UBB.Developers Forums General Discussion Chit Chat How do you handle moderation complaints?

Hi,

Just wondering how people handle moderation complaints.

I was on holiday for 2 weeks and left one of my Mods in charge as a temp admin. Some members knew I was gone and things got out of hand quickly resulting in the temp admin banning 2 people.

This started an (yet again) a massive discussion on moderating and what is wrong with it (nobody comes up with viable alternatives though).

We have one of these threads every couple of months and they are really quite annoying as at the end of the day, nothing much changes.

I would much prefer people to *only* complain in PM, but of course they do it on the open board so they will have an audience.

Luckily the majority of the members is happy with the moderation and understands that the board is not run through a democracy, but still there are always those that need to bitch and complain whenever they see the slightest opening.

Anyway, enough ranting. How do you deal with complaints about the moderation / moderators?

Sanuk!

It would depend on whether or not the problem was with the moderator or the member - progressive discipline starting with a pm to "we are noticing you are doing blah blah blah, please don't" increasing up to banning if the issue isn't straightened out. It depends on the issue too, sometimes a first offense is enough to go straight to a ban. It's much better to deal with it in private and quickly to keep them from spoiling it for everyone.

We developed a set of guidelines for moderators at ubbdev and adapted for here - clear expectations up front head off a lot of problems that could have popped up if we were vague about how we handle things. Here's the link:

https://www.ubbdev.com/columns/tackaberry/mod_guide.html

The moderator implicitly agrees to the guidelines before they start. Feel free to adapt for your own use.

Hi,

Thanks for the guidelines. I, however, do not think that my problem is with the moderators, but rather with some of the members who just like to stir the [censored].

I would love to be able to keep all the moderation behind the scenes, but unfortunately this doesn't always work. Besides it is sometimes useful to display a bit of 'force', helps in making others understand you are serious.

I guess the way we run our board is fairly okay, the amount of flaming is very low. Mainly I think because over the years we have build up a reputation, flaming is not tolerated.

Anyway, once again, thanks for the guidelines.

Sanuk!

You could always make a quick example out of the worst offender - that should keep things quiet for a while to come

Hi,

"You could always make a quick example out of the worst offender"

Yep, I do that from time to time. It's great to be in control of the 'Big Red Button'

Sanuk!

Instead of doing that, I just got rid of the offending forum. Did the same job and no users got hurt in the process.