Respect your moderators.
I was a member of a large (tens of thousands of members worldwide) motorcycle forum for more than ten years, and after a few years I decided to give something back by putting my hand up to be a moderator, which I did for some years - maybe six years from memory.
Moderating was not fun for me, it was a responsibility.
Our biggest problem by far was spammers, I was deleting about 100 new members every month just for spamming the forum. Some were immediately obvious even before their first post (given away by their user name, email address or sig file), others would sneak around posting innocuous comments before dumping their spam, even sneakier ones would copy and paste some contributory comment stolen from another post or forum, but tack on a spam link, or edit the post later on to add the spam. Dealing with the spammers very significantly ate up time I could otherwise have spent contributing to threads. But if I didn't stay on top of it daily it became a major chore after several weeks of piling up.
Something I took particularly seriously was monitoring the For Sale forums to ensure our members were not ripped off. Basically, if a recent member posted items for sale they got a fairly intense background check from me to see if they'd had dealings around other forums, auction sites, Police records and such. An immediate flag for me was if their email address(es), name or phone numbers didn't bring back any hits that could identify them. Remaining absolutely untraceable on the internet while selling stuff takes quite a lot of effort, more effort than most people are willing to put in just to sell a $250 fuel tank or some such item. I was amazed that in the US people are perfectly willing to sell very thinly veiled but obviously stolen motorcycles on public forums. They were forwarded to the relevant authorities immediately.
A smaller, but significant problem were people that had little idea of their subject but took great joy in trying to assist people by giving them incorrect information, albeit with the best of intention. Information on a forum is there forever and will be seen by people searching for such information. It is in nobody's best interest to perpetuate false information, but this is not generally seen to be within a moderator's purview. Having put my hand up for the job though I spent a lot of my time trying to ensure the forum remained a useful and accurate resource. Since I don't know everything this usually involved some degree of research to confirm or correct those subjects I am fairly intimate with, or to pass such things as electrical or aesthetic matters on to somebody else that understood them.
We also had little tolerance for people trying to promote illegal activities, like street racing for example, and we very quickly jumped on the blow hards and bullshitters - they benefit nobody at all.
Far less of a problem were the occasional discussions that got heated. I have zero tolerance for any personal attack of any kind. For myself, lack of tolerance toward other people on absolutely no tangible grounds at all is reprehensible, but sadly, still a significant problem within society. I would report such a post, with my view of it, which would go to the moderator's forum for discussion (we had about ten mods and 3-4 admins at any period - the forum changed hands at least twice while I was a moderator). However, as a moderator I considered it more appropriate to publicly reprimand the offender - hopefully they were decent enough to realise they had gone to far, apologise to the recipient and the members in general, and move on. Most did so. Such situations were not deleted but left as a reminder to all that we are human, we make mistakes, we own them. Everybody has a right to evolve and learn from their mistakes. Any member that was not sufficiently evolved to see their problem got a private message from me to enlighten them in depth. If they still didn't get it, they were removed. In all my time I probably banned less than ten members for such transgressions, most of them several times as they came back under new aliases. If they returned but behaved then I had no problem with them, but I watched them carefully. Sadly, some members very clearly had issues with drugs, alcohol, rage, or had mental illnesses (PTSD mainly I think due to the high number of US military personal), and despite their generally useful contribution to the forum, their regular binges were intolerable and they also had to go. These people often came back after some time, behaved for a period, but sadly let themselves down again. The moderators also tend to receive even worse abuse once they step in. I had one clearly PTSD US Marine actually calling motorcycle shops in Perth trying to track me down
Forum members are people just like you would meet in day-to-day life, fighting the same battles we all do, some less successfully than others.
Our forum was large, with members from some of the most remote corners of the world, struggling with some problem with their bike. Some had not a single word of English but Google Translate generally allowed us to make some sort of headway (for some reason Thai is particularly difficult for Google to translate). Many were simply not computer literate or forum savvy and had come to us out of desperation. Others had various injuries or handicaps that made communication less than ideal. Too many times such people were criticised for their efforts by other members. I made strenuous efforts to help these people in particular, and to show others that doing so only takes slightly more effort than helping somebody who is able to communicate more clearly. I was very pleased to see several other members start to follow my lead, possibly my single greatest contribution to the forum, in my own opinion.
I have had little to do with firearms forums until 2014, other than occasional browsing. I signed up to _a lot_ of forums and had a browse to decide where Aussie shooters and hunters were getting together online. Enoughgun is the best I've found to date. People that respect each other and try to help others improve themselves is what makes any forum great, but without active moderators it quickly falls apart. A forum with a long list of questions posted, with dozens of views, but no contributing discussion is pointless.
But recently I have been disappointed with the garbage that a handful of posters have gotten away with.
Thumbs up from me Aster
