Community Moderation: Part 3

Well it has been a few weeks since my last post on community moderation. For those of you who may not have been following my last few posts on the subject, I decided to change my forum moderation standards from quite flexible and forgiving to more strict and iron-fisted.

All my attempts at controlling the fighting and problems with technology were failing miserably. Folks were abusing whatever system I put in place. Finally I grew tired of it all and made a post about how the site's moderation was about to change. I laid down the law on zero-tolerance user harassment and enforced it from day one.

The results have been fairly positive. We've had much less harassment, and much more constructive commenting. Those that found themselves unable to be respectful have been either penalized user points or removed from the site.

Some threatened to leave the site. A funny threat since I was not really that interested in keeping the problem users around... Others applauded our efforts to clean up the discussions and get the site back on track.

Sometimes I wonder if it is all worth it. My community of members make up less than 10% of my total visitors/traffic. I spend probably 80% of my time on moderation and community management. When the community works together to help someone it is the best feature our site can offer... and well worth it. Other times I just want to turn the whole community feature off and give up... but alas I keep on plugging away... hoping someday to find peace. ;-)

Until next time...