(10-29-2026 04:52 PM)bill dazzle Wrote:  I would enjoy being a moderator if I had the time and energy. Thanks for the kind words from you lads.

Bill, you would hate it. There is no middle ground. Precious little room for board friends. If you have any you would be accused of siding with them. Dealing with the vilest of posters has longer term repercussions than most could possibly imagine. I had one here whom I banned that took my screen name to post really vile things on other sites posing as me. It took threatened legal action to make him stop and he then adopted the name of another mod here to try to do the same and I had to contact that site owner and tell him what to check and he stopped him. The aggravation beyond simply performing mod functions is also manifested in the number of our subforums whose moderators never show up, and you have to go in blind to the personalities and stop hissy fits and pooh fights.

I don't know if it would be agreeable to him, but Adopted Monarch would be one of my selections here. He is dispassionate, practical, objective, and approaches most topics with sincerity and care. He would not hammer the left and he is not totally to the right. That would be my recommendation as I think he could remain detached enough to do the job.

Nothing pisses me off more than to have to deal out the punishment to posters I like, but you have to do it. You think you have a cordial relationship which they then abuse by acting inappropriately to other posters and expecting leniency. Then when you have to ding them their buddies shun you.

What's even worse are the harmless idiots who spam threads with off topic posts, much like happens daily here in the spin room, but on the CS/CR forum where topics "should" stay tracked to the OP, if you have to warn them then everybody thinks you are a bully. Now toss in the one who manages to worm in dissension in multiple threads, but stays out of the ensuing fight, and when you speak sternly to them in public because the little bastard has his PM and Email turned off people like you think he's being a bully for speaking harshly to them in an open thread. Those sir, are the kinds I dress down. I do it so the rest of the board starts to notice their behavior. Then there are the ones who have completely mistaken takes on subjects that they love to expound on, and if the topic is not that topic, they do their darndest to turn it into the topic they want to talk about and in a day 1/4 of the total threads on the forum have them in it saying the same things over and over again "with fierce conviction" like the Right Stuff stated. It is simply exhausting and all ******** hate authority figures, especially when they have to adjust their behavior officially.

Now to make everyone want to enjoy the ability to be a mod, you will spend about 1/3rd of your time on the forum handling all kinds of things that have nothing to do with what you want to come here to do. You'll be deleting duplicated threads, answering PMs many of which are somebody who just wants to talk and keeps PMing back no matter how clearly you articulated the answer to their original PM. Then there are thread mergers and thread splits where the programs may or may not be functioning properly and it is a procedure that can easily take up to 30 minutes to do properly. And all of these things are alerted to you while you are simply trying to proof a post you have yet to submit.

Finally there are the 2 AM spam attacks that take multiple avatars and spam every thread on multiple subforums. And you get to clean it up and try to ban that many avatars as quickly as possible to stop them only to have the site protocol stop you because you have reached your ban limit for the day.

I suggest anyone wanting to be a moderator should sleep on it, take a long think with their favorite libation, consider what taking 1/3rd of their posting time would do their enjoyment of the site, or what adding 1/3rd to your time on the site (what I did in retirement) would do to your enjoyment of the site and then decide. IMO this is why we elect so many mods who simply vanish after a month or two or show up seasonally for 3 months out of the year.

I think you possess many of the qualities to be a good moderator, but I don't think you can be perceived as a nice guy doing it. If you are willing to become Black Bill the Bastard you can be a moderator.