My point is that BM is pretty much all volunteers at this point since Tom has moved on to other projects.
The founder is still a volunteer. There were a lot more volunteers when Tom was still involved than when he was not. There seems to be a growing cultural divide of players vs devs of late, when it used to be a much more shared effort where devs were all players and any player would contribute where they'd see fit. That's how Dwilight was created. Darfix starting the project, I think Giask worked on map, players came up with all the region names and did various other bits before Tom and Devs finally took it up. I think last December would've been the 10-year-anniversary of Darfix's first email proposing the West Continent, as it was then known.
Vita, is there an appeal process in place for forum issues? It seems by your statement that there may be more working on moderation here other than Timothy which was my original understanding. If so, can we have that somewhere to make it clearer for players so that they understand better? If not, then I apologize for any confusion.
I think that may imply more of a system than exists. It's not so much like a legal/court system where you appeal to correct a criminal label applied to you as much as cutting out derogatory, insulting posts. A slightly more detailed explanation...
We have the Forum Rules of Conduct. Anaris and I have adminship of forum. We used to have more global mods and board mods that actively enforced the rules. With their gradual departure, enforcement grew lax. Also, international game, many subjective standards on what is acceptable/offensive, and maintaining a middle path of both being considerate in speech and not being overly-sensitive. I recently added a new mod to various boards to re-enforce the rules. There may be room for more mods.
The mod powers are relatively limited, in terms of enforcement. One can warn the user, increasing their warn level between 0% and 100%. At certain levels, a notification to mods is added to all their posts of a high level, they cannot post anymore et cetera. Over time, it decreases back to 0. When I moderate posts, I generally do it on a per-post basis adding a small amount. Others prefer to just apply one large increase to cover general behavior/multiple posts. If the post is particularly offensive, I may edit out the offensive parts and leave a red moderator notice.
So when you say 'appeal', appeal what exactly? A moderate saying 'hey, cut out out the insults!' and increasing your warn level to get your attention that hey, cool it off a bit? We all have moments and admins have had their warn levels increased at times too. And again, warn levels decrease over time. I guess I see it more as a measurement of poor forum etiquette. Particularly egregious individuals may find themselves banned from forum, which makes more sense for an 'appeal', but such bans are quite rare. In any case, Anaris or I would be the ultimate stop for any concerns. Or Tom, but it best be a very, very good reason. But as you/daviceroy mentions, since we're currently the primary mods (plus the other new one), its most likely to receive further explanation more than anything else. Still, if the initial warning message did not explain why you were warned or you felt mod misunderstood situation, that cannot hurt.
While we are on the topic of appealing/bringing one's attention to wrongdoing, let me draw everyone's attention to the 'Report to Moderator' link at the bottom of every message. If there is content that violates the Forum Rules of Content (especially is insulting, derogatory), please report it. This gives a notification to moderators that gives a link to increase the warn level of a user. This alerts us that there is an area of concern to give our attention to. I realized, after promoting a new mod, that despite people stating their concern over insulting behavior, there are practically no moderator reports on any message, for months at a time. While moderators can certainly go looking for derogatory posts, its a whole lot easier to check the interface built for those reports.
Regarding the specifics of moderation sparking this event, hopefully not being too far off the mark as I have not been paying the closest attention last few weeks, I think what happened was... we have been attempting to enforce moderation of the board more proactively in last few weeks resulting in increased warnings and a new mod added, insults were given on both sides of some forum disagreement, a mod warned users for such, since the increase of warn levels isn't broadcast to all but only the person warned assumptions were made that only some parties received warnings and not all parties. So yes, in an effort to re-enforce the rules and remembering that only the warned person receives the warning so you do not know who else was warned, it is possible warnings were applied on posts that would not have received them when moderation wasn't being enforced as actively.
