There’s accountability to other mods and the 3300 members of this forum. We’ll have a forum update coming with 2 new mods introduced soon, so it’s quite a team as we prepare for alpha 2 and 3 and beyond. @frabrunelle is not doing anything different than in 2014 when he offered to help out. And look at who liked that post ;-). It’s true that this forum went from 100% community to maidsafe/community but I don’t think that’s a bad thing. We have a new domain (this one) as the old one was in the hands of someone who became unfriendly with this community. I’m happy that this domain is secured by the Maidsafe foundation, it takes away any risk of someone stealing it.
Yes, this is it for a part. We can’t satisfy 100% of all users. Some people just don’t like authority and think everything needs to be 100% democratic, including owning a domain. I know of 1 active member that got away because he didn’t like moderation (he made that public in a topic). Another active member just left after a 2 week ban. And we really only ban people for 2 weeks after something more than some name-calling happened. We’ve had 2 permabans of community members as far as I can recall. And believe me that you would’ve agreed with both of them. These were cases with extreme namecalling, blackmailing, making online threats and more like that.
We’ve also had a number of active members banned, but that number is < 5. That’s on 3300 members total, so as low as 0.15% of all members. And these were all allowed back (some only got banned for 24H to cool down a bit). We also try to talk before we ban, to see if there’s another solution. But don’t forget that we never just banned someone because we as mods think it was necessary, it’s always after a number of flags from the community that someone comes on the radar. We delete the posts that are inappropriate, but the community should count on us that we take it a step further when people keep crossing certain lines. We’ve got quite some new mods over the last 1,5 years and we’re never in a 50/50 debate where some say we should ban and a others say we shouldn’t. This means there’s great consensus when we ban (temporarily) and I’m quite sure you would agree with all of them if you could see why we did it. Our “suspended member list” is as empty as it can be at the moment. Quite cool on a forum with 3300 members.