One of my web design clients is having trouble with their message board. It should be much better moderated. As the owners of the board have no experience with moderating, things are getting a bit out of control. (The site is for a professional organization, but is open to the public. Their chosen profession, code enforcement, angers MANY people),

I'm looking for some sort of "How To" guide to moderating a message board. Since you guys seem to do such a great job on MousePad, I wondered if you've seen such a thing and could direct me to it.

Thanks for any help you can provide.

justagrrl -- Thank you for your compliments.

We don't have a manual. Our primary guiding philosophy is derived from our community policies, so the first thing you should look at in your forum is your set of policies. As a controlled environment, you should never have to find yourself in a position where things are that out of control, since you have members with authorization to close threads, suspend members, and so on. Feel free to read our Frequently Asked Questions forum; it covers a wide range of issues including acceptable member behavior.

Remember that the boards are not a democracy, anarchy, or unmoderated Usenet. While your site may anger many people, for those individuals to complain, they must still comply with the community policies. Your forum resides on a server that is paid for by your clients, and they were not voted into office by the members as public officials. If it seems like they are always complaining about the same issues in an endless debate, consider setting up a FAQ that addresses these subjects, and point them there.

Moderators should be selected extremely carefully. While experience helps, your clients need to look most of all for mature, intelligent, level-headed people who won't take things personally when they have to do the tough job of stepping in to discipline a member with a warning.

Your clients probably also need to recruit and develop a moderation team to work together; it's difficult to take on the weight of such responsibility by oneself. Keep in mind that no one moderator would act alone -- while a single moderator may be the point of contact for a warning, those are issued in agreement of the team.

Good luck!

Thanks Lani. I'll check out your FAQ again.