[Rich Z]

Originally Posted by donzee

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Rich, I am a more than once daily reader, and do not have the necessary experience to understand what happened ( I guess I missed the sawn song deleted post ), but would love to hear the explanation in order to better understand.

I guess you are asking about the quote I made concerning an admin on a message board site. This might take a bit to explain, as some things are not self evident and I had to learn through the school of hard knocks myself.

Well, on a message board site, it is not unusual for an admin like myself to grant moderator powers to one or more people for a couple of reasons. (1) Is that it helps to endow a feeling of ownership to some members who have already shown a desire to participate on the site so they feel a stronger desire to help contribute with conversations taking place, and often initiating their own new threads to try to start new conversations to help keep the site active and growing. (2) Moderators also help keep down the instances of spam attacks, simply because the admin, as one person, just can't be on site 24/7 to be able to handle them as quickly as necessary. I have had porn spam attacks wreak havoc on some of my sites that caused quite a bit of consternation from the members, and in some instances those sorts of posts can get a site blocked by corporate and home profanity filters at the ISP or router levels and put a site on a black list that is difficult to rescind later. So it behooves an admin/owner to get rid of such posts on a site as quickly as possible. BTW, this is also the reason why profanity must be limited and/or contained as much as possible on a site. And can negatively affect a site in quite a number of ways. (3) Moderators, of course, are there to "moderate" discussions when they become heated or otherwise blow up into what are called "flame wars" between members. This can produce a very uncomfortable atmosphere for a lot of onlookers watching the train wreck between other members, so the moderators' job is to try to keep such things from going beyond the simmer level to where the pot boils over. Continued flame wars will also often destroy a site as the majority of members cease to be amused by such antics and just take their presence and participation elsewhere to places where such things aren't quite so common.

So obviously there are a lot of solid reasons why moderators are a good thing for a site and can be quite beneficial.

Now understandably and necessarily so, a moderator has quite a bit of power on a site. An admin needs to pick moderators carefully as they are pretty much putting the fate and health of their site into the hands of said moderators. A moderator gone rogue, for any number of reasons, can completely destroy a site of this nature. They can delete posts and messages at will. Like ALL of them if they so choose. They can ban every member. They will likely know the viewing habits of the admin, and will know when they will have the MOST available time to do as much damage as possible before the admin can learn about it. In many cases, the damage can be irreparable. I have seen MANY instances of moderators who had conflicts with not only the administrator, but also other moderators completely destroy websites. I have personally experienced moderators who used the access they had to the memberlist surreptitiously contact other members and advertisers as they built their own website to compete with the one they were moderator on. This often happens when there becomes a conflict between the admin and one or more moderators, and they become convinced that they can do a much better job of the website. Which they decide to do, but of course behind the admin/owner's back. There are normally two ways this sort of damage takes place, although both can and have been used concurrently.

One method is to try to get the current admin/owner so aggravated with the site because of constant strife and headaches that they just simply want to be rid of the site. Sometimes bogus registrations are employed just to provide aggravations and headaches to the admin, but not necessarily. It's not difficult for someone with the knowhow to fake IP addresses to avoid detection, and of course, free anonymous email addresses are a dime a dozen. The idea is to get the admin/owner so tired of dealing with the BS all of the time that they just want to walk away from it all. Which, of course, those mods will be only too happy to take over. A popular ploy is for a bogus registration to be so much of a pain in the butt that they get banned and then another bogus registration strikes up the marching band claiming the admin is overbearing and dictatorial by not allowing free speech and legitimate complaints from the membership. Basically putting the admin in a "damned if you do/damned if you don't" position. Which is actually very effective if the admin isn't aware of what is going on.

Another method a rogue mod will use to undermine an admin and his site is to be building another website all along, secretively, while still maintaining the role of moderator and the appearance of all is cool, regardless of the friction. This gives a rogue mod a lot of time to get all their ducks in a row and contact other members, sponsors, and advertisers to bring them onboard with their new site. Often running the other site secretly while making those contacts. In this scenario, the mod or mods (or even some helpers supporting the mod and the new site) will constantly try to undermine the admin both overly and covertly trying to make the current site appear less attractive to the membership, and therefore make their own new site appear that much more attractive in comparison. Pretty much a sales pitch effort outlining the perceived faults of the "old" site and the changes that will be implemented in the "new" site. Fortunately, it is quite rare that these "spite sites" survive for longer than 6 months.

I have seen all of the above take place, and in many instances on some of my own sites with some of my own moderators. So I am quite cognizant of the dangers of what a rogue moderator can do and am constantly on alert for the signs. That is why I have had to take care in my choices for mods for my sites, and picked people I felt were trustworthy and stable enough so that the possibility of the dangers mentioned could be minimized. Obviously, for me to have experienced such things in the past, my batting record has certainly not been perfect. Knowing I have made mistakes in the past, my current philosophy is to err on the side of caution.

Now, no, I am not accusing Gordon of any of the above at all. But I have become very cognizant of the fact that when severe conflicts become more and more common with a mod, and their attitude becomes very evident that they disagree with more and more of my decisions, that the jeopardy grows exponentially that ANY person can not be ruled out as being a risk to my site. The fact that I have made this mistake in the past is ample evidence that it is not prudent to ignore the warnings and take steps IMMEDIATELY to prevent yet another mistake from taking place. It is much better to be safe than sorry.

Do I think Gordon would do any damage to this site or undermine me in such a fashion as I have indicated? No, I do not. I still consider Gordon a friend, however we just are not compatible in an Admin/Moderator relationship. As such, one had to relinquish that power here. Since it is my name on the door, the choice was obvious of who that had to be.

Now for the record, this is NOT my first rodeo running a message board site. I also run the following two sites and have been doing so for years.

http://www.FaunaClassifieds.com/forums
http://www.Cornsnakes.com

In both I have had issues with moderators that did not work out. It's just par for the course, and obviously a learning curve involved. I think the first message board site I created and ran was actually in 1997 or so. Trust me, you DO learn a lot about people running these things.

Anyway, sorry if that was a lot more detail than you really wanted to hear, but I felt I should explain this in as much detail as possible for those who really don't understand this aspect of running a message board site. The internet is littered with message board sites that have failed, and quite often it has been because of conflicts of this nature. I just do not want to see this site suffer that same fate, and felt I needed to take steps necessary to protect it in case I was once again wrong about someone I trust.