Obviously a fascist

In an online forum, the purpose of a moderator is to keep everything from going to shit.  What that should mean is squelching the trolls and dumbass kids who fail to contribute even a modicum of positive influence on the forum.  A good forum will have many good users who weed out the bad by constantly making them look foolish.  A person can be made to look dumb only so many times before he/she goes elsewhere.  I like to think that Chris, Ruckus, Liney, and I are that type of user on our particular forum.  We do a lot of good in our forum teaching others how to think critically about baseball and the Phillies.

Which brings me to why I’m annoyed.  I created a thread explicitly to contain our blog’s thoughts.  The idea was to keep things in one place.  We get the benefit of a little promotion while the forum gets the benefit of not having our crap spread around 10 different threads. 100% less “I can answer your question but I’m just going to link you to my blog article” is a good thing.  And of course, because this post has happened, you probably have figured out that thread has been closed.  I don’t blame the particular mod in question for blindly following the rules, what I’m bothered by is people applying arbitrary rules that they have no stake in.  It doesn’t matter to this particular mod if the Phillies forum has a thread that promotes a blog.  He doesn’t use the Phillies forum.  Shouldn’t it be up to the discretion of the Phillies moderator to close threads in the Phillies forum?  I sent this to the mod who closed the thread.

The express purpose of the thread was to make the forum better. A number of PSD Phillies forum users are followers of the blog and like to remain updated. By allowing us use of a thread, we’re able to keep other threads uncluttered. Otherwise our work would be linked into whatever thread was appropriate and discussed there. I see this as detracting from the forum because it changes our post behavior. By keeping updates in one place, we the bloggers can continue to post in other threads as we usually would and the forum goers have the option of following our blog or not.

Further, for those users that do like to follow us, an updates thread provides a richer PSD experience. There hasn’t been any negative feedback in the thread from the Phillies forum goers.

I ask that you reconsider your decision to close the thread. A dedicated thread keeps things much neater and tidier. Further, it keeps everyone involved happy. Please consider re-opening it.

His response:

A thread specifically dedicated to a blog is not what we allow. If the thread is about a Philly related topic and refers to blog it is fine. But threads referring to the blog specifically are not what we want.

sigh I don’t understand.  I try to make things as simple as possible and they want it done the hard way.  I guess the forum will now become an extension of our blog.  Hello Prospects Thread.  Allow me to introduce you to The A Team’s Top 10 Prospects…

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