> That's precisely the kind of thing that turns people off codes of conduct.
I don't know if you've ever moderated a large community, but if you do it by the letter of any law, people will endlessly probe for loopholes and argue over edge cases. I'd imagine the wording you quoted is there to head off such issues, not because the moderator loves vagueness for it's own sake.
Seconded. I was a moderator for a subreddit with 120k readers. If you want to see what the outer limits of your rules are, enforce them as written and the community will be more than happy to show you.
It's much better to be flexible and operate case by case within some common framework. The people who look would accuse you of subjective favoritism also do it when you enforce to the letter of the rule, so you're going to get flack for it either way.
That's another of the unwritten rules of moderation, I think: You WILL get flak. There is no scenario where you get no flak. Therefore, you must not treat not getting flak as an end goal, or you might as well just turn the moderation power over to your biggest assholes and cut out the stressful process of being the middleman for their asshole decisions.
The question for a moderator is, who is giving you the flak? If it's the sort of people you don't want in your community, whoever that may be for your community, then you seem to be on the right track.
A private message to the mods from an asshole pulling every psych trick out of the book to hurt you in that private message is not a sign of failure; it is a sign of success. It can take a bit of emotional adjustment to feel that as a success and not a failure, but it's doable. The more vicious they are in that post the more they are proving you didn't want the there anyhow.
> The people who look would accuse you of subjective favoritism also do it when you enforce to the letter of the rule, so you're going to get flack for it either way.
No matter how precise the rule, it's possible for someone to make the baseless accusation that you're deliberately singling them out to apply the rule to them, while letting the behavior of others slide.
I don't know if you've ever moderated a large community, but if you do it by the letter of any law, people will endlessly probe for loopholes and argue over edge cases. I'd imagine the wording you quoted is there to head off such issues, not because the moderator loves vagueness for it's own sake.