Moderation

• Moderation is necessary to keep SEN healthy and well-functioning. It upholds the ideals that SEN stands for by enforcement of the terms of service, the rules, and other sources such as pinned topics found in individual forums. This means that moderation shall not be limited to the explicit text of the rules, but rather to the spirit of the rules and what they were intended for.
• The purpose of this handbook goes beyond formally defining moderation policy and increasing public awareness of it. It also serves to maximize efficency, professionalism, and coordination of moderation.

Attitude

• Moderators are expected to be exemplary members. Your conduct influences people. It sets the atmosphere for the forum and you serve as a representative of the staff itself. Needless to say, you should not be doing the things that other members are moderated for. ("because I can" excuses should be few and far between.)
• Moderation shall not be subject to emotional compromise.
• Moderation shall not be subject to bias. We are not here to play favorites -- if it breaks the rules, it breaks the rules. Moderation is geared towards the improvement of SEN and the community.

Procedure

• Ask questions in the staff forum if you do not understand how something works or want help in making a call. The rest of the staff is here to help.
• Remember that locking an active topic hurts all the contributors to the thread. As such, one should try to salvage and save a productive topic rather than lock it in an attempt to punish the topic creator.
• Take time to actively warn members with full explanations of what they did wrong. This often cannot fit nicely in the small "reason" field provided with moderation actions. Send a PM to them explaining what they did, which rule(s) were violated, and how they can improve. You must actively work with members, particularily new members who may not be used to a community such as SEN.
• If a particular member is being exceptionally disruptive (or continuing to be a minor nuisance), please notify a Global Moderator or Administrator for futher action. Intervention and/or suspension is key to them learning that their behavior is not acceptable and to better respect SEN. If no rehabilitation can be made, the member shall be banned.

Technical

• The maxlength for the reason field is one kilobyte (1024 characters). If that is insufficent, please carry over to PM and make a note of it in the reason.
• When viewing the admin tab and looking at member logs, hover over a row to pop up a tooltip with the reason given with the entry.
• When editing more than one post in a topic, the previously edited post will appear when you go to edit your next post. Hit the edit button a second time to refresh the post you are editing.

Additional Reading

http://www.staredit.net/topic/3563/ - While not official doctrine, this should be helpful to moderators. Also, note to self to incorporate his points into the handbook.



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