Real-Life Decision Making
You are a forum moderator for a popular, online gaming community. Although
your membership is over 50,000, you have a core group of members that have
frequented the site since the beginning. As a moderator, you spend a lot of
time reading posts to the site and you've gotten to know many of the core
members.
You've noticed that one of your core members has started to post some negative
responses on the site. Your community respects opinions and encourages open
discussions, so you let it slide. As the day goes on, you notice that the
member has increased his negativity and the posts are becoming more inappropriate.
You are familiar with the member. The member has never acted this way on
the forum before. But now the posts are creating some controversy with other
members, and you are getting complaints.
Your usual course of action is to issue a warning. If the warning is not
followed, you "mute" the member. Muting a member takes away their posting
privileges for a set period of time.
You wonder if this member's history in the community might deserve special
treatment. You're worried, however, that if other members in the community
see you playing favorites it might become more of a headache for you in the
future.
Forum moderators are forced to make decisions all the time, says Karl Nyen.
He is the lead global moderator at Markee Dragon.
"An example is if a long-time member and contributor to the forums is having
some behavior issues. Deciding the action upon the member is
a hard decision because it could upset other members of the website and ultimately
cause more of a problem," says Nyen.
You need to decide how to deal with the misbehaving long-time member.
Do you issue a warning to the member or ignore the outbursts?
What do you do?