I wouldn't mind seeing Thorsten's idea implemented, but I think it's a little far-fetched - it does require certain skills to moderate "successfully", and those are not primarily of technical nature. However, as far as I can tell, it's a "trust" thing - the FlightGear community, and especially the community of long-term contributors is a fairly tightly-knit group, and a number of long term members have repeatedly mentioned that this also causes some challenges, i.e. when it comes to dealing with a lack of contributors in one (or more) department/s (just remember Curt's comments regarding the increasing attrition rate) - thus, moderating the forum (or the wiki) isn't any different.
And while I like Thorsten's idea, I don't see it easily implemented - even though Bomber's idea may make this much easier, i.e. having moderators per sub-forum, this is something that I suggested years ago, back when I was volunteering to help with Nasal stuff, but wasn't much interested in helping moderate the FDM or graphics forums ...
Apart from that, a certain group of people around here (myself included) tends to get involved in too many debates to be really suitable for moderating this place.
I have been involved in more than just a few online communities, and phpBB-based communities specifically, and helped set up/administrate one phpBB community with roughly 4k-6k new users per year, and I would politely suggest not to underestimate the amount of work this causes, and the friction (read: frustration) that all this causes, just look at Curt's public postings in response to some of the recent "community challenges", and now imagine you are the one being yelled at - to some degree, people like Gijs, Stuart or now bugman are really just filtering community interactions while trying to ease the pain that is caused by a place like this.
And to be fair, the flightgear avsim.com forum never received that much attention, and never saw so many heated debates
BTW: I don't think there is anything like a mailing list "mantra", I also don't think that this is what this is about - compared to the mailing list, the forum can be a hugely frustrating place (and heck, I am not even subscribed to the list ...)
Honestly, this doesn't have to do much with any policy making, you literally can be the change you want to see - at some point, people will emulate best practices, especially if people are generally positive - which is something where contributors like Gijs and Johan G really shine at.
Anyway, if the moderation team is revamped (even if just temporarily for testing purposes), it would make sense to peer-review their actions, which adds to the workload of those few remaining. Apart from that, it's definitely something that is technically feasibile - as a matter of fact, back when I still had some forum privileges around here, those were specifically restricted to some some forums, so it's not rocket science - Gijs set up the whole thing within minutes, without requiring any support from Curt or others, all it takes is a global moderator as far as I can see.
And no, I definitely don't volunteer to be involved in any of this 
Statistics: Posted by Hooray — Wed Aug 24, 2016 6:20 pm