There are broken things to fix and clean up (nobody needs sticky threads full of dead links), and enhancements to come, but we don't want to take anything away.
Including putatively "off-topic" stuff. That's the seasoning that makes each community unique. Yeah, we have some focused subforums for that, and I've done a good bit of moving threads into the right subs. Not as a project unto itself, but it's kind of related to the spam-hunting I've focused on: 120 spam posts removed just this week, and bunches of spam accounts along with them!
The task is more about renovation than rehabilitation.
Heavy content moderation is still very useful for some types of forums - you don't want your technical Q&A forum to get mired down in irrelevant discussions
My longest stretch was running a hardcore tech forum where we as admins were desperately trying to encourage off-topic conversations, and created specific forums hoping to accommodate them. Specifically, the forum was related to film and television production, and we thought, "hey, so many of these folks have been to film school, they watch a ton of stuff, and have certainly worked on projects that everyone reading this owns -- maybe we can start by focusing our off-topic efforts on what we're watching, favorite movies, etc"...but man, we couldn't move that needle at ALL.
But where we had to moderate was that these folks could get crazy hostile. LOL I think it's true in a lot of nerd communities, right? Comes with the territory.
A bit of irony. One idea I came up with that helped a lot was forcing a real-names only policy. I figured that people would calm down at least a little if people couldn't snipe from behind screen names. We lost a good-sized handful of folks to that (they logged out forever rather than take responsibility for what they posted), but things got so much better for years that I was patting myself on the back for this amazing insight...
...and then along comes Facebook, where these exact same folks had not just their real names, but pictures of themselves, their pets, their wedding photos and such, heck, a map to their HOUSE
spewing the vilest poison you can imagine in front of their mothers, kids, and everyone they went to high school with. LOL
Facebook definitely taught me the limits of accountability in public discourse, which is a big part of why I won't go there anymore.
But yeah, moderation is all about context.
Could you explain this concept, which you speak of, full life outside of UU?
I have no idea what she means.
Kidding aside, just as I was diving into this particular pool, my wife developed a very serious health condition that's requiring most of my focus, along with things like making our house wheelchair accessible and the gazillions of related tasks.
I'm also finding that admin-ing is cutting into my time for regular posting here AND my ukulele playing! Having these two superlative humans who just happen to have mad skills of very different sorts is going to make a HUGE difference to everything about my life.
And to the forum. A team full of people with the same experiences and perspectives isn't as strong as it should be, and I love that the Venn diagram of our skillsets has just the
right amount of overlap, and just the right amount of unique expertise for each of us. That said, I was immediately struck that our goals for the community are virtually identical. I've never been part of a team that was this entirely aligned from the jump, and it's going to make a big difference on how well and how quickly we move. Strap in, kids!
THAT said, they've identified some issues behind the scenes that had me scratching my head, but not yet able to identify the problems specifically enough to tackle them.
They saw what's what right away.
So we're going to have to shore up the foundations before we start building much more on top of them.
It's all underway, though, and we're very pleased to be picking up some steam as we go!
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