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The spam forums haven't typically been moderated in the past. Indeed, moderation of non-government forums (basically the roleplaying, spam, and game forums) has been done by Kris alone, because neither Tsu nor I participate there and we haven't seen a need to appoint a global moderator. This is the first I've heard of any issues with moderation there.

As a general note, those with moderation powers should apply them leniently, with points being issued as a last resort. I've seen an uptick in the number of points issued compared to past two or so years, but our forum culture hasn't significantly changed over that time. Points carry sometimes severe punishments, and apply forum-wide, even if the problem is specific to one subforum. The system can't be fine tuned, unfortunately.

That all being said, the "spam" forum has traditionally been about spam games, rather than straight up random posting. I can't personally fault Kris's judgement, given the traditions of that forum. I don't think it's "impossible" to review that decision.

As for appeals, there's no current appeals process, but it's not "forbidden." The rule you cite is for moderators, who are the Cabinet ministers and the Chair. Our laws sometimes have special rules for freedom of speech, punishments, etc., when it comes to moderation in the government subforums. We don't have an appeals process because we haven't needed one, but that doesn't mean it's out of the question.


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Is there any way to get those threads re-opened? I liked them :\

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Not sure why so much blah blah blah was needed to basically say, "hey this is a new type of spam that TSP hasn't seen before, can we give it a chance by unlocking those particular posts out of like the many similar ones that weren't - k thanx bai"

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@sandaoguo, thanks for the quick and reasoned response

On deeming something as a "game" rather than "random posting" — There exists plenty precedence for what could be intuitively judged as the latter, in the form of threads such as Last Person to Post Wins II, which is just about spamming until an admin pulls the plug and archives the thread, or Random Thoughts, which is literally about posting random stuff. Furthermore, I argue that a policy for making a distinction is near impossible to make without collateral damage; furthermore, one interesting feature in the Taco Island forum I mentioned in the OP is that sometimes a thread that is started has no rules, and they develop organically from what is posted in the thread (a sort of implicit spam-thread-based nomic, if you will). This is a surprisingly fun way to play.

On appeals, I agree that our forum culture hasn't made an appeals procedure strictly necessary (if something does come up, it can be handled "out-of-band" usually). I understand the intent of the rule on final decisions that you explained, though I would hope regardless that the forum administration clarifies that rule, as a by-the-letter reading does mean an appeal wouldn't be allowed even in other cases. It's the one place where the topic is mentioned, and it's an explicit denial.

@Yuno, the threads are all merged and therefore it's no longer possible to be able to separate them into what used to be their component parts.

@Escade, because it's not just that they were locked, they were also merged together (which means they might as well have been deleted, because they were griefed beyond repair or review). There's nothing that could be unlocked, nothing that could be pointed at as "hey, this could be fun because XYZ" because of that, nothing that other residents could point at and say "hey, why'd you lock that, that was fun", etc.. Now again, I'm not saying that the "unofficial" thread shouldn't have been locked (because prohibiting double posting is perfectly reasonable), but that's not the one that was merged - all the others, the actually potentially valuable ones, were. I found the way this was handled very egregious, and that's why I went with all that "blah blah blah".

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