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I've seen people attack mods several times on account of them being mods. What if mods had separate accounts for posting, and accounts specifically for moderation actions.

I realize that there's a lot of personality built up behind particular names, but I think that would reduce the amount of ad hominem attacks on anything that a mod might happen to say that someone would disagree with. You guys don't deserve to be punching bags simply because you keep order.

 daedalus wrote:
I've seen people attack mods several times on account of them being mods.

TBH this is very rare, and thankfully so.

As to the separate account suggestion, the same kind of people who engage in the behavior you describe also tend to believe moderators give special treatment to buddies or DCMs -- which motivates them to further rule breaking attacks on the perceived buddies and DCMs. A policy of having separate mod accounts would seriously exacerbate this kind of problem, encouraging aggressive posters to attack anyone they suspected of being a mod, and I think also could foster distrust among users generally.

Yeah, I think having modpuppet accounts would be more trouble that it's worth. I fully understand the idea behind it, but we would probably just end up with the same people still attacking the MODs and then just adding everybody that they suspect of being a MOD.

I suppose I could see where dissent would breed upon that kind of paranoia. Still, I remember when a former mod still got attacked even after unbecoming a mod because people believed him to have lost his mod status simply because he dared have an opinion. Those kind of things don't sit well with me, regardless of the individual in question.

It's a great thing in theory. We did this in an old, big forum and it worked well until one mod accidentally revealed his "private" account and a witch hunt started with people trying to find anything negative to blame him.

In general, though, I also have a bad feeling in the guts when I see a mod being heavily invested / biased in regards to a topic. The moment you lose your professional distance, you open yourself up to mistakes where you let your emotions or relations to individual users overcome your professionalism.

This has happened on Dakka before, but I highly recommend PM'ing yakface about it. Yakface has always been open to any criticism / problems with his mods and does a great job at clearing problems up.

 Sigvatr wrote:

In general, though, I also have a bad feeling in the guts when I see a mod being heavily invested / biased in regards to a topic. The moment you lose your professional distance, you open yourself up to mistakes where you let your emotions or relations to individual users overcome your professionalism.

It certainly is always a risk for a MOD to be involved. But I want to say that if a MOD action is required in a thread that a MOD has participated in, it usually seems like a neutral MOD will come and do the red texting. It doesn't totally negate the feeling of pro-MOD bias users might have, but it seems like it helps keep things transparent.

I think there is no reason for a moderator account because I rarely see a moderator who fails to make a distinction between when they are making a personal statement, and when they are making a moderation statement. Right?

Yes, you are, but to be fair, it might not be that clear and obvious to everyone all the time?

 Sigvatr wrote:
In general, though, I also have a bad feeling in the guts when I see a mod being heavily invested / biased in regards to a topic. The moment you lose your professional distance, you open yourself up to mistakes where you let your emotions or relations to individual users overcome your professionalism.

Here's the thing: We're not 'professional' moderators. We're hobbyists on a discussion board who happen to have a few extra buttons on our forum page due to our volunteering to help keep the place in order.

There is no 'professional distance'. We all participate in discussion, because that's what we're ultimately here for.

Issues with moderators being invested in a discussion and then moderating in it are greatly lessened by the fact that all moderator actions are tracked and, where necessary, discussed amongst the rest of the mod team.


The separate account idea would be unworkable in practice, as the line between a mod post and a user post is often quite blurry. And it would be a pain on the bits to have to be constantly logging in and out while browsing the forum.