I don’t want to sound Like a jerk when I write this or give anyone the impression that I think that they shouldn’t become a Mod but I think I should say something…
TO BE A MOD
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I hear all the time in the chat rooms " I am soooo ready to be a mod and ban all these noobs."
This isn’t what it means to be a mod,
to be a mod means that you just want to help people and make Kongregate.com a better place.
I couldn’t imagine what it must be like trying to play a shooter game and have people constantly wanting to talk to you in the chat rooms or logging in and having an endless amount of PM’s from people complaining that someone is being a jerk and they need to be silenced or they want to be a mod them selves or someone just wants to annoy you with dumb questions and even worse than this is the fact that you will most likely have people who are your friends that you might have to deal with who are behaving badly.
DEALING WITH FLAMERS
One of the hardest parts about being a Mod has to be when two people are bickering and it boils over into a flame war and they need to cool the situation down without taking sides ,
I don’t have any numbers but 90% of the time it’s normally one person being a jerk and the other person simply responded in kind to the jerks nastyness ,
you wouldn’t want to be too extreme as maybe both people had legitimate gripes and it just boiled over or maybe they were even friends and were just playing around and you over reacted and now both people are disgruntled about coming back to this site and simply don’t come back.
THE FORUMS
I have to admit that when I first came to Kongregate.com that I had thought about becoming a Mod just so I could go into the forums and remove all of the spam and read all of the " hidden by an administrator or Moderator " messages because well, I am the curious type but only Admins or the Mods of that forum have the ability to read hidden messages or even hide messages in the forums.
The most you could do as a Mod is simply flag a post like the rest of every else here at Kong.
THE TROLLS
These people are a heck of a lot harder to deal with than you think , you can’t simply get rid of them if you silence them as they will just show up using an Alt account and then try to get revenge on you for giving them a 15 minute silence or act ten times worse than before .
Even if you are an Administrator you can’t IP ban anyone so the same people everyday are going to show up and cause havoc and spread chaos and they are going to scream the loudest if they incur anything untoward directed at them, on top of this these people relish the idea of actually getting a Mod in trouble and even if you’ve helped them out they will most likely take any opportunity to get you in trouble or demoded if they can and these are the people that you will have to try the hardest to be nice too.
ABOUT THE BAN HAMMER
Kongregate.com is a business and believe it or not the last thing they want to do is to silence/Ban someone as they don’t want that person to become disgruntled and not come back to this site but on the other hand the Admins don’t want one person to ruin everyone else’s good time, so they want the Mods here to be the nicest people on the planet and try to reason and communicate with people before they silence or ban any one .
Probably one of the biggest misconceptions here at Kong is that when you become a Mod you can Perma-ban some one (lock their account out) this certainly isn’t true , the most a mod can do is silence someone for two weeks and even then they will need a VERY valid reason for doing so.
CONTROLLING YOURSELF
Unfortionately this is the part where most Mods fail at being a Mod,
when your a Mod everyone and anyone is going to crticize you over every little thing that you do or say so you have to take care never to say anything about anyone behind their back because sooner or later it will get back to them,
Plus you have to watch every comment that you make about anything controversial so you don’t offend someone by making a off hand comment about religion, gender, sex, race ect ect in the chat rooms , on top of this you can’t have a bad day as a Mod and ‘log on’ and lash out at someone or cop an attitude about something when someone asks you a really dumb question that doesn’t even have anything to do with Kongregate.com.
Originally posted by RiddleMaster: in a forum thread
We’re not asked to remove “trolls”, we’re actually asked to try and “rehabilitate” users who have engaged in unattractive behavior. I’d rather befriend an unfriendly user who just wanted someone to talk to, than to jump on the ball and silence/ban a user when it really isn’t necessary.
^This is what makes a good Mod.
 "Diablos_shadow")