Fair enough. I said at the beginning that we should let you do your moderating without much in the way of comment and I think, for the most part, people did that and, for the most part, you've done a good job. My comments below reflect on the few, rather than the many, of your interventions.
Whilst you still retain that role, I will venture one piece of feedback in relation to the political threads. I think that you were not active enough with the subtle, gentle, moderation that could have steered people away from trouble sooner. No doubt it's tough and time consuming, but my experience in the past was that timely (and sometimes frequent) "settle it down, guys" or "you're over the line, Phil" or similar served to swing people toward the level of discourse that was requested. Locking or hiding of threads merely frustrates people, particularly those who had said nothing wrong and had legitimate replies, and the frustrations ultimately spills over into other threads.
The concept of punishing all in order to get the many to influence the few doesn't work when the many have no real influence. Public expression of dissatisfaction (followed up some times with acknowledgement of improvement) works well to establish the boundaries and for posters to become familiar with the expectations. Locking or hiding or deleting entire threads, imo, is rarely required. Individual posts? Sure, sometimes. And I know that you did edit posts from time to time where you felt the content was inappropriate - that was good.
More grey responses, less black and white. More small pushes typically results in less large ones being needed. To some that comes across as treating the posters like children with the expectation that they should already know better. But online is different. There's no physical interaction and intent and emotion and all of that can be so easily misconstrued, particularly when you add in wider cultural experiences and backgrounds. It's nothing new. It was like this in the 80s when I was on BBS chat boards and then the early 90s in newgroups or in IRC (before it became the utter den of iniquity) and then from the late 90s when the public web brought us message boards in various forms, and now through to social media.
I'll also take a moment to say thanks for doing what you're doing as I know it isn't easy, and to apologise for my contribution to the end result - I never intended anything inappropriate, but I have no doubt that sometimes some people will have seen it that way, because intentions are often blind to reality. My apology extends to everyone who might have felt my comments were out of line.
