And then we come to the moderation in general. The World Cup was the all-time nadir of moderation in this forum for me, some of you will probably hark to the autumn of 06 well I guess it was similar. Only one of the mods seemed to actually understand how important the tournament was to some of us English posters, unfortunately he seemed to revel in baiting the English posters. The moderation showed a complete lack of proactivity, posts were labelled as 'pathetic' by people who obviously don't actually have a clue. Too often we hide behind rules and use them as excuses. Surely mods should be capable of showing empathy rather than applying rules rigidly. There was no attempt to stop Sir Alex and Pratters' dross after the Germany trouncing, and as sledger said, it would appear that calling a spade a spade is an offence round here. Forget about who technically broke the rules, if the mods had been proactive then they would have stepped in long before any of that mess occurred. I made this point a couple of weeks ago and it was ignored so I'll make it again. four years ago James stepped in when he knew it was about to go off, put a massive warning up to the whole forum and everyone backed off. I posted a link to it in a discussion with SS the night before the Germany game and hey, I'm not one to tell the mods what to do but with a bit of foresight they might have acted similarly. But no, let's shut the door after the horse has bolted. I don't wanna whinge about my ban, it was three days ,I lived hey, but it was one of the most pointless things ever.
It wasn't just that night, throughout the WC we had to put up with nonsense posting that mods had no idea how to deal with. Every third post was someone popping up to say 'blablabla football is **** I'm not trolling though honest' and this was just allowed to go on, when someone finally lost it with this their post was deleted (because if you can't see it then obviously it didn't happen). You know what, I know some posters got upset about European snobbery throughout the tournament, and fair enough too in some cases. There are some awesome footy posters from outside of Europe, alas it appears none of our active moderation team actually understand the culture of football and this showed with the moderation. I'd love to see what happened if someone posts in the next Cricket World Cup in the way Sir Alex, pratters, GingerFurball, hell even the likes of SS, did should India go out. Let me tell you there will be threads locked and blanket permas.
So as for GingerFurball, well he's a good poster on the most part, especially in Cricket Chat, and I quite liked the guy a few months ago, but my word he's the worst mod we've ever had. He baits posters, he is happy to label people 'thick', even though we have all been told in the past that abusing banned members is still not allowed. How many threads have we seen closed by him only for them to be quietly reopened a few hours later?