I am personally acquainted with the following five different hobbyist message boards, all of which have moderators listed for the forums (some forums have two or three moderators):
MB #1: A very large UK board, which on the surface insists on extreme politeness in all forums, but whose moderators are allowed to express all-stops-out confrontational Pit-style opinions as they please (no hobby is ever cut and dried–there is always room for discussion). If you express amazement at this, or if you sound in any way judgemental (“hey! no fair, you’re a moderator…”), perhaps comparing it unfavorably to other MBs, you are immediately jumped on with both feet by all the other moderators. And I’m not talking about the usual “the SDMB mods are a clique!” accusations, I’m talking about serious moderator mob rule. You are immediately the Bad Guy, all your previous posts are resurrected, dissected, and discussed at length by a group of mods, special note being made of all the other times you ever disagreed with a mod. There is a lot of good hobbyist information at this MB, but I keep taking it off my Favorites list, because of the lectures from the mods, and because they have the gall to say, piously, “We’re all just here to answer questions and to help people, so let’s all stick to the facts…” Okay, I’m sticking to the facts, but what about Mr. Moderator, who just called me a cruel and unusual person because he happens to disagree with my technique?
MB #2: A very small, very quiet MB, whose mods are invisible, although their names are listed. Rarely hear a peep out of any of them. They never lock spam threads, or move threads posted in the wrong forums, or delete duplicate threads. They never offer advice to new posters on how not to start a new thread accidentally instead of clicking on Post Reply. Dunno what they do, exactly. Sometimes one or two of them will Reply to a “help me!” thread, if no one else has, but they don’t seem to feel an obligation to say anything.
MB #3: A fairly large noisy MB, whose mods are also completely invisible. They never move threads, or lock spam threads, either. Fortunately everybody on this MB is jes’ naturally polite, so no Pit-style fistfights ever need to be broken up. One wonders what would happen if they did.
MB #4: A large, very noisy, very quarrelsome MB, with a lot of trolls. There’s a lot of good hobbyist information, and a lot of good discussion with neat people, if you can remember not to feed the trolls, so after the SDMB, it’s actually my favorite MB. However, the moderators have no clue how to “moderate”; when a Pit-style fist fight erupts, there is much ineffectual hand-wringing, with the occasional threat of banning from the administration, but nothing is ever done. Multiple user names abound, and are used in combat.
MB #5: Another very small, quiet MB, with moderators listed, but as with MB #2, not in evidence, not even to answer a “help me!” question when no one else will. There are advertising and spam threads all over the place; in some forums, there are more ad threads than real threads.
All of these message boards have their good points, which is why I patronize them. But the overall lack of moderation, especially when compared to the caliber of moderation that takes place at the SDMB, is profoundly frustrating. I’ve been sitting there many times, on MB #4, with small-arms fire rattling all around me, wondering where the mods were. And it’s irritating to see the spam threads just sitting there, and the threads in the wrong forums.
And no, I’m not making these up. I give thanks, daily, devoutly, for the Straight Dope Message Board.