Very difficult issue, because whatever rules you try and standardise on there will always be someone who stretches them to their absolute limit. This then causes problems with those moderators who are either eager to flex their muscles or have a predeliction towards clumsy mass deletions, and it all sadly kind of tends to go downhill from there. On the web people are incredibly rude, graphic and flamey, mainly because it\'s so impersonal. I run a board with approx 5,000 new posts every day, and I\'ve found that the best approach when you start getting flamefests between people that won\'t back down is generally to drop them a mail rather than publicly deleting or locking threads (which usually prompts 5 new threads of \'my right to free speech\').
And Athelas, I don\'t know who you are or how long you played my mud, but sorry to see your comments. Believe me, running a board whilst keeping it vaguely civil which is populated by hardcore net gamers isn\'t easy =). Fyi, whilst you may have had your differences with an imm (I have no idea who), things have changed a bit, for example aennor quit (who was the most deletehappy imm) and we recorded a new high of 212 people online recently.
Nass,
WoTMUD.org
afterthought - about an off-topic board, we tried that, it failed (People went overboard in it). When I got back from a holiday to find threads in the garbage board with posts mocking kids with Down\'s Syndrome, I simply deleted the board, and 2 months later I\'m still feeling the benefit.
