Moderators powers and duties

What are the duties and powers of the various moderators for this forum?

It varies from moderator to moderator but there are no laid down rules

First off any newbie posting has to have his post approved to weed the spam out so it means checking the forum quite often and either approving or deleting as the case may be.

We also have the option to edit posts. I personally don't bother with this unless is a basic spelling mistake in the heading as we can change these but the OP can't.

Then it's more about policing the forum. Neil obviously has more permissions than others being an employee of MTM. Jason can lock posts, I can't. Probably an oversight when the account was set up.

One important thing though is moderators only have one presence on the board so when Jason for example posts about his engines he's doing that personally, not as a moderator. Many people seem to overlook the fact that we wear two hats and have and are entitled to a personal opinion.

Why do you ask, can I ask?

Diane

A few duties I can think of:

Approving first posts as JS says to weed out spam etc

Dealing with any posts that are reported by somebody clicking teh little red flag under a post

Deleting doubel posts which are quite common

Tidying up links that have been incorrectly posted, embedding Youtube links, correcting photobucket image links, etc

Making sure you are all behaving yourselves

Keeping an eye on the classifieds to stop them being abused but traders etc

Editing thread headings so they better describe the thread

Moving wrongly placed posts or moving threads to the correct topic

I'm sure there are more.

As for Powers

We can lock a thread

Delete a post or whole thread

Discipline members - issue warnings or ban

But we can't predict the lotto numbers

Edited By JasonB on 20/12/2015 13:16:51

A couple of things not mentioned before are, from time to time, protecting forum members from the consequences of ill-considered postings and much more frequently helping out members who have locked themselves out of their accounts.

Neil

John, Jason and Neil,

Many thanks for your detailed and lucid explanations which are much appreciated.

Diane,

I asked simply because I did not know the answer. Now I do I am perfectly happy.

.

Have you ever had to discipline JS. ?

Nick

you can ban me if you want

I love it when people are perfectly happy. Thank you

Diane

We prefer a discrete message if someone is infringing the rules without being aware of it.

Neil

Regarding the matter of banning/suspending a member.

1. Is that member informed of the ban and the reason why?
2. Is there an avenue of appeal regarding the matter?

* Danny M *

Yes and Yes in 99% of cases. Basically 3 strikes and you are out.

how do I contact a moderator to give me access to contact details of a seller in the classified. I am interested in the lubricators that are for sale.

Hello Vic,

We have had several advertisers who have been contacted by scammers in response to their classified ads.

The only simple way we have of helping ensure that people replying to ads are bona fide is to require them to have made a small number of postings on the forum. First posting take a little while to moderate, plus ether is a bit of a time delay.

Scammers who know little or nothing of model engineering are unlikely to be able to make a meaningful contribution to the forum, so we hope it will put them off.

Sorry for the inconvenience, however we feel this is the best way of stopping this abuse of the classifieds.

Neil

Hi chaps, Just while all are looking I have noticed a strange occurrence --- when typing a post if I press return the curser goes to the top of the post and not to the next line, I then have to click on the correct position to continue typing.

A similar thing happens when adding a link -- it goes to the top of the post.

Any ideas ? John

Are you using an Apple device, John?

I don't know the details, but it seems we just have to live with this behaviour.

MichaelG.

Hi John

It is as Michael says - I am "Apple Man" ( iMac, iPad and iPod !) - I was converted by all my kids constant chime of " For goodness sake Dad - get yourself an Apple"

It's worth putting up with the little eccentricities of the hardware for a quiet life! (What is more the design IS good and it all seems to work both individually and together)

Norman

An example of a site with insufficient moderation is the Stirling------Forum, it has been completely knocked over three times by invasion from(the last time) China.

Ian S C

I have just this trouble, it seems to be concurrent with switching to Microsoft Edge. Even more inconvenient is that I can no longer attach any of the material in my albums to support answers to questions raised in forum correspondence. All I can do now is tell them to look instead.

Regards Brian

PS To overcome the odd effect both John and I have observed, I find that typing material as normal can then be paragraphed by using the return key in between the sentences after completion, rather than during the composition of it as was normal beforehand

Edited By Brian Wood on 05/08/2016 12:14:19

Edited By Brian Wood on 05/08/2016 12:14:57

A suggestion (and i've no idea whether it works) - try 'Shift-Return' instead of just 'Return'.

Diane