Over zealous and totally inconsistent moderation

[JacquesHammer]

Can someone give some thought please as to the nonsensical situation regarding moderation.

I’ve been taking an interest for a few months now and there’s no pattern to any deletions.

Is there some sort of agenda?

Hi OP,

Thanks for getting in touch.

We're really sorry that you feel our moderation is inconsistent - we try really hard to be consistent (but sometimes we do make mistakes - we're all human!)

Are your concerns site-wide, and do you have any examples?

I’ve got one! The thread ‘today I raised an issue at work that was GC’ about OP sharing her work women’s toilets with a transwoman colleague. Amongst several other posters, I gave OP practical advice, as I have had this experience at work too and I found it humiliating and at times frightening.
Now the whole thread has been zapped.
Could you not have just deleted what was outside of guidelines (I don’t know what it was?) and let the thread stand. That’s a woman asking for help there, with other women offering help and support. Our time to help her wasted. It’s very disheartening and I would say not in the spirit to just kill off whole threads.

That ^was an example just now, from FWR

Hi @ChattyLion

We do understand where you're coming from, but we don't believe this to be an issue with consistency. We have always zapped threads that are too far gone or not in the spirit of the site. If lots of users appear to be breaking talk guidelines, then it'd be a very rare case to leave that thread standing. This is site-wide too, not just related to one topic.

Thanks for the reply Lily. I appreciate you getting back. Only you as mods can be the judge of what is ‘too far gone’ in a thread, but from a poster and user of the site perspective, personally I’d rather that when its an individual asking for help/advice, (So not just posters sounding off ), that you made a Swiss cheese thread with deletions, if they break guidelines.

Or, could you try deleting up to a reasonable point and then posting a warning against the guidelines continuing being to be broken, before killing the whole thread off if further deletions are needed? I feel that would be better because it would give us time to act- eg we could PM the OP if necessary with contact details or websites that they might find useful if it looks like the thread is in the balance. I didn’t notice any warning before this particular one was zapped but I have seen warnings like that on other threads before.
Anyway- thanks for listening, because I can only imagine what silliness and nastiness you are busy fending off behind the scenes and I am sorry that you have to go through all that to let us keep on talking.

Hi ChattyLion,

You make some really useful points; especially about us mods posting on threads with a warning when things go awry to give everyone a chance to PM the OP like you suggest.

We'll definitely take this into account when moderating the most tricky threads.

Thank you that’s great.