It varies from moderator to moderator but there are no laid down rules

First off any newbie posting has to have his post approved to weed the spam out so it means checking the forum quite often and either approving or deleting as the case may be.

We also have the option to edit posts. I personally don't bother with this unless is a basic spelling mistake in the heading as we can change these but the OP can't.

Then it's more about policing the forum. Neil obviously has more permissions than others being an employee of MTM. Jason can lock posts, I can't. Probably an oversight when the account was set up.

One important thing though is moderators only have one presence on the board so when Jason for example posts about his engines he's doing that personally, not as a moderator. Many people seem to overlook the fact that we wear two hats and have and are entitled to a personal opinion.

A few duties I can think of:

Approving first posts as JS says to weed out spam etc

Dealing with any posts that are reported by somebody clicking teh little red flag under a post

Deleting doubel posts which are quite common

Tidying up links that have been incorrectly posted, embedding Youtube links, correcting photobucket image links, etc

Making sure you are all behaving yourselves

Keeping an eye on the classifieds to stop them being abused but traders etc

Editing thread headings so they better describe the thread

Moving wrongly placed posts or moving threads to the correct topic

I'm sure there are more.

As for Powers

We can lock a thread

Delete a post or whole thread

Discipline members – issue warnings or ban

But we can't predict the lotto numbers

Edited By JasonB on 20/12/2015 13:16:51

you can ban me if you want

We prefer a discrete message if someone is infringing the rules without being aware of it.

Neil

Yes and Yes in 99% of cases. Basically 3 strikes and you are out.

Hello Vic,

We have had several advertisers who have been contacted by scammers in response to their classified ads.

The only simple way we have of helping ensure that people replying to ads are bona fide is to require them to have made a small number of postings on the forum. First posting take a little while to moderate, plus ether is a bit of a time delay.

Scammers who know little or nothing of model engineering are unlikely to be able to make a meaningful contribution to the forum, so we hope it will put them off.

Sorry for the inconvenience, however we feel this is the best way of stopping this abuse of the classifieds.

Neil

Are you using an Apple device, John?

I don't know the details, but it seems we just have to live with this behaviour.

MichaelG.

An example of a site with insufficient moderation is the Stirling——Forum, it has been completely knocked over three times by invasion from(the last time) China.

Ian S C

A suggestion (and i've no idea whether it works) – try 'Shift-Return' instead of just 'Return'.

Diane

It's because Apple decided not to follow convention in terms of how newline and carriage return characters are handled.

Also Edge follows Internet Explorer tradition by not following accepted standards for web pages. Hunt around and it has a 'compatibility view' setting somewhere. Microsoft's tacit admission that they don't do web like everyone else.

Unfortunately apple browsers don't have a similar feature – presumably they consider incompatibility as proof the rest of the world has got it wrong

Neil

.

It's because Apple decided not to follow Microsoft's convention in terms of how newline and carriage return characters are handled.