Can we discuss recent trends in moderation?

What a nice thing to hear. Thanks. :slight_smile:


I’m in the wrong frame of mind to comment extensively on this, so I won’t. But I will say a couple of things about hijacks.

First, hijacks come up more in P&E and GD than other forums because OPs are often narrowly framed. The OP wants to discuss a particular thing, they take their time to put their OP together, and then someone comes along and has fun with their thread and it gets out of hand. Moderators have the task of deciding when a hijack goes too far. Not an enviable task.

Second, someone is always going to be irritated when we make calls about hijacks. Call it too soon and we’re spoil sports. Call it too late and the OP is upset because their thread got derailed.

In P&E, we’re agreed we’re focusing on the updated and good rules left to us in 2020 by Jonathan Chance. Hijacks were his number one concern. Personally, I understand why.

My philosophy re hijacks is, I don’t mind if they run on for a few posts. But when more people join in with the hijack and pay less and less attention to the OP, then I’m going to act. Posters should be mindful of this and do their best to pay attention to mod instructions already given in a thread. An easy way to do that is to examine posts of moderators within the thread. You can do a search of just What_Exit or raventhief or Aspenglow from the OP, and if it’s a fast-moving thread where you don’t want to review the whole thing, that’s a quick shortcut to see if you’ve missed a mod instruction.

Which brings me to my last point: You have the same 3 moderators in both P&E and GD. It’s always going to be one of us moderating in these fora except on rare occasions. Because P&E and GD are where we tend to moderate more heavily for hijacks based on reasons stated above, you’ll see it more than in other forums where hijacks are not only allowed but in some cases, even encouraged.

I can’t say I’ve noticed a lot more moderation re hijacking in other parts of the forum, but maybe I’ve just missed it.