There is a lot of sense in what Michael said about a heavy-handed approach. Anything that looks to be clueless we can just delete and, bam, history. The problem in the past has been that the user just comes back and re-posts the message with a "I don't know what happened to the last message I posted" and reposts. I also don't like deleting a thread that already has useful replies since that means we're also deleting the message of someone who replied honestly trying to help.

We are currently beta-testing a new version of this forum now (I am using the new version to write this message, as is Steve and I believe Erik Malund is still testing it) and this new version also gives Steve and me the ability to close or delete a thread and have the system notify the poster via email that the action was taken and lets us tell them why. The new version is also "threaded" within threads which makes it clear who is reply to who within a thread.

In the past I've been hesitant to adopt a truly heavy-handed approach such as this. There are members who routinely email me and complain about "censorship" and unfair moderating and Steve and me being "dictators" so we have taken an approach that tries to balance the reasonable moderation of the forum with a desire to reduce the number of complaints we receive. This has worked in the past but things have become more critical on the forum lately.

If there is a general consensus of members that we be truly that aggresive in moderation, we can do that. That would imply deleting all the messages that appear to be "clueless" as well as any messages asking what happened to previous posts (if they don't check their email) and also deleting the barage of posts from people who complain about moderation. I'm not entirely fond of this approach because I suspect there's going to be a lot of deleting and that causes me to cringe, but hopefully would start to improve the quality of posts.

I would very much like everyone's opinion on this topic, whether you are for or against heavy-handed moderation. It obviously hasn't been my preference but if that's what we need to do now and people here are generally in favor of it then we can implement that approach and we'll just have to get used to deleting clueless messages and taking the flack from those that complain when we delete anything.

Regards,
Craig Steiner
8052.com Webmaster