Good moderators (fair, consistent, firm, no ego) are worth their weight in gold. It’s hard for your dinner guests to enjoy their evening if there are people peeing on your table and throwing plates at your wife. Granted, ‘no moderation’ may sometimes be preferable to extremely crappy moderators.
What’s with the mod worship? Seriously, in all my time in all the boards/forums I’ve ever been to I’ve never seen a situation where moderation was necessary, or where moderation that did occur wasn’t abusive. In 4 years at Mises forums I’ve never encountered any activity that needed moderation, but again, I’ve heard of some where the moderation that did occur was abusive.
Is there some bogeyman I’ve managed to avoid across 15 years online who seeks out niche forums and just goes wild? A community moderates itself, it’s what humans do, how doesn’t anyone else see that?
I wholeheartedly second every single thing hashem wrote in the OP - he obviously speaks from extensive experience - with the possible exception of moderation. Ludicrously Light Moderation (LLM) that is hopefully never used, and that requires consensus of all mods and many users for any act of censorship or ban, can be better than no moderation at all in a few rare cases.
“Moderation” - such an innocuous-sounding word for something that is pure poison to communities. It should be handled like a nuclear device.
I have lost weight ever since I re-transitioned to the primal lifestyle.
I think we can all agree that forum is best which moderates least. If it is used, it should be considered a necessary evil and handled like a nuclear device. I would support a forum where real attention was payed to general input and especially input regarding moderation.
That aside, I feel like others have important ideas to contribute about how to make this forums successor completely awesome. Aside from ideas about moderation, let’s gather here suggestions about how to make the next forum exceptional.
*sigh - A forum is not a country and moderators are not a government. A forum is private property in the sense that it is running on a server somewhere that is actually owned by the forum owner. Forum contributors are not paying and there is no contractual agreement of any kind. The norms that obtain here are like having a conversation in someone’s living room. You can be shown the door if you’re an obnoxious twerp. Everyone understands this except you, hashem.
A complete lack of moderation is not “anarchy” as against moderation’s “statism”. Moderation is like private event staff on private property… they are the ones who have the ability and responsibility to show the trouble-makers out the door. This, in turn, makes the activities that much more pleasant for everyone not drunk out of their mind and not splattering the forums with inflammatory/obscene material. MissSocialist is a recent example of such a troublemaker. I’m not morally opposed to nude pictures, but I browse the forums at work and in my living room (kids around), it simply causes problems for all other users to have a woman’s naked breasts as your avatar.
Clayton -
This thread is for contributing suggestions to people who might build the next forum. I gave my ideas about how moderation SHOULD work, based on my personal experiences with moderated forums over 15 years. This has nothing to do with the theoretical legal status of a forum, you’re way off topic.
In theory, I can fathom a community managing itself without moderation. In practice, I’ve experienced just that in every board/forum I’ve ever been to. Moderation was always unnecessary at best, and usually always abusive. I’m not opposed to filtering out illegal content and porn. But I don’t think a bogeyman is a valid excuse for moderation, and I’ve managed to never see such a bogeyman in all my exerience online.
Again, if you think moderation is valuable, then cool, contribute your suggestions. If you have other ideas, those are primarly the purpose of this thread.
I’m with Hashem, over the years I’ve had far more problems with mods than trolls. They’re far likelier to ruin a good board and run out good posters too.
You need people with mod status for some basic maintenence and cleaning work, like deleting spam bots and the like, but to have mods policing regular posters that’s just absurd.
This is an awful, awful idea. If you want no moderation, then head over to 4chan’s /pol/ and enjoy the daily discussions they have there, which generally consist of mutual shit slinging, idiotic and lame attempts at gaining attention by posting pictures of interracial porn and repeating the phrase “niggers and jews bad news” over and over again.
I’m sure you, a hardline rothbardian anarchist would be just fine with that, but many others who want a more intelligent discussion, would simply leave this site. This is not good, because it will create a drain of intelligent posters, and usher in various internet nutjobs and literal crackheads. I’m not necessarily talking about just various types of racist scum (which I admit to have no tolerance of) but literally people who talk nonsense due to progressing stages of degenerative mental illness (as evidenced by youtube or infowars comments).
The problem with your view is that Mises.org is a private website. It is owned by private individuals, and thus constitutes their property, not yours. It is not a commonly owned plot of land, an anarchist commune. As such the owners of this site can be as despotic and dictatorial as they want, and ban whoever they want, according to their judgement, and they will be justified at doing that. They are not initiating force against you by forcing you to adopt certain opinions. If you do not agree with the general atmosphere or ideology presented on here, you may simply leave. But this attempt at building a sort of internet anarcho-commune simply does not hold well with me, and I will vehemently oppose it. The reason why is given my experience with unmoderated boards, absent the enforced rules of civility, the primary driving factor in creating a post will be its shock content rather than intellectual value. As such, people will be less keen on debating each other from an equal standpoint, than they would be in simply insulting and ridiculing each other, leading to an environment where intelligent discussion is pretty much impossible. At any rate, it would probably not be taken seriously by the owners of this website.
That said I would leave this website if the moderators started to censor discussions with posters who advocated certain positions which were unpopular on this kind of forum. In my view, moderation should concern itself so that discussion remains civil and that the content of the posts is clear and legible, not with the content of the beliefs themselves, which may be leftist, rightist, atheist, racist or whatever.
Dude I already addressed all that.
My recent experiences with moderators do argue in favour of what hashem is saying.
I think that over-the top trolling (and I mean excessive) could be moderated, as well as needless, over-the-top language. And I don’t mean people throwing insults at each other. I mean long rants full of expletives that don’t add anything to the discussion and disrupt board operation.
Otherwise, strong language ought to be tolerated.
Hey, this happens to be my moderating criteria for LibertyHQ!
http://libertyhq.freeforums.org/forum-guidelines-and-useful-tips-t4.html
I think I quasi-agree with both hashem and Clayton. I think it would be a nice venture to have the new forums not have mods (or at least tone their power down) but I certainly wouldn’t say this as any sort of protest against the Mises forums, as in “they can’t do this because it isn’t true anarchy” as others have interperated it as.
But really, I don’t think that without Mods a forum would just instantly turn into the 4Chan /b/ thread. 4Chan attracted those kinds of bizarre characters because of what it advertised itself as - we’re an economics/philosophical thread, so I don’t think that cat pornography posters would be immediately drawn to some place like that.
EDIT
Also, Wheylous, when you say that you want things on the PG-13 side with regards to Liberty HQ, you also say that we can say any kind of strong language as long as it isn’t spamming or trolling. The word cu** is not to be found it any PG-13 films, so if I were to say something like “boy that Piers Morgan sure is a cu**,” would I be banned for violating the PG-13 statement, or protected under the strong language statement?
I meant full nudity in that one 
I should clarify.
Edit: fixed. So yes, that would be protected speech. Rather, it would be speech that moderators have no power to moderate.
Being the owner, I could do whatever the heck I wanted to the website, but that would be violating my contract with you guys, at which point you could punish me by leaving the site. Therefore, I have an interest in sticking to them as well
This forum already only undergoes light moderation.
I don’t really see an issue with mods. It works well on some sites and on others it doesn’t. This forum is mostly mature and is concerned with academic discussions/philosophy so it requires very little moderation. Others are more concerned with keeping a consistent tone, image and theme and in their case it helps. The new Austrian forum might go that way depending on how closely it affiliates to the LVMI.
For instance, I don’t really take issue with profanity and I don’t like tipping around people’s toes because kids MIGHT lurk on the forum, which is their parent’s problem really. In some cases though I can see why it would not be tolerated. If the forum doesn’t come with a warning on it I can see how it’d be an issue.
Indeed, but I certainly don’t think it goes to the extent that hashem is a proponent of. All I’m saying really is that it would be an interesting thing to see.
Yeah, I didn’t just mean this forum but the internet in general.
@ Wheylous
I see. I was just curious though, I have no desire or need to express myself through that degree of language, despite the fact that I do believe in what Penn and Teller say about profanity. 
Indeed, but I certainly don’t think it goes to the extent that hashem is a proponent of. All I’m saying really is that it would be an interesting thing to see.
It would be but personally I prefer mods to maintain minimum standards of etiquette, e.g. removing obnoxious pricks who go out of their way to antagonise other people. Not everyone enjoys that kind of discussion, and on academic fora it might not even be suitable or conducive to the kind of discussions you want going on there.
This is true. Perhaps though we could give it a go, and if it really doesn’t work out, we could reinstate a model of the old system?
Speaking of which, is there an exact date for the move?