Feel free to criticize moderation. But first of all we don’t manage a community. SAFE folks are all over the place. Telegram, Reddit, Bitcointalk, The dev forum, this forum etc. I help out here as a mod/backup adming but also started a forum about EOS for example. I don’t have any control on Reddit, Telegram or the Bitcointalkforum topic about MaidSafe. So far for my “managing” work.
Second: You quote here about “key forum contributors” being driven away. Well… I would like to reply to that. When someone trolls the whatever out of moderation it most of the time doesn’t show up to the average user. Think about mods asking someone several times not to start “moderation talk” topics on the frontpage and a troll doing exactly that even 5 minutes after we’ve deleted the topic and asked him again over PM to stop trolling us. Or someone intentionally posting adult links even while we asked a user not to as we’re a family friendly forum. We no longer post details about why someone is banned/suspended but we did in the past and this is a post (Jan 2016) you might want to look at as it shows numerous cases of trolling etc. And we even let that person back to our platform after a 7 day ban. Imagine what someone has to do before we ban a month or permaban a user.
We always suspend/block someone for a week or 2 weeks after we see no other option. We might do it for a month if it’s a second ban etc. But when someone keeps going over the line there is a point where we permaban someone. Here’s the list. It doesn’t show all bans (like new users posting weight loss spam) as we don’t see them as “members”. So… out of 7300 members we’ve permabanned 7 in total. That’s not even 0.1% (not even 1 out of 1000) of all users. And as you can see most of them used so called “sock puppets”. We don’t really care if we see multiple accounts from the same IP (could be some family members or partner right…) but in these cases they really used these accounts to reply on their own topics or to troll moderation. Overall the “Suspended members list” is filled with severe trolls, people that made physical threats or tried to scam our community by claiming loss of a private key and asking for donations by posting a maid-address. I’m quite sure that most members here (like 9 out of 10) would agree with these bans if they knew all the details.
Now, there is a small group that left this forum as they don’t like the way it’s moderated. That’s not something I like. None of mods like it. But can you please answer the following question… Let’s assume we would we would try to please that group… And let’s say it’s a clear list of requests/proposals they want to see implemented like being more allowed to go off-topic in posts… Have moderation-talk (Meta) on the frontpage… Being less strict to trolling and implementing more community proposals…
What do we do if another group of clear voiced people start to criticize moderation about that?? What if they have a strong opinion about moderation getting back to how it was before these changes?? What if even some long time forum members decide to leave because “Meta is back on the frontpage” and there is “way too much off topic talk on the frontpage”??? What would we do???
I hope you can really answer these questions.