Quote Originally Posted by MARK EG
mods afraid to step up
Avast, this is one of my most hated pet peeves about forums, when the mods just happily let the bricks crumble around them as they settle for the mediocraty of the not upsetting anyone. There is one set of forums I frequent which has a persistant troll, now on his fourth account who posts material about the same calibre as you find in the smelliest corner of Squatjuice, is offensive to everyone and a terrible troll. And despite being banned three times the mod replies to complaints about him with "it takes too much effort to moderate his posting". That sort of attitude is a bit like Hannibal going over the mountains but forgetting the elephants because "I can't see what possible use I have for them".

The single most important point about this argument is, who's paying the bandwidth costs? I know a few forums that deliberately won't accept donations from users because they don't want people to think that just because some of their hard earned pennies are fueling the alcholoic tendancies of the owners that they somehow have the right to tell them what to do, feel like they own the other place or just generaly act in a terrible and disgusting manner because they think they can.

I do agree with the point of view that an agreesive locking of threads for whatever takes Mark's fancy is a bit over the top. I don't agree with it but I respect his right to, for instance, change the forum name from Blackout to 'Paedophiles Annonymous'.

Personaly, what I would love to see because it really does add character to a forum and provides a way for Mark to bitchslap people in a lesser way as well as providing amusing antics, is to change peoples custom titles to reflect incidents in the posters career. Somethingawful takes this concept to a wonderfull extreme with the pure level of beasting some people get on their custom titles. Imagine going to a thread and someone having something like "Regis is a terrible man and probably molested me as a child" beside someones name to let folk know that someone is a known Regis hater and is really pushing it a bit too far. It's hilarious to see stupid stuff written letting people know that someone is a bit of an idiot, especially when it's written in 18 point font in bright red and the text takes up about twice as much space as any of their posts. It's like branding! Only people get annoyed about it, they get pointed at and it's like a tattoo, you can only get rid of it by not being an idiot. Or doing something truely amusing.

Anyway back to the point, if there was one in the first place. People should be able to post saying whatever they like, it's not the negative statements we should be trying to cull from out little colective it's the really shit uninformative pointless drivel that spews from peoples mouth when they think they can get away with it. Take the recent Regis thread, some people said some stuff, I added my comments, then noticed people were just starting to talk absoloute pish so I've not returned to the thread since and I'm now just waiting for the thread to collapse in on itself due to the weighty ego of the people keeping the pointless debate going.

You know I've only been on these forums for six months, and I swear the topic of "Yes I know we have this debate every week and Mark tells us to **** off in a new lengthy post rather than pointing us to the last thread where an exciting battle of wills was fought between the free people and that evil opressor who admins this site but I keep coming back everyday anyway to continue to post my inane commentry so I guess it's not really that bad of a dictatorship afterall"

You could also try using the wordfilter to block "negativity" and replace it with "shut the **** up" for a few days. Actually I've never agreed with the whole swearing filter either, you should replace swear words using the word filter with amusing words, like "cabbage", "Jon Steels blue car" or "feel the rage of my axe of stitching +2"