There is an alternative way to moderate these forums, a way in which the vbulletin forums are designed in accordance with but which is still little known of here. After I'd started as a moderator, I was very much a supporter of it, but now I'm not so sure. It was debated on the mod forum, but little of that ever reached our regular members.
It has to do with the infractions system. Today, an infraction is handed out rarely and it's usually a notification that you did something wrong and a warning that if you keep it up, you may get some form of ban down the line. However, recieving an infraction has little immediate practical relevance for the user.
That's of course not the way the infractions system is supposed to work. An infraction expires after X amount of time and you can gain several timing out at different times. Whenever you have 10 or more, you are banned from the forums until enough of them expire to bring you under 10. For them to work like this, they can't be handed out rarely. Rather, they have to be handed out every time a user does something wrong and recieving one is obviously not a big deal - you'd have to get 9 more before there's any practical effect (in a way, you are allowed to break the rules to some extent). By such a system, infractions would be handed out by moderators much more often - it would be a consequence of all actions that are in conflict with the rules. Most users would get them and when they misbehave too much, they are banned from the forums for X amount of time depending on how many infractions they've been given and when they expire.
One idea behind it is that if moderators are told to hand out infractions every time a member is insulted (ex) regardless of who does it, moderation becomes non-personal and it helps eliminate certain human errors from moderation like favoritism. The length of infraction-caused-bans are not decided by any one moderator, they just give you the infraction(s) that the rulebook says you should have regardless of it's effect on you as a user. Everyone face the same consequences, everyone gain infractions. Rather than getting explained to you in a PM what you did wrong, an infraction message - because they would be sent out so much more frequent - would probably just quote the post causing the infraction and a link to a thread where the system is explained.
It would be an attempt at introducing consequence and objective moderation to the forum. Moderators would act a little more robotic, but a downside is of course that moderators would have to moderate much more which is of course a job. Members would have to put up with being moderated more often and some have argued earlier that this might cause a little social tension and drive a wedge between the moderators and the regular users. Personally, I'm not so sure if that would be a problem if the regular members understand the system, but I guess it's a possibility.
There's of course no reason to use this system if things are going smoothly the way we work now and for the most part, my opinion is that moderation the way it is now is working. If it ain't broke, why fix it?
Anyways, now you know about it. I used to hand out more infractions back in the day .. now I've conformed
