other people's mod posts a heck of a lot easier.

EDIT: I just saw your RimEdit mod post Darker, and I must say I quite like how you have formatted it. The important thing for me is that it is readable and contains clear section headings, not that it is coloured in a specific way.

[Luckless]

Heavy handed moderation rules such as that are an excellent way to poison a community and needlessly create hard feelings and alienate members, and they are made worse with abrupt application of moderation powers when no communication is attempted.

Excessive "my way or the highway" results in many choosing the highway, and leaving a clique that is at risk of becoming absolutely horrible for new people to join.

General guide lines on posts are good, but leave the creator free to be flexible with how they post. Readability is important, not that they have followed the letter of an arbitrary template 100%. 100% strict templates are actually a great way to reduce readability.

In cases where readability is less than desired the first tool used should be to communicate with the poster to inform them of your opinion. Explain what you feel is wrong and how it can be improved. Barring little things like obvious typos on links and such that break things and are easy to fix, or actual broken rules/abusive posts, the original poster should be given the chance to fix their post as they feel best.

If a mod still feels that a post is less readable than it should be, then they should continue the discussion. "I know better than you because I'm a mod!" is not a great stance for moderators to help build a community up.

[Darker]

it certainly makes reading other people's mod posts a heck of a lot easier.

If he removes bad formatting or fixes typos (though I saw his grammar and I doubt it), that's very usefull and important for all of us.

But if he just uses his power to enforce his style - that's not ok.

[Tynan]

I agree that this level of editing is unnecessary. We'll try to move towards a more minimal moderation style.