As a moderator I have a few things to say. First of all, as I am reading this thread I see most of the people that are wanting new mods and admin are fairly new members of the site and have not seen the growth of the site from what it was last year at this time. Last year the site was the most basic of basic forums with just a small chat box and none of the other stuff that we have now such as being able to add friends, have your own person photo album, being able to see new posts in threads next to the chat box, sponsors section, blaster form apparel section to name a few. Cbaber shut down the site for a few days and did tons of work to make this site 10 times better than it was.
Second, since I have been a member of this site 5 moderators, 3 technicians and one admin has been added to the site. We started to have a TON of problems with spamming and people making multiple fake accounts just to cause problems with the site. As moderators we all worked hard to put an end to it. At one point I was banning 3-4 accounts a day because there were so many problems. There are a few different ways that members can get a hold of a mod if they are having problems. Send them a PM, visitor message or just plain report the post or whole thread. When you do that an email is sent out to ever single mod on the site for them to go look at the post and fix it. I for one get maybe one or two "reported post" emails every few weeks if that. If a thread is going sideways and needs to be modded you MUST report it. It is unrealistic to think that any human being has time to read EVERY post in EVERY thread and moderate out the stuff that should not be there. As for me, when I skim through new posts or threads I look for titles that catch my attention. If it just a title that says "need help jetting" I am going to probably skip it because I am going to assume that the thread is saying on topic and needs no moderation. If I see a title that says "lol post all your dirty jokes here" I am going to read the entire thread and keep up on it because I know for a fact that somebody is not going to be able to help them self and start to post up stuff that should not be on a form with 12 year old members. Bottom line if you have a problem with a tread, post or member report it.
Third. As a moderator you really do not have that much power. We can read posts that the regular members have posted and deleted, we have a moderator/admin "office" which is just a chat box that only mods and admin can see and use and we have a thread that is hidden and can only be seen by mods and admin. Other powers include being able to ban people, or give infractions and edit posts. That's about it. There is nothing else really that we can do.
Fourth. The site has been VERY quiet lately. We have not been getting new members like we once were. Also the new members now are not becoming supporting members. This leads to the point that most people have been talking about which is improving the site. Improving the site costs money. If we do not get the supporting members we do not get money. As far as Admin goes, cbaber backs the site and makes it run. He controls the servers, how the site is set up, what gets done on it so on and so fourth. Djack is also admin but has NO power to do any of those changes. Even if he wanted to put a blaster on the top of the forum he couldn't do it. He has very very basic admin powers. If you guys want to see changes in the site you have to be able to come up with a way to fund them. I know how much it costs to run a forum and I can tell you the money that this forum produces from supporting members is not enough to run the forum. This means that the money is coming out of somebody's pocket.
I hope you guys see that the mods and admin are doing the best they can. All of you guys have great ideas but those ideas can not happen over night nor are they free to do. Adding more mods and admin is not going to "fix" the problem described in this thread. As far as a smooth running forum this one is one of the smoothest I have been on. There is no spam posts 100 times a day or constant member bashing. I could see if there was all this stuff going on and nothing being done about it but for the most part I see no major issues with the forum. Bottom line is if there is a problem report it to mods or admin and it will be taken care of to the best of our ability.
Thanks,
BF.com
