Steve, I understand your goal in trying to minimise any allegations of bias or partiality on the part of the moderating staff. But despite the best intentions, I think the opposite has happened.

As I described previously, relying on the member reporting feature has led to flagrant and obvious examples of selective enforcement of the rules. One dirk thread will be reported and taken to the Memory Hole while a nearly identical dirk thread will remain open. And it all comes down to the fact that a member reported one but not the other. The membership has no expectations of being free from bias, yet they are the ones driving the proverbial boat when it comes to flagging posts. If the moderators cannot act until a member reports it, then the bias in the system starts at the very beginning: with the membership. How is this a better system?

Again, I understand your basic premise. Putting it into normal everyday perspective, we would not want the typical street police officer to be the one to arrest people and also act as judge, jury, and executioner. I can understand your reluctance to have the moderators fill all those roles. Even though that's the way it works on virtually every other internet forum out there. But relying solely on the member reporting feature as a replacement for the proverbial street police officer doesn't seem to fix the problem. The bias problem doesn't get better - it gets worse. If your concern is that the person who flags a post shouldn't have a say in the final decision, then it would make more sense to have a policy where the moderator that reports the thread be excluded from the final vote amongst the moderators. But I'd still think it should be the moderators alone who flag threads, since they actually are expected to be unbiased, where the general membership is not.

It's your forum and your decision, of course. But since you did ask me these questions, my opinion is that I personally prefer the moderating team to have full authority over all of it. If you trust your staff to be impartial and act in good faith to support the rules and mission of this forum, especially since they confer with each other before any final decisions are made, it seems to me that this would be a much more bias-free system than relying on the extremely biased membership to decide what gets flagged. I don't know what goes on behind the curtain, as it were, but it seems to me that your moderating staff is pretty level-headed and capable of acting as faithful agents of the rules.

As to your last question, no, I'm not the kind of person who agrees with absolutes. So I'm probably not the right person to ask that sort of question to. I think there's always room for common sense in every aspect of life, regardless of what "the rules" say. Being a strict enforcer and hiding behind the verbiage of written rules is what leads to silly "zero tolerance" policies and mindless worship of authority. An internet forum is a place run by people, for other people. Nothing will be perfect, and you'll never please all of the people. But my personal opinion is that the reasonable members will always understand when reasonable staff members try to make the best decisions they can in trying to uphold the goals of the forum. The unreasonable members won't agree or care, no matter how hard you try. It's a waste of time trying to please the unreasonable ones.