I wrote about the trouble of email comms about a decade ago that used about the same percentages as in Phil’s post. Forums are in the same boat. In the days of Compuserve forums, we used emotioncons as one of the ways to put tone into the message. We put the effort into communicating in the writing some of the tone and body language to let people know we were joking, or not. The community was good at keeping people civil, and we did not have to have many moderators.
Phil’s last line was the key to the success of those programming forums I participated in - giving the other the benefit of doubt that the intention was good. It worked then. It can work now.
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Yeah, it’s surprising to me that there isn’t more work being done on software which can store, organize, and make accessible the knowledge created by such discussion forums, or by an institution.
The most interesting development seems to be Jupyter Notebook, but it’s got an absolutely bizarre (to me at least) architecture, and I’ve not had any luck getting it running / set up, and it doesn’t seem that amenable to collaboration.
It’s a shame there isn’t a suitable AI program for this sort of thing, say something which would work as well as sBook does for addresses.
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I think the issue is what people’s idea of moderators job is. It’s not just about policing the members, that’s actually the least part of it. If you take a forum like Adafruit’s for example, they have moderators on at all times and they steer most posts to the information the person is looking for in older posts and marking posts that’s information is no longer relevant. The job is mostly about keeping the forum in order and being able to answer or show where the answer is located on the forum. There will always be disagreements and people taking things the wrong way, just the nature of the beast. This really hasn’t been too much of a problem here, the biggest problem seems to be organization and keeping veterans and newbies interested and involved. Just my opinion, but every time moderation comes up it seems everybody focuses on policing. Just figured we needed a different direction of thoughts on the direction.
Brian
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In my experience a moderator needs the following attributes:
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Time to dedicate to the moderation job
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The ability to connect and communicate effectively with the community
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Leadership and teamwork qualities that aren’t inhibited by personal aspirations.
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The ability to execute moderation actions quickly and consistently tuning practice to team discussions.
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A vision for where they want to take the forum that matches the rest of the moderation team.
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(Moderation) experience that translates to new points of view to complement the existing mod team.
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Trustworthiness, humility, honesty.
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Being reachable and participatory in internal discussions and communication in a timely manner.
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A genuine interest in moderation so they don’t burn out and want to moderate for the sake of moderating.
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A liking for performing mundane, repetitive tasks and answering the same questions over and over again.
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A willingness to take and ignore taking abuse while remaining professional.
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Someone who takes pride in their work.
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The OpenBuilds Forum will delete all of your content and your account at your request.
Now you know of one. 
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