My posts last night come off as pretty anti-Mod, however my biggest complaint, which I want to make clear, isn't that Krellin was silenced or Draug banned (on some level they both deserved what they got), its the ambiguity of the reasons behind it.

For any civilized society to function (on some levels every forum is a society), a clear and consistent rule of law is required. As it currently stands, forum moderation on Webdiplomacy lacks the clarity needed for a functional rule of law.

Currently the forum is loosely modded, as it should be. I've been on many sites where political dialogue is impossible because Mods go too far in enforcing rules, and often is the case that threads are locked if discussions got too heated, and certain beliefs are silenced for fear of offending others.

In this respect webdiplomacy's forum is superior to most on the web; where the mods only loosely moderate the forum and let the community get away with a lot, mostly in the name of free speech.

However the area where webdiplomacy falls short of many forums is the lack of official rules behind moderation. Here on webdiplomacy, mods silence people who cross a line, as they should. However, here on webdiplomacy, often is the case that there is no clarity behind where that line is, and where it was crossed. The forum moderators therefore have to make the very touch choices on their own discretion, which will frequently lead to unfair rulings.

Something that would help both the mods and those in the forum community is establishing a rule of law; ie what can get you silenced (or banned) and for how long said silencing would last. This would help go a long way to making the forum a better place, and it would also make it a lot harder to criticize the actions of the mods.

My first suggestion is to update the sites rulebook, as currently it lists the only rules in forum moderation as “[Sharing] information on a private / anonymous / gunboat game, or threads about suspected multi-accounters / meta-gamers / bugs.”, neither of which were actions committed by either Draugnar or Krellin, making it very easy to argue that Krellin and Draug didn’t deserve to be banned/silenced, on account that they didn’t break any rules.

My second suggestion is to list the lengths of silences when you committ something, making it so that mods don’t arbitrarily decide the lenghts of silencing:
Ie. How did President Eden come up with the 30 day silencing for Krellin? Is it an arbitrary number made up by him, made up by the entire mod team after consulting eachother, or predetermined based on an (unknown) set of rules.

Overall my suggestion would be to update the set of rules so that they include the rules, definitions for those rules and the punishment for breaking those rules:

Example:
Circumventing a silence
Allowing an already silenced user to circumvent his silence by communicating through you (eg. copy and pasting a pm of his onto the forum).
1st offence: warning
2nd: 24 hour silence
3rd: 72 hour silence
4th: 1 month
5th: Permanent silence and/or possible site ban

Thoughts?