Have you ever been a forum moderator? If so, why?

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I was a mod on a console maker's forum back when they first had them. We were more then mods really but anyway that's beside the point. Honestly it was pure hell most of the time. Having done it I'd never do it again.
 
I'm very impressed that the forum administrators have admitted that there were "mistakes" made, both in moderation and choosing the mods themselves.

This is something you don't often see.
 
Nope, I am way to fucking uneven to be trust worthy of any kind of power. One day I am really happy, next day I ll be hung over and I would ban someone just because I was in a bad mood.

Definitely working on myself to fix these issues as I would like to be more even keeled, but yeah ... I'd be a terrible mod lol.
 
I was a mod on a decent-sized Pokemon community forum called Pokeschool over a decade ago, but I basically got moderated around the time the site started going into severe decline and I left soon afterwards as well. I don't even think I got to ban anyone lol
 
I used to be a Global Moderator on YugiohForums back in 2003/2004. (I quit.)

I then became an Adminstrator on this PC gaming site "Counter-Hack" in 2005. (I quit.)

Then I was a moderator on Smashboards from June 2010 to March 2012.
 
Was asked by IGN back in '04, but my account here at GAF got approved around the same time and I decided I didn't want to post at IGN anymore.
 
NeoGAF is the only forum I've ever been a mod/admin at, and almost certainly will ever be. And for the most part, I loved being an admin here.

Admittedly, part of that was due to selfish reasons. When you're an admin, you can edit thread titles, edit people's posts, their tags, move posts and threads around, etc. This meant two things to me back then:

1) I could edit people's posts and tags to something comical (selfish)
2) I could edit people's posts, tags, threads, etc. to help them out

And I actually helped a lot of people out back when I was a mod/admin; I responded to the vast majority of PM's I was sent. Even if they were people swearing at me for getting banned (even if I didn't ban them!), I'd often still at least check the mod forum, find out who banned them, and let them the reason why.

And I think the reason why I was so willing to help people out was because I was also given so much freedom to do whatever I wanted. This led to some really fun times, and ultimately me getting de-adminned. I get slack every now and then from being one of the WORST MODS EVER - and the reasoning behind these accusations is admittedly justified most of the time.

When I look at the majority of mods on GAF today, I think they do an incredible job, because 99% of the time they do the hard, mundane work of enforcing rules, coordinating conversation, fixing threads... with none of the fun that I selfishly enjoyed. And for that reason, I don't think I would ever want to be a mod/admin on any message forum - GAF or any other - because there's a pretty great standard set at the best ones that I would go out of my mind trying to match.

That said, I've got absolutely no regrets from my time being an admin on GAF, because it was fucking fun as hell. And no matter what your opinion of my "moderating style" was, I'll assert that I more often than not made things more interesting. And if THAT is the true goal of being a good moderator or administrator, then yeah, I was pretty much the best one that this forum has ever fucking seen.

But it's so not.
 
Yeah I was , on a forum for the video game WWE No Mercy.

Cause I suppose I consistently posted news and other info that they modded me.

I wanted to be the mod of this one shitty Transformers board but I didn't. They gave it to this one loser who had this gimmick of always talking like Dr. Doom. What a loser.

At least The King of Games keeps it to a minimum.
 
I've been posting on forums for nearly 14 years, and I don't mean to disrespect anyone with my personal findings.

Forum mods choose that position generally because that is the closest they can get to leadership in their normal lives.
 
Moderation on GAF is prettty damn good. The only negative I can think of is ban times seem long as heeeck sometimes, and I feel like permas are almost never justified. Forever is a long time. Max ban should be a year unless something hugely offensive and disgusting had taken place.
 
German videogameing print magazines forum for many years.

Admins were all employees and had to follow their guidelines (and in the end we mods as well), so that often resulted in communication issues.
Fun times in the mod/admin-only area though, including "strikes" against some new company regulations and demotions/promotions haha.

Lots of answering game-related questions though, at least I always felt the need to do it as often no one else would (or would answer incorrectly).

Made a complete switch to GAF mainly because I wanted to lay back and just watch(read) again. GAF has a high amount and, more importantly, high density of competent users. So I don't feel like I HAVE to read everything and answer everything I can, as someone else will soon reply to a post in the same way or probably better than me.
 
Ezalc said:
Jesus there are 20 mods? I only know like 7. Anyways, sometimes it's not even about that. I just feel that at times there is a lack of communication between a mod and whoever got punished.
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I would guess the bulk of the mods hang out in the wasteland that is the gaming side.
 
I was an active moderator/administrator of EGM's forums at Gamers.com, and then 1up.com, for most of the last decade. It was thankless work...but it was fun, and I loved that community so much it was worth it.
 
-Pyromaniac- said:
Moderation on GAF is prettty damn good. The only negative I can think of is ban times seem long as heeeck sometimes, and I feel like permas are almost never justified. Forever is a long time. Max ban should be a year unless something hugely offensive and disgusting had taken place.
Click to expand...

FWIW, I basically assume anyone who gets a perm and isn't a junior just re-registers and either reforms so they don't get caught, or continues along the same schtick and the cycle begins anew.
 
yes. I used to be a moderator at two car messageboards.

1. board I was pretty much let go because I got power hungry and let my friends get away with anything.

2. I just stopped posting on the boars but would still moderate it as I was friends with the admin and he understood. posters didn't like a faceless mod, so they revolted at me being a mod and not posting. so much so some members made alt accounts just to bash me. since I was a mod I could see their ip address so I called them out. admin sided with his posters and I was banned.

when people need a mod they beg for it, when they see you work, they want you dead. never again.
 
Yes. On another site a long time ago. Because I used to think that kind of thing mattered. That it somehow made me special and would boost my ego. Then I realized it took up too much of my time and required me to kiss certain mods and admins asses because they had seniority. If they wanted to act like irrational tyrant dickheads I had to follow along or get kicked out of the "special club".

Plus there was no middle ground, sometimes it seemed the "mods that mattered" were bipolar, going from extremely strict (requiring too much reporting for the rest of us) or so lax the site become a shithole filled with 12 year old assholes with brain damage.
 
I was, long ago on a now defunct gaming site. I'm trying to be a moderator again though. To whom should I send the Paypal funds to?

charlequin said:
I am a man of great belief in the redemptive power of the human spirit, but it turns out some fools just won't learn no matter how many chances you give them.
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Poor snesfreak...
 
I feel nothing but empathy with the admin and moderators here and I do not believe I could ever do it despite the jokes in the past. They do the job to the best of their judgements and abilities, and that shows in the way the forum has run over the past decade or so. Much better, more cohesive, room to breathe, and GAF has been the only forum I have frequented over the years for many of those reasons.
 
LOL thread takes modding too seriously at times. I am a videogame mod on a rap forum. Awesome because I am partially responsible for turning their VG forum around. No stress, everyone's mature and I like informing folks of games they might have otherwise missed.
 
Definitely been a moderator...

Official Prince of Persia and King Kong forums for about 4 years (2003 to 2007)... Good times. I helped promote Prince of Persia series through my site: Prince of Persia Legacy.

Ubi is now using the term that I coined up on their official Prince of Persia forums, ie PoP Legacy... I am still waiting to hear back from them concerning the future of PoP Legacy.

Aside from that, I have been asked to moderate a few other boards, which I had to kindly decline.
 
i did it on an offshoot of the old aol keyword video game website. it didn't like, you know, flourish or anything, but i tried bringing new people into the fold. it served as a small minigaf for a day or two when grubdog went crazy and killed a bunch of people.
 
I was a mod on the IGN Metal board. I was offered it and I couldn't really think of a reason to turn it down. I stopped posting there years ago when they opened the board up to non-premium members as it went to shit.
 
I was a mod on an official fan club forum for an asian pop singer. When I was active, it had around 40k members, but everyone was always well behaved. Said pop star was a rumoured lesbian so only discussions about that would occasionally get out of hand. Weeding out tabloid journalists posing as fans was also fun, though it was kinda weird that it was something we had to do.

I did it for the free stuff like t shirts, concert tickets and the occasional signed cds. Good times!
 
charlequin said:
I am a man of great belief in the redemptive power of the human spirit, but it turns out some fools just won't learn no matter how many chances you give them.
Click to expand...

MikeWorks is a good example of redemption. His initial reign as a mod was before my time, but from what I gather, he was kind of immature and bothersome at the time. However, he did eventually grow out of that phase. Would his old persona be permabanned if he posted like that today? I don't know, but if he were then we would have missed out on a good poster a few years down the road.

In my opinion, life sentences can be easily be warranted in society when involving convictions of murder, rape etc. but to never be given another chance on an online forum, a poster would need to do something extremely heinous to justify that sentence.
 
I was a terrible under 12 year-old Supra\Global Mod for a CNET derivative, I posted porn and blamed it on someone else using my computer. I was friends with the Admin, so he let it slide lol.

My friend didn't clean it up for a while, and we had some outrageous follow-ups, best of times.

I was a terrible child, I love myself.

I was also given this privilege on other sites, and only banned the bots. I gave everyone chances, and deterred people via PMs.
I'm a fly mod, nobody can come close, well, maybe the other childish mod who posted his story, we are one in the same.

So Neogaf, make me a mod?
 
Yeah.

I knew the guys that started the website.

Moderated for two years, site slowed down, lost interest, told them I wasn't going to be posting/modding anymore.

Logged in a month ago and I was still a mod. About 900 PMs from people asking me how to do simple stuff in the FAQs and "WHERE ARE YOU????".

Good times.
 
I'm currently a mod for pretty much the only active Penny-Arcade gaming group chat channel in steam.

Why? Because the guy who started it picked people at random and de-admined them if they didn't work out. I was one of the lucky early ones.

Mostly all I do is post game announcements and kick/ban spammers. Occassionally abuse my powers for the sake of good fun against people who I know will laugh it off.

Also try to keep things pg-13 and discourage some of our more eccentric members from saying... eccentric things, if you know what I mean.

It's not really a special job, there are probably 25-30 active members (and many more who sorta fly-by-night and show up randomly) and about 7 of us are admin.
 
I was an admin on a little place called The Gaming Center. Not the BBS you'll find mention of if you hit Google, this was a forum/various game servers about 8 years ago.

There's no traces of it on the internet at all any more.


Also was an admin for someone's personal forums years before that. Both communities were small and not unruly, so I really didn't have to do much.

Funnily enough, that person whose forum I was an admin on has a history here at GAF and has been permabanned for longer than I've been here... Though that was all long after I lost contact with them.


As for why... In both cases it was just a side-effect. I was an admin on the forums because I was doing work elsewhere. For TGC, I kept the servers running and did programming for new stuff, and on the personal forum, I was the one who set it up in the first place, as well as all the rest of their website and email.
 
My sole moderator claim to fame was running the Classic Gaming forum at the old Next Generation Online forums. The way the forum software was set up, all posts had to be approved by the moderator before anyone else could read them, so my job was basically deleting spam, doing minor edits for spelling/grammar, and debating.

While the format wouldn't at all scale to NeoGAF's size, it was nice in that it encouraged thoughtful debate rather than the sound-bite format that vBulletin boards promote.
 
I'm the admin of another forum, so I'm sort of a mod by default. The place is so chill I rarely have to moderate though, outside of a wave of spam every few weeks.
 
Yup I been a moderator, as to why? I had seniority over most of the members. The Admin was rarely there and barely knew what he was doing.
 
I was a moderator long ago at the nintendose website. It was the awesome community there that pushed me to want to do it. Also, I spent a lot of time on the site so I figured what the hey. Wouldn't ever do it again though.
 
Yes. It was cool at first. Got old quick. You can't please everyone. They always have the pitchforks out for mods.
 
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