I have never before been on a moderated site. I have seen praises for past times at MF when it was moderated, years before I joined. These past few weeks I dug deep in MF in the look for the content I was afraid was going to disappear. I saw ten years ago mentions of posts deleted, especially related to SheFights, and of users being afraid that their posts might be affected.

My impression was that very little moderation actually happened, but I noticed occasions where it was needed. Some interesting topics were started and abruptly stopped because people started putting commercial messages completely unrelated to the topics.

So I would say that in practice this site is very reasonable in the use of moderation but ineffective in the way it promotes it.

Why not use the low hanging fruit, and say completely uncontroversial things like that no users who want to put ads for their products rather to contribute to the topics will be allowed, and that no personal attacks will be permitted. This is a good enough start and nobody will disagree with that. As far as going after opinions probably you can trust the community to do its job. If it does not, maybe those ideas are not so shocking after all.

Let me add another and for me better argument for the site. It is administration. Here I can use my preferred name, Komodo. I cannot do it at Max Fisch, because I lost the email associated with it, and there is no administrator to talk to about eliminating the old association and creating a new one.

Moderation... I opened this thinking it was about "moderation" in session activities, the number of sessions a year, etc., etc. LOL!

About having moderators for this type of site, I was a member of MF, off and on, since around 1999 or so. I bounced in and out of MF because I was in and out of the scene... and the famous "flame wars" that occurred.

I joined MF back then after being "ordered" to by Empress Dominique who wanted me to provide wonderful reviews of my sessions with Her. (They weren't phony, the sessions were great and, by the pics on FetLife, she is as gorgeous as ever.)

Where I got into trouble was when I reviewed another Mistress. The Empress allowed me to see her as I recall. Being naïve to the ways of the "World Wide Web" circa 2000 I provided an honest review of this high-profile and gorgeous Mistress. I basically said this Mistress (no I won't mention her name, I think she is still active on the West Coast) was gorgeous but that the session was lousy... and she had an attitude.

Well, not only did that Mistress get after me, so did Empress Dominique, who said I embarrassed her and ordered me to publicly apologize. (The Empress said a bad review on MF back then hurt business.) I was told to ask MF to take the review down and, I think, that was done before I had a chance to email the request.

In the years I have returned to MF, and joined this site, subs and Mistresses seem a lot more supportive rather than confrontational. (Obviously I don't visit the political part of MF or this site.) Moderators of this type of site is great, but so many of us have learned to moderate ourselves, be a bit more understanding, and watch our words carefully.

Most of the flame wars I noticed where about RaptureVision and SheFights. In particular there was a guy Kinght of Halos who was kind of toxic. The moment he saw SheFights he would take over, to any sentence he would respond with a page, and kept on and on.

He would have been an ideal candidate for deletion, except that he was right. He had been injured by SheFights girls (sorry in my book they were not even close to mistresses) so he had a valid grudge, but the way he was going about it he was alienating everybody.

Or you have Roy who obviously wrote fabricated stories but they were no harm, and created interesting discussions.

Both cases show the difficulty of going after content.

There are some overmoderated bulletin boards with swaggering moderators full of their own self-importance.

Having said that I have here since the beginning (and unlike some struck around)and have seen no sign the administrator here wants to go in that direction.

I agree, here moderation has been done with a light touch.