We've had a few rounds of discussions of a thing in the past, which is that some people really want Affirmation And Emotional Support from mods. And the thing is... I'm absolutely not a person who can do that on demand, and I don't want to try to fake it, and I don't pick moderators based on that. But. It's a big deal for some people to have the authority figures express caring for them. As a pretty much half-baked experiment, with no real control groups, I went ahead and made a forum where only mods can see your posts, and people have been using it. It's actually been super effective. I am really happy with it, I think it's done a great thing. But it doesn't really solve the whole problem, even though it helps some. So, here's the basic problem I'm wrestling with. The Caring Void is limited in utility because we don't have that many people who can read it, and not all of us are super good at Being Comforting, or able to do it all the time, or whatever. But any time I add people to the mod list, at least someone will feel less safe, because they won't trust that person. (No, I don't think we have anyone that everyone trusts.) We can't really do subdivisions super easily. We could have something like "feel free to ask specific mods to stay out in thread title", but that doesn't help if new mods get added. So, basically: I like the idea of having some kind of better organized emotional support stuff available, but I can't think how to get there from here. I definitely see problems with tying that functionality to traditional "moderator" functionality, I also see problems with separating them, I just don't even fucking know.
The i need support thread in top serket might provide some ideas and people to consider for how you could work this? I think its a pretty good idea
I'd suggest whitelisting instead of blacklisting. By putting a list of the mods you're comfortable reading your words in the title, instead of a list of mods you don't want reading, you sidestep the issue of new mods being added who haven't been vetted; people can add the new mods to their whitelist or not, and until they get around to it you've still got an easily-understood screen of who you want reading your voidthoughts. The delicate balance of power isn't shaken as much if you're explicit about who you want to read instead of who you don't want to read.
