What are everyone's thoughts on having mods? I'd say one of the bigger issues with the IMDb forums was the lack of moderation and a set of basic rules that users had to follow. You could always report a post, but other than that there wasn't much that could be done to deal with 'problem users' besides adding them to your ignore list.
shareI agree that giving moderators wide discretion is problematical. There needs to be a set of rules that go further than "no death threats."
What we want to do is eliminate trolling (by banning the trolls), and that's fairly easy to define.
If most of a person's posts are subjective attacks on movies, they are a troll. A bad troll simply goes into every popular movie and starts a thread saying "This sucks." A better troll might specify "it's badly paced, the plot makes no sense, Robert Downey is terrible, the CGI looks like it was created by fourth-graders on a cell phone ...." This is still obvious trolling. If a plot makes no sense, and that genuinely bothers you, you *know why.* You don't just assert that, you say something like "The Dwarves learn they need to get to The Lonely Mountain by Durin's Day, but instead of leaving immediately, they hang around!" If a movie is badly paced, you talk about how scene X following scene Y was a bad idea. I have read and responded to lots of substantive negative posts. It always makes for good discussion.
Uncritical praise can be an invitation for others to elaborate on what made a movie good. (I've responded to many "This was great!" posts with a set of reasons why I agreed, and often gotten thanks.) But uncritical condemnation -- if you cannot articulate why you didn't like a movie, that serves no purpose on a message board. I think people should be gently discouraged from the all-too-common "Everyone else loves this, but I was bored and hated it" posts (or, rather, encouraged to tell us *why* they think they were bored), but I think you'll find that most authors of those posts can be found enthusing about most other movies. Someone who *only* says things like that is trolling.
What else? No off-topic vitriolic rants.
If enough people join here, and I hope they do, things will be rocky at first. The trolls haven't even hit this place yet. But I will stick with it and hope it is moderated and not just a cesspool.
shareMods are great, especially mod 3! Don’t change a thing.
shareIt's a thankless task trying to push shit uphill with a pointy stick.
forums without effective moderation become cesspools very quickly. i've seen it happen more than once.
shareI said it once, I’ll say it again....It’s a Mod, Mod, Mod, Mod World!....except mod-3, they’re from Pluto, or Tatooine or something ...
shareYou could’ve went with Uranus but I see you took the high road.
shareNah, I don’t need any mods up my ass, though they are a recent inspiration for a parody song I’ve been working on....just waiting to drop it at the right time...
shareLet me know when its posted. 😂
shareOh you’ll know...but here’s the dilemma: mod-5 has a pretty good sense of humor so they’d probably allow it; but mod-3, who knows, I might get banned because they might not like a reference or two (or 3 or 4 or 10)....who friggin knows, and that’s the point....need some mod consistency....ehhh, what the hell....first world problems....
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