ccDan - 7:44 pm on May 15, 2004 (gmt 0)

ken_b wrote:

Be Consistent: Treat everyone the same.

This is one of, if not the, most important rule in moderation.

If you do not consistently and fairly administer the rules, it's all over.

If you let your friends get away with things you do not let others get away with, you *will* lose users. I've seen too many forums devolve into a small group of moderators and their buddies, where they inevitably wind up scratching their heads wondering where all the other users went.

You will always have users that will complain about how you've administered the rules. It's important to review your own actions and make sure those users are not right.

As far as political forums go, when I moderated a news site years ago, it would frequently end up with political discussions. Besides the rules implemented site wide (i.e. use of language, no advertising, etc.), the only additional rule I added in political discussions was no personal attacks against other posters. You could insult political officeholders and the like, but if you descended into a personal attack against other posters, you were done.

In those days, editing a message was not an option; so the only recourse was to delete the user's entire post, and send them a note describing why it was deleting and want changes they needed to make if they wanted to re-post.

And, I'm not sure that's not such a bad idea. If you edit a post, I think you may get more criticism than if you had simply deleted the post and described to the poster what changes *they* needed to make.