Forums is a lot different. I forgot to talk about the forums in the mods handbook. Thankfully forums have been around for many decades and a lot of tools exist to make moderators jobs easier. Let's talk about the system in place. The forums have an infraction system. Generally people break rules, but just because someone has broken a rule that doesn't mean they should be exiled. The infraction system allows staff members to assign warnings and infractions to forums members. The more infractions a person has, the more dangerous it is for them to misbehave, and therefore they try harder to not break rules. If a member has 10 or more infractions, they will lose their ability to use the forums until the time a previous infraction has expired. So in a way, people can ban themselves if they collect too many infractions. Let's talk about possible conditions to implement disciplinary action. Someone makes a new account and starts advertising a product, or a website, or just rapidly posting spam. This is where someone can get spam cleaner-ed. The spam cleaner tool is for automatically deleting all posts made by an account and permanently deleting that account. The spam cleaner tool can only be used by moderators on recently created accounts. If it is clear that someone a) has made an account to promote a product, website or another server. b) if someone is griefing and creating a lot of posts with low quality content, and specifically intending to cause a disruption. In the two conditions above, it's okay to hit that spam cleaner button. This is what it looks like. Now lets talk about infractions and warnings. A lot of people can take infractions personally and be very upset, so do not hand them out lightly. There is nothing worse than accidentally breaking a rule on a forums and then being punished for it like you did it on purpose. Actually happened to me. So there are four main things that moderators have to deal with. Spamming Swearing Flaming/harassment advertising If someone spams, make sure to give them a warning with zero warning points. If they ignore your message and continue spamming, give them another point. Make sure to remove the spam from public view. Something I don't want staff members to do, is, find someone spamming for 10 posts, and then give 1 warning point per 1 post for 10 posts. That's wrong. That's basically a ban for spam. I want moderators to give warning points per instances of misbehaving outbursts. So if someone makes 10 posts, delete the 10 posts and give 1 warning point, if they do it again 15 minutes later, repeat. I guess if its on the same day you can increase the warning points by 1 per instance. Eventually they will self ban. You don't have to let them spam for 15 minutes, you can give them a warning points each time they ignore your previous warning. So for example if someone is just spamming non stop few posts a minute, and you keep warning them and they ignore you, you can keep giving them warning points until they stop ignoring you, or until they are tempbanned. So basically this applies to all four categories, spamming, swearing, harassment, and advertising. So the harassment and flaming part is very hard to objectively judge. Like I can say "I don't like your shirt" and you can say that I am flaming you. lol. So don't give people harassment warnings unless they are being absolute savage dickheads to other people for no reason. Also give people 1 swear word allowance per post. It's when there is a bunch of cussing, that is when problems start. Also, staff, do not give people infractions for harassing you, but another staff member can give people infractions for harassing you. So this at least has a buddy system so that a staff member can't just ban people by spamming them with warning points.
LOL most of your mods flame and swear on here anyways, so they have no right enforcing the rules they don't abide by
I didn't say that, just keep and eye on the mods you have and make sure they follow the rules themselves. The server needs mods, but they need to follow the rules as well
