A changing of the guard..

As my colleagues have been made aware, I have resigned as moderator of this forum.

I would like to thank the people who have participated in this sub-forum. You have ensured that I had very little to do. Thank you!

And I hope that whoever is the next moderator will find it just as easy.

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Are you volunteering? We haven't had a lot of female Moderators and they haven't always worked out splendidly, e.g. Sam. We need more.

Apparently Bells got into an argument with one of the other Moderators and felt that she had been demeaned, or something like that anyway. I wasn't in on it so I can't tell you any more than that. I'm certainly not going to go searching back over the super-secret Moderators' subforum looking for it at this point.

You have to have a really thick skin to do this job. If the members aren't raggin' on ya, the other Mods are. In Western culture men typically withstand that kind of crap better than women. We compartmentalize everything so when we walk away from our screens we don't even remember it happened.

That's why we're always asking, "What's wrong, Honey?" If it's something that came up yesterday, as far as we're concerned it has ceased to exist. On the other hand it allows us to sit down with somebody who killed millions of our people--yesterday!--and sign a peace treaty.

 

Depends on the board. Over on Linguistics I spend most of my time answering interesting questions. On Politics you might break up some flame wars. On some of the hard science boards you have to be on the lookout for religionism and other crackpottery. People ask you to move threads around. If you find commercial spam you have to delete it and permaban the poster, which is useless because the same one never comes back.

You have to always be on the lookout for rule violations, such as personal insults, racism and trolling. Trolling isn't always easy to figure out since many of our members are very young; they blow off steam and their sense of humor is not quite fully developed but they don't really mean any harm. You have to temp-ban people who violate the rules and if they keep it up they can be permabanned, but every moderator has a reasonable amount of discretion on how he handles things on his own board.

We have our own Super Secret Moderators board and you have to check in regularly to see what's going on. We have discussions about how to solve recurring problems and sometimes we just come for a hug--although that's not always what's waiting for us. The administrators have concerns about the direction the website is taking and it's our job to keep it moving in the right direction. The people who run SciForums now want us to return it to the place of science and scholarship it was ten years ago when I first joined, so there's a lot of cleaning up to do. Sometimes when you take out the trash the trash objects.

You have to be fairly even-tempered. Moderators have been fired for getting too hot-headed, and Moderators have resigned for not being able to put up with the abuse.