Arashinome wrote:The mods here are pampered as fuck and they don't do half of the work that's done on most forums, yet they still get treated like they do. It's not as hard of a job as it's made out to be, you fucking read the forums and delete/move posts. That's about as far as it goes.
How do you know this? You do realize that mods do things outside the forums here as well, and in fact with some exceptions most of the administration's effort focused more on the site side of things than on the forums. Again, that's part of why we have two new mods - it's good to look after forums too.
Noone's making it out to be hard - it's just that we need to be reasonable. I don't think anyone here has made moderators into any sort of "internet heroes" - we have our obligations and we follow them. That's not heroic or "hard", it's just necessary, and that's that. Read the forum rules and descriptions - what's not clear about these? If it says "This forum is for the announcement, organisation and discussion of Multi-Editor AMV Projects" - what part of its purpose needs clarification? What part of its purpose allows for abusive forum behaviour? I'm sorry, but this has nothing to do with a) lazy mods; b) cliques or c) discrimination of any sort. A fun fact: when cleaning up the MEP forum a couple of weeks ago, I also removed posts by a couple of .org mods. So much for discrimination.
As to Nya-chan's point - I would actually suggest avoiding comparison to politics or anything like that. The forums are not a state, and we're not the government. This is a community organization, and we're responsible (but not accountable per se) to the community and the hobby, but we also have certain guidelines, values and regulations. Whatever "political" model you put on it, the fact is that what the .org is really NOT is an anarchy. The .org is not /b/. When it says that a forum is for discussion of MEPs, what part of it encourages inside jokes and memes containing offensive language and providing no value to people outside of a certain group/clique that feels itself to be unrecognized. Oh wait! Is that what this all about?
Look, noone here looks down on inside jokes or "special" humour or the fact that some people enjoy memes and imagespam. Noone here wants to look down on what a certain group of friends finds funny. But remember that there are other people on the forum. What would happen if everyone decided that it was their right to call other people faggots or post non-(overtly-)relevant images in threads? More importantly, how could we keep a forum discourse which encourages people to participate in the community, and represents the hobby in a respectable manner?
The fact is that we need to keep a certain level of civility on the forums. Tolerating what is (in accordance with forum rules and the user agreement) abuse encourages disrespect for the community. And if you want to engage in inside-joke behaviour or otherwise entertain some people in ways that contradict forum rules, especially for something as specific as the MEP forum - there are other places to do this. On the .org, we don't have a public off-topic forum. Personally, I disagree with this decision (which was made by Phade almost 6 years ago), but I will respect it. We do have a donator forum. Mind you, both of these would also had/have rules and moderation standards, but these are looser in comparison and there, this sort of behaviour may or may not be more appropriate. But if you feel the need for inside jokes that are over the line - well, there are other places to do it. I just don't see why you insist on your right to do this on the MEP forum, because I really can't see anything about the MEP forum that would excuse this behaviour either from the point of view of rules, or common sense, or interest in community-building.
As to the issue of discrimination, I think others have already spoken to this to some part. My only question here is "where?", besides your own subjective experience. I am very open about this and I think all of the .org administration would be willing to address and tackle it. In my own experience, I've seen many individual cases where mods may have been wrong with certain decisions. Like I said, this happens. But what I haven't seen is systemic favouritism. I say that as someone who (unlike all other current mods, afaik) has been banned before - and though I was mad about it at the time, in the end I accepted it. When behaviour crosses a certain line, it's wrong for the forum mods to do nothing.
This thread is open, by the way, because it is indeed important to have this discussion. But I'm sorry, I don't think I understand your position or, more accurately, what you want from the mods - at all.