Lately I got one of my posts deleted where I joked how the guy should be shot for giving us hopes about another GTA release. The one who reported me got points and I assume that I lost some.

Now just for the fun of it I decided to check if I can do the same and finding useless or offensive posts didn't prove to be a challenge. One thread just said "I'm bored what should I do?" . The other one was the kind of spam you get in your hotmail inbox advertising a free xbox (or something along those lines) if you visit a certain website.

There were also some less annoying posts, that while offended someone, were in general just a part of the forum traffic and had no potential danger. Naturally I didn't have the honor to report those even though I wanted to know how far will the forum moderators go.

"What an interesting way to receive free points" , I thought to myself. However the reply back on my reports (of the serious looking spam) was that the moderators found no violations. That came to me as an absolute bang. While it didn't exactly upset me, it did put me to thinking.

What does it take to make a spam-free forum and how far should a moderator go? Are kids who visit these forums made into communist whistle blowers by granting them a reward for reporting a fellow user on the first sign of a bad word used in posting? How quick are some moderators to ban a person or delete his message just because they read somewhere else that the user is an ATI fan and the moderator in question is a GeForce fan? Even more importantly, how are we to know what kinds of moderators we got?

Try giving everyone a chance to say what they want and the forum will be spammed to death. Enforce plenty of rules and keep everything under control and soon the forum will turn into a police state. Where does the balance lye?

Maybe we need some democracy? Maybe users themselves should choose people out of general public to moderate the forums and every year or so those people have to be replaced with other users. Anual moderator elections :) How's that?

Maybe there should be rules or other control tricks like a moderator that must never check the abuse reports on his own?

Maybe in order to select better users not everyone can just join the forum but must first invest some effort like filling out a very long form about gaming or something else that will keep away the children who join just because they have nothing better to do and just want to annoy someone. In the world of today where internet has become big enough for many people to get lost in it (voluntarily as well as involuntarily) maybe forums can not be free for everyone.

Before my blog turns into a huge article I'm pulling away....