I’m a frequent visitor to a number of online forums. I love to enter debates on many different topics and also enjoy giving free advice to people on how to achieve success with their web strategy. I discuss many other topics, but only offer advice in areas I have experience in.
The one thing that annoys me most about forums are those forums that have a “mini dictator”. If you have in anyway been in a topical debate online at some stage, I’m nearly certain you’ve come across one. I believe every forum should have a moderator to be decisive on things that get out of hand. But like a good game of football, you should never really have a referee interfere with the game unless 100% necessary.
Unfortunately there are too many moderators that feel that they are in some state of power. They sit, by themselves, probably in their bedroom or a bat cave with their only interaction with the outside world through online forums. Their online friends are people they have met online and have only befriended them because they are a moderator of a busy discussion forum… Yes as you can see, I look very lowly on these power seeking nerds.
I’ve encountered a few in my time, the worst has to be askaboutmoney.com – you can read my post on that run in here >>
But there is another forum that constantly gets up my goat. So much so that my interaction with others on this forum is kept to a minimum. That forum / news-list is the eBusiness Forum by Enterprise Ireland. The sad thing is that there is a lot of interesting people and topics to be read at this forum. However, when you want to participate, you have to be extremely careful that your conversation is not taken out of context or you run the risk of your response being culled or separated into another topic by the moderator.
Recently I posted a response to a conversation on online marketing – I agree that it kind of went off topic, but it was still in context to the original query. For some reason, the moderator felt it would be a good idea to take my response and start a brand new topic with a completely different title that really didn’t relate to my response.
This meant that my response was now out on it’s on, with no relation to what I was discussing. It’s clear that the moderator simply hadn’t got a clue what I was talking about, so took one sentence out of context and created a new unrelated topic. Luckily most people following this discussion were interested in Online Marketing, so when a new Google related topic arrived, they were able to catch on to where it left off. But I can only imagine how those that weren’t following the original topic picked up this discussion.
At one stage in the “new topic”, Richard Hearne mentioned that “We haven’t had a thread as good as this one in a while”. He was damn right. It was great with lots of ideas and debates flying around. I posted my response to him which was “Isn’t it just a pity the moderator felt he had to split it into numerous threads”. For some odd reason…. the moderator didn’t let this through….
It’s ok to come to our forum and give regular visitors your professional and expert opinion on any given topic (for free!!), but don’t dare say that the moderators were wrong in anyway. This isn’t the first case of ridiculous moderator interference.
Another pet hate of mine on the Enterprise Ireland eBusiness Discussion forum is when the moderator feels he needs to take a Wikipedia definition of a term or phrase. I’m not sure if this is because he had to look it up himself to help him understand what people were talking about or if he thinks he’s doing everyone a service, in most cases he’s not.
I’ll probably get banned from the eBusiness Discussion forum now for this blog post – ah well…. so be it…
#1 by Paul Anthony at September 18th, 2009
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Hi Tom,
I couldn’t agree more. Some mods use their power to squash people’s opinion and thoughts – rather than what they are needed for – ridding the forum of spam, and cleaning up wrongly placed threads.
Regards,
Paul.
#2 by Tom Doyle at September 18th, 2009
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Hi Paul
You’ve hit the nail on the head – that’s all they should be there for, spam and cleaning. Not to opress peoples opinions.
#3 by sam at November 23rd, 2009
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If you don’t like how a site is moderated, use another, there are millions on every topic. I moderate a forum on a site I own and pay for, its entirely to me what I allow to be posted, you have no inherent right to post on any forum, it’s always at the forum owners discretion.
To many people think the internet is a ‘public’ place so they can have the same rights as they do in the public square at home, yet every site on the net has an actual owner.
#4 by Tom Doyle at November 23rd, 2009
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@Sam – you’re completely missing the point and you’re obviously one of those moderators that I detest.
As you sit there and moderate your “little world” you ignore everything and everyone that has made your forum popular (if it is) in the first place.
Without participation, your forum (or anyone else’s) would be another deserted little website on the web.
Until moderators like yourself cop on that it’s not YOU or your stupid moderation techniques, but the people contributing to the forum that makes it a success.
A forum IS a public place – that’s the idea of a fourm.
Yes I agree, it’s up to the moderator to decide what is to be discussed, but a moderator should not interfere if comments are against his views OR split them up if he doesn’t know what he is talking about.
If you can’t see that, I suggest that you shut down your forum before recommending that I use a different one…
#5 by sam at November 23rd, 2009
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Tom,
you don’t allow posts to even appear here till you have checked them, tell me a public place where that happens, you are bring a complete hypocrite.
#6 by Tom Doyle at November 24th, 2009
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Eh… Sam… This is a private blog, not a public forum… major difference.
Most blogs would vet comments posted before making them live… Those that don’t, tend to be overrun with spam.
#7 by sam at November 24th, 2009
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My point is that there’s is no such thing as a ‘public’ internet forum. All internet sites have an owner, the rules of ICANN make it impossible to have an owner free site, therefore they can never be ‘public’.
#8 by Tom Doyle at November 24th, 2009
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Sorry Sam, don’t agree with you again on this. Of course all sites have owners, but that doesn’t mean they are not public forums.
As I’ve said, I don’t have an issue with forums and rules – my issues are with Moderators that are so up their own backsides that they stop conversations from flowing, either through ignorance or the fact that they don’t want to hear anyone else’s opinion.
A lot of moderators don’t even own the websites they moderate – so ownership doesn’t come into question at all.