Moderators are the everyday posters that do the dirty work with the actual message board communities. They get the task of saying things to posters like: “Hey now. Let’s keep it clean here folks” and “Don’t make me ban you.” Moderators are typically control freaks. They want you to kiss their ass and they want to tell you what to do. They are sometimes on a mission to prove that they have great power on the internet and like to whip out the banstick as often as possible to satisfy their own sick and twisted urges.

Some boards even have Super Moderators, or Global Moderators. Regular Moderators are just able to moderate as few as one forum and typically are the vilest of all moderators. These guys are stuck in their own little world and have no power on other boards around the site. They have been groveling to the board Administrator and Super Mods for a long time and have finally reached their goal of minion (moderator). Their ultimate goal is to achieve Global/Super Moderator status. Then they can gain even more control.
Haphazardly moderating post on all boards for the entire site as well as a bigger Banstick. At this point they have likely achieved the highest prestige they will ever get in their life and seem to lay off a bit. They are now comfortable and have no one to compete with. They believe they are royalty and should be treated as such.

Be careful with moderators. The ones on a mission will look for the slightest reason to take out their life’s frustrations on you. One false post and you will get a “Warning”. Come back with another one and you could be headed straight to Bansville.

There are cool moderators out there though. These guys are probably posters you have a good report with so you can pretty much get away with anything on their boards. Even if someone reports you this guy will just delete it and never say a word to you about it. In fact this moderator kind of likes to “stir the pot” themselves and is a good source to get total morons banned from the boards.

Message board Terms of Service (TOS) are pretty much the rules that moderators or administrators use to hassle the posters of the board. Since people are pretty much animals there needs to be some guidelines to keep them under control. Many users follow them, but many do not. Some rules may be: No profanity (swearing, cursing), no pornographic images, no personal attacks on other posters, no spamming, etc. These are rules put into place so that members can get along (somewhat) and that the boards will remain uncluttered and family safe. Blah, blah, blah.

For most of us though, these rules tend to be something that we loosely follow. I’ll admit that I swear like a truck driver on most days so that rule on boards is pretty damned annoying if they have a word filter. My posts sometimes look like this:

“This is ****ing bull***! I can’t ****ing believe that you ***holes want to **** **** **** **** the *** and **** stuff **** *****!”

As you can see it is pretty difficult to tell what I’m saying on these boards because I have a potty mouth.

Besides the curse filter, the personal attacks thing kind of gets out of control at times too. Some people are just idiots. Someone has to tell them that they are full of crap or brain-dead don’t they? I consider this a personal service, free of charge mind you, to these ignoramus posters out there. God forbid these posters actually learn the correct way thing work.

Then you have the old “consequences” of actions for violating the TOS. Maybe you can’t post for a few days. Maybe you get banned for a month. In extreme cases you could get your IP address banned and you can’t post from that computer again (IP masks and other stuff get around that). One board I post at actually changes your title under your username to “Asscaked” once you get banned. Everyone gets a good chuckle out of that.

You just need to learn how to bend, but not break the rules. Push the limits, but don’t go over the line. You can easily piss off, annoy, and make other posters cry with just some subtle truths masked with sarcasm rather than getting really offensive. If it s learned skill. Nothing works better than a laughing smiley or the little code after a really true, but offensive post. After all…you were just “joking”. Doesn’t anyone have a sense of humor anymore?