Board Thread:Community Voting/@comment-24675554-20160815002016/@comment-1984487-20160816115028

BusyCityGirl wrote: I'm curious why you would have inactive mods out and what the definition of too many active is and why you say those two cases would be problems?

This is something I have never heard convincing arguments for and is a perspective I am genuinely trying to understand. Inactive mods simply have not, and could not pose problems. For too many mods, I actually can see a small space for problems and have seen some when we have poor quality mods elected and they work as individuals instead of with the mod team and sometimes need modding themselves. When there are many of these, other mods can't moderate as a cohesive team. But really, it comes down to the quality of mods and not truly the number, and quality cannot be tightly controlled with our current system of voting them in. I do not see these problems lately anyway and do not think we have a surplus of mods at the moment. So in the end I still see no real issue with lots of mods either.

For me personally, I have years of experience as an admin on a forum which needed 24/7 chat moderation (literally 24/7, we had a team for EU and a team for US times). The mods need to be clued in, extremely active and they need to work in a close-knit team that can all quickly come to decisions. There are times in the chat here where I'd say 80-90% of the people on are moderators, it's just not needed, it's just inefficient and the decision making becomes ridiculously slow. Your point that the number of mods doesn't effect anything is just completely questionable, ever heard that too many cooks spoil the broth? You know you have too many when they can't all reach agreements quickly, and this happens all the time here from what I'm seeing. Mods should simply scale with numbers of normal users, right now there's say a max of 20 on chat sometimes, you don't need 12-15 of them to be mods too which is often the case here. To touch back on the inactive mods, honestly, my issue with inactive mods is they have rights for no reason at all and if they are just going to be inactive all the time they don't deserve those rights. I've found though a lot of these inactive mods seem to have this sense of entitlement and when you put their position on the chopping block they come back all upset. I just don't care for people who seem to think they deserve moderator/admin positions when they aren't doing their job in the first place. If you aren't going to be around until there's talk of you losing your spot then just do the right thing and step down and let some active and enthusiastic member take your place.

Now before you think I'd just demote anyone who's inactive for a week, I have no problem with people going away for a few months if they have the decency to inform everyone who needs to know. They don't even have to say the reason if they don't want but I see some of the inactive mods here just have turned up out of the blue because of this.