Thanks for your comments Yorkpoker. The OP contains a lot of excellent insights that I'm sure (as Beanie mentioned) will unfortunately go completely ignored by those who need to hear it the most.
...due to BS that was mostly avoidable.
If you want to sum up why I quit moderating this forum in a short phrase, this is one of the best ways I can think of. To borrow your words again, another way would be that
I am tired of people responding to issues without considering either the feelings, sense (or lack) of humor, personal bias, or past experience of other posters on this forum.
We are all over 18 here.
This is not the case. Many of the users of the forum are, but there is no minimum age requirement. (And of course, no requirement to enter your actual year of birth into your forum profile.)
Sloth, A_A, and Scharf, start dropping the hammer where needed.
As I mentioned when they were designated as forum moderators, all_aces and Dave Scharf were (and still are) under no expectation from either me or Sloth to actually participate in forum moderation. (Also, one other reason that Dave S was made a global Mod was so that he is able to better manage his own forum section.) It was actually extremely valuable to me to have them classified as Mods simply so we could have discussions in a private "Mod Talk" section of the forum. Moderating the forum as little or as much as they like is completely their perrogative.
And clearly doing whatever the heck he feels like with the forum is Sloth's perrogative. :cool:
I may fill in as a guerrilla, trench level moderator (unofficial, of course) and just make a point of stepping in to shut down flame wars.
This is an excellent idea, and something
everyonre can do. I'm not suggesting that everyone step into every flame war and start trying to calm everyone down, or (worse) flaming the flamers everyone yourself. I mean, use things like the "Report to Moderator" function to get the Mod's attention.
One the the great difficulties I had in moderating the forum was a lack of input from forum members. I have been accused of "abusing my power" by making unilateral decisions. Without any kind of input from the rest of the forum users, what the heck was I supposed to do?
Scotty's always seemed to be a pretty level headed, thick skinned individual, so I imagine he likely had other reasons as well.
Thanks for that. I'm glad I at least
appear level-headed. :)
However, I am not at all thick skinned. I suppose that if I appear to be so while posting on an internet forum, this is merely a form of self defence. The reality is that I have been greatly hurt by my recent experiences on this forum. On the other hand, being thin skinned goes both ways, and I have been greatly inspired by all of the positive comments I've gotten recently, and I thank all of you for those.
ScottyZ