1. If the mods are to be anonymous, I won't agree to be one. It is unnecessary.

2. I have no qualms about slapping my friends around if they misbehave. The real balancing act is how much to handle directly on a thread, to head off further problems, and when to take something privately to a person so as not to embarrass them or exacerbate the situation at hand. That is a very fine line to walk.

All mods should be able to be fair. I think, rather than a good cop, bad cop scenario, it might be more of a "I'm friends with these people, so YOU mod them, and I will mod these people because they are your friends." Something along those lines is more the impression I got from the description. Is that about right?

Anyway, the functionality of the forum will have more to do with mod capabilities than you might think. Hopefully, we'll get a nice, shiny system in place. Private messaging is a HUGE plus. Especially if people really disagree. A mod has the option of saying "Take it off the thread and over to PM". That is a great thing for a mod to have.

There are so many things one doesn't think of until one is in the middle of a situation. In all my years of running forums, I've only ever had an argument flare up once, and the whole thing was so patently ridiculous, that I pretty much just let the folks wind themselves out, and then deleted the whole thing. Never had a single complaint about it. Only once did I have to actively moderate someone, and that was just someone who refused to learn how to communicate with the rest of the community. I didn't have to ban the person, fortunately. Just a few mods and all was good.

I'm going back to the ability to tell people to take their arguments offline. That is such a great thing.

Rambling away...
Em

Oh, and I *like* that the checkbox is automatically checked. It's really easy to come and unsubscribe, but if I forget to subscribe to one, I may have trouble finding it again, or even remembering what I was trying to follow.