Meta: On Moderation

Well it has been almost two weeks since the moderation system floated to the top of the page and then disappeared completely. During this time of great hardship I have learned to appreciate what I had in the past, and how important a moderation system is to a board like this. I have come to realize in its absence, how much I relied upon it. These days I have no mechanism at my disposal to avoid reading posts that lack insight, posts that contain grammatical errors, and those that are simply not funny. I am at a complete loss in identifying the currenty popular opinions in order to align myself with them; I can barely identify bandwagons to jump on to, and my motivation to post is at an all time low. How am I, a simple blog reader, to singlehandedly separate the wheat from the chaff, the sheep from the goats, in each individual thread?

If I look back at when this feeling began, I can trace it back more than two years to April 27th, 2011 when Brian first implemented the slashcomments system, effectively limiting the rainbow spectrum of communal expression to a palette of 5 basic colors. Trips to Darkest Bolivia were replaced with the less ominous "-1", and posts that inspired rolling laughter were now simply "Funny". There was much protest, but we continued on, and made do.

At certain moments it seemed that our respected leader was on the verge of delivering us back to the promised land. For instance, in October of 2012 he wrote to us:

I am planning a move to Drupal 7 as soon as it is feasible and will be starting that process as soon as the OSU game ends. Unfortunately, that process is going to take a while because some critical modules are still not updated. So the site will remain static until then; when I move to 7 the full glory of pos/negbangs will return. Prepare thy anus.

Nearly a year later our anuses remained at the ready, when things instead took a turn for the worse, and our 5 remaining colors faded to total blackness. All I can say is that during these difficult times we must stick together and keep on posting. We will post not in an ordered hierarchy of merit, rather we will post in a chaotic soup of equality, but we will post nonetheless. I have hope that one day this board will rise again, that one day excellent posts will again receive their rightful level of exaltation, and that terrible posts by trolls will be driven down depths of derision that they deserve. I have hope.