Didn't you used to hang out on the Delphi Warren Ellis Forum? Whassamatter, don't wanna take your leadership tips from ol' Stalin's examples? BAN 'EM ALL, ASK QUESTIONS LATER!!
;-)

Actually, I was on TheEngine for a while, and believe me, I wanted to be one of Ellis' attack-wombs.

God i hate the tourist types - we get the "ad trivia" people who are doing some sort of quiz and they dash by and DEMAND ANSWERS to weird thinsg RIGHT NOW without ever having participated in the forum before (or after). Usually the answer is right within our search engine (like who directed X, who did music for Y) but they haven't searched either. I'd love to figure out a way to discourage that kind of stuff.

Wait, which NYC LJ comm? I'm a moderator for nyc_nobody and thecity.

You let people delete their own comments? That sounds like a bad choice to me, because it lets people retract something that another person has responded to, making the respondent (often) look like an arsehole.

It seems, from the way MeCha works, that quietly deleting threads that are a seriously bad idea, quietly deleting comments that are technical glitches like duplicate posts (as long as nobody has responded to the duplicate yet) and deleting comments that are unacceptable with a quiet e-mail to the user if possible is very effective. But then, MeCha is a pretty friendly place for the most part (with a small number of sometimes quite bizarre exceptions), so maybe it's not a good example. On those occasions when I am in the bowels of MeCha and see what has been pruned, it pleases me that it is so invisible to users so we don't have the MeTa-like bitch-fests every time a precious snowflake of a comment gets pruned or pornographic content gets posted on the front page (dude, what the fuck were you thinking?).

I think, though, that you have to accept pretty much all comers to an open forum. The inclusiveness of an open forum is both it's best and worst feature. I contribute daily to a forum about power boat racing and the spelling and grammar often makes me not only cringe, but struggle to understand what the person is trying to say, even after re-reading comments. But they are just as welcomed as the most literate of members, because those things are not important to the majority of members. The only things that are expressly forbidden are bad language (kids participate there, too and there is a filter in place that, for example, replaces "fuck" with "golly") and personal attacks on others. On that forum, you are able to edit your comments, but only before another comment has been made in the thread.

If you don't want people to just drop in and start taking from the community without giving first, perhaps you need to be more explicit in stating this somewhere (a sign-up page, perhaps?). Otherwise, you could take a different tack and thank them for joining you and welcome them to hang around and participate - most won't, I guess, but you never know.

boingboing on moderation
I like the idea of disemvoweling.

I don't moderate any forums, but the blogs I like best are those in which the discussion or comments is heavily moderated. On the other hand, I tend to read mostly feminist blogs, so the moderation is necessary (in my mind) to keep it from degenerating into nastiness when the trolls arrive or from staying purely at a "feminism 101" level forever. The troll comments are either not approved or deleted and the users are often banned; the 101 askers aren't allowed to derail more nuanced conversations.

Which doesn't mean there's not debate or intellectual arguments; it just means that people who are not acting in good faith or who are making nuisances of themselves are not allowed to take over.

For me, as a participant, that level of moderation is a godsend. But it wouldn't be appropriate for every community, of course. (I just wanted to throw in a voice supporting heavy-handed moderation and deletion.)

*contemplates deleting occhi's comment just to be heavy-handed*

*giggles and tries to think of MeCha 101 questions I can insist be answered NOW otherwise you're just PROVING you're all a bunch of cilantro-hating freaks that no one will ever love!*

Careful, we have the power and we aren't afraid to use it;-)
dg

You let people delete their own comments?

I had the same reaction. Heh.

As far as the boingboing bit goes, I think there's some good meat in Teresa's writeup. Maybe a weirdly arch way to present it, but hey, different culture.

I am a little boggled that they disemvoweled the portion of a boinger/mefite's comment that suggested examining mefi's approach to moderation. Not the rest of the comment, and not the quotations of the disemvoweled portion in later comments -- just the original bit itself.

for occhiblu:

!!! - WHAT IS WITH THAT PINK RABBIT ON THE HILLSIDE???

Ardiril made me laugh.

dg freaked me the fuck out. ACK!

Bwahahahahaha!

My work here is done

*sweeps cape over head, vanishes in a cloud of fragrant blue smoke*

Ok, having just recently felt the weirdness of a deleted comment (a response to one that really needed deletin') at another forum, I'm not sure I fancy the delete tactic. It didn't svae the trainwreck of a thread I was in, which really was a shame (even if I did my best posting more comments on topic to fill up the deleted holes) - instead new people would come in and basically do what the deleted guy just did, except less venomous so not to warrant deletion. So the tactic doesn't seem to straighten out trainwreck threads as new people in it won't see what is off-limits.

Still, in the other thread I started here the deletion tactic seemed to make sense. It probably is the best way of handling a really really active community - but for a smaller one I wonder if it works for the above reason - if you don't know what's verboten you'll keep doing it.

Now, I've had members email and say "delete my account because so-and-so was rude to me, I've been a member for X years blabla" to which I responded by simply deleting their account (well, they asked for that didn't they?). Now I'm not so sure, should I have walked into the thread and said "whoha, cool down" (even though what X said was simply sarcastic and not something someone should get an account deleted for that was just silly). Should I have deleted the extra-sarcastic comment?

Some threads go waaaay off topic, and my tactic right now is to let them as there's only so much to be said about an ad campaign really and some of the off-topicness is rather funny. Will this bite me in the ass later?

My users can edit their own comments (though not if someone has replied to it) and so far this is only used to fix spelling errors. I've not seen anyone change their entire comment. They can not delete their own comments. But I can. There's also a spam filter in place so if the comments are simply spam they usually vanish right before the users eyes. (i have the option of changing this in case it was a real comment).

I had more problems in the past with users getting really personal, like: "I hate that ad and the guy who made it is a fat bastard" but after a few messages to users doing that, personal attacks are not done any more.

I heard somewhere that standard practice is to tar & feather the offenders.

Eide: It's newyorkers, and I'm there under the same username. In fact, I've had you on my f-list for a long time, just reading about your life.

Yup yup. I still think it's crazy that you know my college friend's Stuy friends like lampbane and raptorck.

Like I said the first time we noticed the similarity, it's a damn, small, geek world.