by Barbosa2 » Fri May 20, 2011 4:19 pm
Having been a moderator at several Discussion Boards (none of them RC related) since 1997 and Head Administrator for the most recent DB i was in, I reckon I can say a few words here.
I understand the slights against "American" boards and "free speech". Some boards offer no holds barred. Others adhere to certain modicums of civility, copyrights and whatnot. What users must consider is the quality of educational DB's, their rules and how they're run and policed, so to speak. Recently, at RCG, I asked a question by starting a new thread. The very first response wasn't an off topic one-liner, it was a paragraph of tongue-in-cheek gibberish. I learned nothing. Had I been a moderator in another DB, I would have deleted that post. Would have I have abused the posters free speech? Not according to the rules. Free speech has rules, regardless what country you live in. If all one does is post one liners with no value to the discussion, it takes away from the discussion.
Consider RCG and those that have build threads. How many times have you seen a poster come along and hijack it with their own build? It's irritating to me. Equally an irritant is the poster that derails the thread with off topic crap. I don't know how many times I've had to split a thread into two or more separate threads just to keep the original thread coherent and on topic. The idea, at least in the DB's I moderated, was to keep the OP on topic. And that includes separating posts to make new threads because some bonehead simply has to derail the OP...deleting insulting or offensive material...cutting out copyrighted material to 10% of the original material (plagiarism)...keeping an eye on quote-mining...watching out for spam.
In all the DB's I've belonged to, none of the moderators and administrators were paid. It's all volunteer work. Now, consider a fast DB with 30+ forums and 30+ moderators (fast means there will be anywhere from one to five pages of posts per 24 hours). A perfect world would see that each forum is maintained by 3 Moderators and hopefully one of them is several time zones apart from the others. I'm telling you, it's sometimes a real bitch when a fast forum hasn't been looked at because the Mod is sick or on vacation. For example, multiply that by 6. So one tries to triple up a fast forum with Mods. Sometimes one has no choice but to ask Mods to cover 3 or 4 forums. Burnout is quick. Turnover sucks.
At one point (just a couple months ago), I was spending 4-6 hours a day administrating one DB and at the same time watching my assigned forums. I had to give it up.
Mods get angry, just like any other human. No one can be completely unbiased. I don't know what's going on at RCGroups and I don't give a rats ass. The idiot posters that get angry at someone who asks a question are burnt out...or post sluts. These angry posters have nothing stopping them from answering a legitimate question either typing it out or providing a canned cut-and-paste reply (I've done the C&P thing thousands of times). They forget that they were once newbies and that search functions are not always helpful. So when I see this:
"I'm thinking of putting this motor in this plane with this rx, what do you all think?"
with a response:
"You're fucking stupid"
I'd expect the reply would be at least edited by a moderator. Wouldn't you? Are ethics and manners in such low esteem these days? Don't you expect the same treatment from those moderating as well?
So what about the guy here that found a way to cover the adds in RCG and his ban? In one respect, I can see why Admin got hot on him. The adds supply income. And a board the size of RCG requires a huge amount of space on a server. I'd reckon the costs for RCG is over $10,000 per year. It's a huge website.
BUT...
That doesn't assuage the treatment he got from Admin. Heavy handedness. Lack of courtesy. Moderation inconsistency. Etc. Not my way of running a board. At the same time, there's thousands of RCG members. How many do you reckon click on the ads? I don't. And what if virtually all members found a way to dispose of the ads? The companies will never know; RCG still gets paid.
Either way I look at it, though, I'll still use RCG and the others for reference and education. There's a goldmine of information in RCG. My only problem is wading through all the crap in a thread to find it. Most of the time I feel like I'm a heron wading all day through a pond looking for that one fish I can eat. Why do you think there are 6,000 posts in a single thread? Because Mods don't filter out the crap. I'm a big fan of posters staying on topic. And I'm a bigger fan of removing page after page of one liners that don't help.
I'm glad I found this DB. It's like a small town library...cozy and informative. Not like the Library of Congress that's overwhelming and huge. I really enjoy the videos and reviews.
This is way too long. I'll quit now.