The way I personally look at moderation and such, comes from a perspective of someone that tries to understand things from everyone's perspective. As a user, I of course fully understand the user perspective of things. Users dont want to have their own personal posting styles restricted by rules they dont agree with. Many users likely dont read through ALL the rules, and occasionally do something that is against them and get a warning/infraction. I would say its fairly rare that a user will intentionally break a rule, but it can and does happen. When people find a site they love, they want it to conform to the posting style they are comfortable with, people resist change, which is where a lot of the issues tend to come I
would imagine.
From the perspective of the mods though, the rules are there, the rules are clear, and everyone is expected to take the time to sit down, read, and understand them before ever posting in those areas of the forums. If you screw up, you get a warning, if you screw up again on the same thing, youll get an infraction. Processes of appeal exist to help weed out borderline stuff, and can always be appealed to a higher up mod in cases of continued disagreement. The mods have, in recent times, tried to take steps to be a little more lenient in regards to some of the rules to allow for more mistakes by the users that wouldnt immediately lead to a warning/infraction.
At the end of the day, its simply a clashing of styles between users that want complete (or more) freedom in posting, and the owner/admins/mods who are looking to keep the site as organized, on point, and spam/troll/flaming/etc free as possible.
I personally like the site for how much time and effort the mods put in to making
it as organized and on-point as it is. As a new user myself, I got a couple warnings and an infraction because I was still figuring stuff out. I acknowledged my mistakes, thanked the mods for letting me know and made sure to learn from those incidents and make sure not to break those rules in the future
.
In the case of thread closures, sometimes threads simply get played out. After a while of nothing new really being added to the discussion about the topic, often mods will simply decide that its better to close a thread than having to take mod actions otherwise that would lead to spam infractions and such otherwise (its part of the greater leniency that the mods have been trying to practice). Ive also seen threads reopenned plenty of times when something new was potentially being brought to the table about the topic and it was requested to be reopenned. Ive made requests and had them granted for several threads in
the past in fact.
Are the mods perfect? Nope, we are all human, and there are processes in place to help take care of such issues. Otherwise from my point of view, the rules are the rules. If you disagree with a rule and can think of something better that will adequetely deal with the issues that caused the rule creation in the first place, then by all means suggest it. Its important to have such discussion in a calm and respectfull manner though.