Impersonating users deleted/perm-banned, including most notably "Leuders"

Perhaps at last, some of you are beginning to realise what moderating a ψ forum involves! It isn't that people come with different viewpoints, it is that some come with the intention of messing up the forum. We had endless trouble from those people on Skeptiko, but ultimately what can you do - there aren't the hours in the day to fully investigate these idiots.

I want this forum to succeed, because it has attracted so many Skeptiko regulars, and I feel that if it goes under, it will scatter our whole community. I think your Achilles heel will be your moderation policies. There are people here who don't seem to approve of any moderation, and I can understand their viewpoint in an abstract sense, but you can already see the beginnings of the wave of problems that inadequate moderation will bring. Already Laird has probably banned more people than I did in this year up to the point when things got nasty at Skeptiko! I don't blame him for that, but perhaps you can now see the problem, and why I did some of the things I did.

I would strongly suggest that you pre-screen new members, roughly in the way we do at Skeptiko. Each new member has to engage in a short email discussion with a moderator, and the moderator can decide to accept them, or not. I was amazed how useful this was at Skeptiko. This would be the biggest improvement you could make, and would involve far less moderator time, than trying to sort out the mess afterwards.

I would suggest that anyone who misbehaves to a level that means he is banned, loses the right for his posts to continue to appear. In some cases this may involve removing an entire thread, if it mainly related to the banned individual.

I suggested more than once to Alex, that we refuse to let people join if they want to use bizarre names, such as "Laird pseudoscience promoter" - why the hell should we give such a person the time of day? Obviously, this is best done in the pre-screen.

The problem is, that initially these people can be seen as vaguely amusing, but the volume of trouble quickly grows, and the forum becomes utterly tedious.

I would also suggest that verbal abuse towards other members of the forum - or the use of more than the odd rude word should be dealt with too. I was criticised for insisting on this - as though I was an old fuddy duddy. However, I had seen how letting this pass, progressively degrades the level of conversation, and undoubtedly puts off some people from joining. Imagine if you have kept the details of some incident - say and NDE - secret for many years. Are you going to wish to join a forum to discuss its significance, if people are swearing at each other?

Finally, I would suggest that discussion/criticism of the actions of moderators should be done privately by PM or email. It was very very wearing to have to deal with trouble makers, and then with endless wrangling as to whether I made the right decision.

David

Has anyone checked whether this is really DaveB, or do people think it's sufficiently obvious?