Board Thread:Consensus Track/@comment-1732320-20150908141427/@comment-1251315-20150909085419

Because I neither want to support or oppose and also because the last time I was managing the forums, there wasn't any decent candidates for forum moderator, from what I saw. Anyone with a lot of forum activity tends to be content editors (hence why the forum mods are mostly all just rollback users as well), because the majority of forum-only users tend to ignore the forum policy on a regular basis (but a few content based editors do so as well).

When the concept of forum moderators came around (as in, the proper concept), the general idea was that the forum moderators would be pooled from the current rollbacks. The majority of rollback users are active editors who use the forums on a semi-regular basis and would be the most familiar with the policies that govern forum use, so they would be able to enforce them more than those who don't edit the mainspace much (no offence meant). The only problem is that the majority of current rollbacks don't use any part of the forums, a few exclusively post in Consensus Track threads and a tiny number contribute to the wider forum community: this small number that contribute to most of the forum boards are -- to my knowledge -- not interested in becoming forum moderators.

If you feel there are users who should be forum mod, just ask them if they want to be one: if they approve, contact a sysop to make the change. Unlike forum operator, a forum mod doesn't have a lot of abusable user rights (they are only able to close, move and hide threads/posts, as well as edit them), as mentioned by UltimateSupreme, and doesn't really warrant an actual consensus imo.

A thread like this is only really necessary for forum operators, because they gain the ability to block users, completely delete a thread (although it's not true deletion, but it becomes unviewable to all but forum ops and sysops) and highlight a thread to be notified to all via the bell icon. Forum mods don't have any rights that can't be undone by someone else anyway.

To be quite honest, threads should be started for inactive moderators who don't use the forums, or moderate them, yet have a forum moderator flag. These users aren't helping the wiki, and -- in some cases -- haven't logged in for months.

IMHO though, the problem with moderation isn't because there's a lack of it: the problem is that many posters seem to just ignore the countless notices in threads telling people to read the forum policy. Examples:
 * You've got the notice at the top of threads, which is pretty adamantly clear NOT to upload images for the forums, yet it happens anyway.
 * You've got the notice above the posting boxes telling people quite clearly that their post will be edited or removed if it violates forum policy or Wikia TOU.
 * Issues with double posting should be sorted, since a script was implemented to prevent that happening.
 * There seems to be general confusion about proper forum etiquette. Nobody is sorting out the debates board and there's hardly any moderation in them, which basically means that the flame wars are continuing to occur.
 * There aren't enough "severe" punishments being handed out. Blocks are not handed out enough to demonstrate that there is a zero-tolerance policy to violations of the forum policy: if not blocks, then the use of the warning template is extremely low. Maybe a moderators COC should be drafted telling mods what they should be doing, how to get help in solving a problem? (this could go well with a possible script that allows moderators to "ping" threads to the attention of forum operators and sysops for whatever reason?)
 * The requests page is useless and nobody will direct their problems there, so it creates the illusion that the forums are ignored.

Of course, people will likely just ignore this post because it was posted by me, but whatever. :D