some of you people need to go spend a couple years in 2009 with your main social outlet being a phpBB that's run by one guy and the user policy just says "don't be a dick and don't break any laws" and moderation decisions only happen between 8pm and 11pm (Central Time) because he has to get the kids to bed first
wait why didn't he appoint a bunch of irresponsible teenage mods and then handle the drama between 8pm and 11pm
he did but then one of them (who wasn't even a teenager he was like 40) made things so much worse it soured him on the whole concept
I moderated my first phpBB forum at the age of 12 and it was VERY BAD
hell yeah
in 8th grade i adminned an irl-friends-invisionfree board and sub-adminned a phpbb for a kings of chaos clan lol
neither really required any real moderation though, mostly just did configuration and some css skinning and stuff
had mods on a couple other boards in my teens but it was all very everybody-knows-everybody just kinda messin around with mod features for laughs kinda stuff.....for the most part
lmao same I was 11 or 12 and I moderated an INVISIONFREE forum entirely centered around this one sprite comic collab that had 25 authors contributing with their self-insert characters and it blew up so bad I posted online the phrase "I swear to never take any kind of position of leadership ever again. This is the worse."
Someone made a sincere post that boiled down to "forums were bad or did you all fuckin forget" and I felt that
That might have been me but I'm sure I'm not the only person to make that observation.
the best forum rule I ever saw was "being the reason I add a rule to this list is a banning offense" and damn do I think about that every day
I gotta imagine the kids these days are having similar experiences of weird forum like spaces on hyper specific reddit and discord communities. It's not exactly the same but people are people and forum drama has existed since there's been forums (the Romans?)
