Glad to read you have made progress in your inner/personal development ...... it stroked my ego when I was mod....but now everything changed.
From experience, the mods listing on the forum home is used a lot and not just in specific markets either. I think that it is quite important when you have forum mods and not just all super mods as users do need to be able to find out quickly who to contact if they need to contact a mod for a section. There is nothing more frustrating as a user than contacting a mod to find out why a thread/post was deleted only to be given the run around becuse the mod you have contacted doesnt have powers in the forum you are talking about.
And here ^ is another good idea.If I want to announce who is a moderator of a subforum, I'll include "Moderators: x,y,z" in the forum description.
The report button is for reporting a post, not for contacting a moderator about a mod action when the post/thread no longer exists.? Hmmm... isn't that what the [Report]-button is for? The beauty of that functionality is that it automatically serves the report to the moderators assigned to the specific forum. So why is it important to know which moderators manages which forum? A perfect example is in fact this very forum overhere at XenForo's. When I report something I do not really care if Lawrence or Peggy moderates the forum I am reporting a post from... I just press [Report] and that is... it. They are not listed as specific moderators on any forum and why should they if I do not need to know this?
I can see it was important to list Moderators before the times of Report functionality in forum software. But surely, with sophisticated Report stuff being brought to us, I do not see the benefits of a moderator column anymore.
The report button is for reporting a post, not for contacting a moderator about a mod action when the post/thread no longer exists.
Please remember that we here are all savvy when it comes to forums as we are all admins, but the average user isn't anywhere near as savvy. I deal a lot with communities whose main audiences are housewifes and young people (pre-teens to about 16-17 yo's) and this does make a big difference in how things are used and seen. From experience, these groups will contact the first moderator on the list if they can't see a list of moderators for a specific forum or if they can't find the staff listing easily will just post threads asking why something was closed/deleted/edited. If they can see who the moderator is for that forum without having to go hunting for the information then they will send them a PM and ask them, although 9/10 times it ends up as a VM as they can't work out the difference between PMs and VMs.
Why not list moderators within the forum a user is browsing? That allows users to see which moderators to contact, while it doesnt clutter up the forum index.
Maybe a 'contact forum moderator' button?
I am used to seeing a list of applicable moderators to choose from at the bottom of a subforum. That works well.Why not list moderators within the forum a user is browsing?
@Grover This is actually where it gets tricky, because it's something that I completely agree with you about...
... but as I do oversee a lot of communities that are on the other side of the coin, I have to stick up for their wants and needs too, which has a habit of making me sound a bit crazy because I have contradicting views between my own thoughts and those that I also need to relay.
If it was up to me, I'd drop a PM to the user whose thread/post was moved when it was moved including where it was moved to as well as leaving a reply in the thread saying 'moved to xyz forum from abc forum' and if deleting or editing then I'd drop a warning via the infraction system to remind about the rules and why.
The communities I oversee find the use of the warnings part of the infraction system for this to be heavy handed and prefer for their moderators to be approachable and therefore for the users to be able to contact the moderators of a specific forum if they have a question about something in that forum.
These same communities don't use smods because each category has a different ethos and user base and so requires different levels of moderation so it isn't a one-size-fits-all interpretation of the rules either. What it means is that something that might be allowed in one category because the main userbase of that category can use it responsibly isn't allowed in another category even though the main forum rules don't prohibit it. Because of this, most deletions or edits are due to differences in the required strictness of moderation between categories and are usually resolved after a pm or two, often because a user has seen a thread that looks interesting but is in a different category to where they primarily post.
We use essential cookies to make this site work, and optional cookies to enhance your experience.