Moderators who are really concerned with what people think of them are liable to do what they think will make them the most popular instead of what they think is the most fair, or will hesitate to ban or discipline someone out of fear of that person or their friends hating him.
I'd say that this depends on why a moderator is asking. If it's because of a lack of self-confidence or because he/she is concerned about his/her image, then that's not a good thing. However, these are not the only imaginable reasons.
I'm one of the moderators on
http://forum.gp2x.de/ and I cannot remember ever having NOT done anything throughout my life with the only reason for not doing it being that someone would no longer have liked me. Yet, I actively seek for criticism regarding my moderation and take measures to improve the probability that people will actually tell me when they think that something I did was wrong. This is the reason why I disagree with the following sentence as a general statement, since there's no way to know for sure (maybe unless you're Blue Protoman).
Actually, if he doesn't want to be a mod then this thread comes off as pretty self-absorbed..
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Moreover, I don't see why this board needs new mods. There's always a substantial risk associated with it - see the other board for a few examples. Communities have to be careful not to treat it like a reward and individuals have to be careful not to seek it out of a sense of prestige.
Rationale for more mods: this place doesn't seem very organized. Nobody moves topics to the correct forum, they're all just in General, including new PND releases. This contributes to some of the PNDs released here not appearing on the wiki software lists (or appearing there late), because there's no way I have time to read all the topics in General as well as the BetaTesting/Software Release/News Zone subforums on the various English and German communities.
I see it the same way, this board is WAY too unorganized and cluttered. If indicating the activity of your board by (threads about topics that had already been discussed in an older thread)/week becomes a halfway representative method of extrapolating overall activity of the board, then you're doing something wrong. This is also the reason for why I disagree with the idea that this place does not need more moderators - in my humble opinion, it does desperately need some moderators which would have to be well-organized, especially since the increasing number of Pandoras and iControlPads out there might mean that we could soon have >7 Which-SD-card-to-buy threads/week.
[...] some of the PNDs released here not appearing on the wiki software lists (or appearing there late), because there's no way I have time to read all the topics in General as well as the BetaTesting/Software Release/News Zone subforums on the various English and German communities.
One of the biggest problems this scene currently has is that while much information about the various devices that are being discussed is available, this information is scattered all over the internet in various flavors of usefulness and complexity. This situation confuses new users, which ultimately leads to even more cluttered information.
To stop this spiral movement and prevent further clutter in this forum, it would probably be helpful to aggregate the most profound information that can be found within posts of this forum in a single sticky thread in a useful way. However, the number of sticky threads this forum has is probably already too high to make people pay enough attention to any of them. When creating software, usability can often be increased by structuring a decision tree that is deep instead of wide. In other words, concolidating (some of) the sticky threads into one (and/or unstickying some of them) could help.
Recently, I initiated something on the German forums which I would also suggest for boards.openpandora.org : a "Forenindex" (~="board index"). It's a single sticky thread that should aggregate links to the most profound posts which are useful in the context of the topics that the forum revolves around. It serves two specific purposes:
- The likelihood of someone asking a common question (such as which SD card(s) to buy, what screen protector to use, if the Pandora should have had a hinge similar to that of the Nintendo DS (links to various screen adjustment hacks that were posted on the forum) or wether the Pandora's NAND can wear quickly) decreases.
- The fact that through the existence of a board index as a single sticky thread it gets WAY easier to find some of the posts containing profound information that are spread across the board increases the chance that someone will add that information to the wiki (which is the place that all information should be headed to).
Number 2) is the reason for why a board index makes sense even though it comes close to being a quirky kind of wiki itself. The board index of forum.gp2x.de is currently at v0.0.0.1 , whenever it changes I will increase the version number and post a diff into a dedicated thread so people can easily follow the changes and updates.
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This post is probably too far off-topic for this thread already - should we start a dedicated thread or do you generally disagree with my considerations?
