We should have a forum UIA and whomever earns the most tips in that UIA can become a moderator.
Once again luckybit...these brilliant ideas are why I am addicted to your brain. You think and daydream like I do about this. Give people the ability to spread their wings!
and @Akado, the problem here is that one person gets to make the decision. Instead we should have a means by which to disintermediate that power out of one person's hands. Also, being a forum moderator is a hard job---so mods should enjoy anything that can get the community behind helping them do their jobs to the best of their ability (imho).
I like the idea of colors to mark people (and show them that they are getting close to a ban). But the big thing for me is the deleting of comments that are "not valuable". I'll tell you right now as much as I hate tonyk's consistent intent to stomp his boot on faces that I am not (and neither is anyone else) qualified to judge whether his posts may or may not have value in our community. Restriction of speech is restriction of speech...no real gray lines here imho. :/
I do like some of your ideas though on how to make it easier and better than the current process. The other cool thing is that just by asking this in the community is that I have someone else who has served as a moderator before (though admittedly 15,000 people is a bit more than I was needing to worry about) who has the experience to give some unique insight based on that experience. The beauty of bringing the community's valuable members' brains together is stunning...and honestly one of the few things that keeps me going sometimes.
It was not 15,000 people, it was 150,000 btw
And we didn't have the names of people coloured (although that's an option). Each member would have a history of warnings and bans with their dates and who was the mod who sent the warning/ban and the motive on their profiles as well as the link to the thread of the infraction. That way a mod would know if member X has a past of warnings and bans.
You would see something like this;
Latest Infractions Received (0 point(s) total)
A yellow warning would get you one point and those points would expire after X time
A red warning would get you 2 points and those points would expire after X time
If you reached 3 or 5 points, cant remember, you would be banned temporarily. ie. 1 week.
Then if you did it again you would get 2 weeks, then 1 month, then permabanned.
According to the user's history, mods would decide if they should issue a red or yellow warning. If it's the user's first time he would get a yellow one, except for flame. If the user already had multiple warnings he would get a red one.
And all the mods could see the user's profiles with the warning's list.
Regarding tonyk, using him as an example, although that applies to everyone else, it's not about censoring his posts or judge what he said is valuable or not. It's about politeness/rudeness of some posts. You don't censor the post and ban him. You remove the words that are rude if he or someone else insults other people and then issue a warning. and I'm not saying he swears. It was an example. lzr for example, would have been long gone because all he does is spam and flame. It's not about censoring someone who talks the truth and has the courage to step up and say things are not working, because that's not what he does. He flames. His comments are useless. That's an example.
You can give the most constructive and useful comment, but if you flame all throughout your post and insult others, it's obvious the swearing should be removed and the user warned/banned accordingly.
Newmine on the other hand, yeah, did a lot of posts that could be considered flame or trollish by some... but at least he didn't swear or insult (assuming i remember correctly?) so there's nothing wrong with it and his posts can be tolerated imo. He is just someone voicing his opinion, even though not in the best way but still.. He has made some good posts.
And like fav said, which most people don't seem to grasp is that being a mod is not a popularity contest. In fact, in most cases if a mod does his job right he won't be liked by the trolls.
We don't even have word censorship to avoid swearing around here. Of course we are all adults, should speak what we want, but there's definitely no need for insults, they don't contribute for a better discussion, on the contrary.
You think bumping old posts sharing whatever kind of coins, even if they don't have the best name, is not spamming/trolling? Please. Of course that should be considered spam. It doesn't contribute for anything and definitely doesn't give a better image of the forums.