[MOSFET]

When
you have a glorified digital janitor on a power-kick who erases half
your posts, even though they contained good advice, moderated forums
can be frustrating (not that all mods are like that, but as
stereotypes go...........).


I hear you there, brother. I was a member of two moderated home-stereo
audiophile groups and my posts were often not posted although I knew they
were relevant and helpful to the discussion at hand (at least based on what
I saw from other postings, not that I am the end-all, be-all expert on
high-end home audio). Once I asked a question and recieved a curt Email
back that my question was not "worthy" for consideration by the regular
"gods".

What I began to notice was that certain individuals seemed to ALWAYS get
their posts listed, no matter how superflouous or unrelated their comments
were. And it wans't long before I relalized what I was TRULY dealing with
was a private club for "members only". Needless to say, after this
epiphany, I never went back.

So yes, I agree with you Lull. My experience with EVERY mod I've ever
participated in has not been a positive one.

And I suppose I can see why. Even the most earnest attempt at making an all
inclusive, helpful, flame and obsenity free moderated group will, in all
probability, eventually go south. The reason is simple, the moderator.

After wading through endless SPAM, obsenity, non-related topics, and
downright nastiness, a moderator will eventually find himself taxed for time
and become just a little jaded at all the garbage he has to read through.
No doubt a moderator will fall into the trap of creating a kind of
"short-hand" way of dealing with all the posts. The easist way is to first
allow all posts, sight unseen, from those people the moderator knows well.
The next bit of short-hand is a cursory look at everything else and at the
first sign of anything that doesn't smell right AT ALL, the delete button is
employed.

I mean, moderating a popular group CANNOT be easy and, of course, extremelly
time consuming. It is simply human nature that eventually a type of
shorthand by the moderator will evolve, no matter how noble the original
intentions. Like I said before, I don't think I'd want that job, in fact, I
KNOW I wouldn't want that responsibility.

Perhaps one day AI will evolve to the point that a computer can screen the
questions in a fair, unbiased way, but we are obviously VERY far from that
(heck, for now I'd take a bot that simply tossed out all those posts with
obsenities, it would at least be a small start down that road).

MOSFET