Twins Daily is the best place to talk baseball and it's thanks to the moderators

[John Bonnes]

[giving standing ovation]

 

I just want to echo Brock's thoughts, add some praise, and then be a little bit of a hardass. 

 

Moderating a sports forum is an incredibly difficult job, which is why they usually fall apart. Within 6 months of launching this site, I was ready to close the forums completely until Glunn and Brock and the rest of the moderation team took it upon themselves to save it. Their work no only provides a great place to discuss Twins baseball, it provide a place, period. If not for them, it would not exist. It couldn't. 

 

I'll add something else you probably do not know: they actually do twice as much as you see, It's damn near impossible to moderate with any consistency, but the moderators here do as good a job of that as anyone because they spend at least as much time discussing between themselves how to work together and be consistent as they do moderating the forums which have grown by leaps and bounds over the last 6 months.

 

Prioritizing consistency is not something they NEED to do, but they do it even though it's twice as much work. So if you occasionally see inconsistencies, consider the challenge of applying consistency to something as nebulous as sports rhetoric, taking into consideration factors like context, past history, member feuds, available personal bandwidth and everything else. It's an impossible task, and they do an unbelievable job, especially considering at times we can all act like petulant emotional children about stuff we care about. 

 

If you find yourself on the wrong side of them occasionally, I'd ask that you consider the challenges they face and the results they have obtained. Take a little medicine, just or not, and try and get past it. They can't be perfect, and likely neither can you. 

 

On the other hand, if you find yourself on the wrong side of them a LOT, understand that I tell each one of them this when they start:

 

Every month 150,000 people stop by the site, and every month there are five hundred or so who contribute thoughts. But in any given period of time, there is consistently 10 or so names that keep causing problems. That is not random. That 2% (or much less) keep coming up because they like to test boundaries and consistency, and we're not going to derail the forums or the community for them, and we're not going to move the boundaries around so they can test those too. 

 

If you find yourself consistently being part of that 2%, if you think you are regularly the target of discipline or unjust decisions, it might not be the moderators that are constantly putting you you in that position. The other 149,990 people that visit the site are not in that position. Neither are the other 490 people who comment. The moderators work terribly hard, take a lot of unjust grief, and agonize over the best way to approach difficult situations. I hope the other 149K who benefit from their work appreciate all that.