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I feel that this issue has needed to be discussed for quite a while now, and it's about time someone put his or her foot down and actually make a post with a valid reason as to why this is.

Gaia's site moderation quality is extremely low in quality. I'm not saying that the mods themselves are inept, but the moderation team as a whole. Sure, Gaia may be a fun place to be, but when conduct is not controlled (or at least given a warning), it makes me doubt this site's credibility.

Yes, I know all of you are busy, but I still find this an invalid excuse.

It's basically the law of the internet that large, popular sites attract trolls and other unpleasant characters, but I have yet to see any of you address this except via the stickies. I'll be honest with you guys now. How many people do you actually think
read the stickies before they go to start posting? The statistics are probably fifty-fifty, but it's that remaining 50% that cause the site to get a bad reputation.

I see the rules definitely protecting the mods' rights, making sure they are not abused and give out official warnings to those that call them out, but what about regular site users? Don't we deserve just as much respect, if not more? And then we have some mods that tend to abuse regular users as well.

For example:

When I first came here to Gaia, I had this user sending me spam after spam of chain letters and the like, so I did what any sane person would do; I added him to my ignore list. However, at that time, the ignore feature didn't seem to be working for me as I still got spam from him to the point where I couldn't receive messages from any other users due to the inbox space being filled. So, I alerted the mods to this guy, since there was no other way I could stop him. The next day, I received about two or three rather rude PMs from different mods, pretty much telling me to press the ignore button and quit wasting their precious time on Gaia, even though I had explained the situation to them (and I only sent in one report). Sure, mods will have their days, but that gives them no excuse whatsoever to use their mod status to get away with being rude to other users and taking their bad day out on us. Since this didn't leave a good impression, I left Gaia for about a year before coming back (this time with the ignore button working). I haven't had trouble with rude mods since then, but quality still has not improved.

You guys have trolls and flamers galore on both the forums and in-game chats, and I have yet to see you guys lift a finger to give them a warning. Would you consider that good moderator control? No, of course not.

You say that we should not submit reports due to foul language and horrible attitude problems, but I think what you fail to realize is that it are these incidents that give this site a bad reputation. I've seen posts that say something about them coming over to rape another user's mom and that same user to crawl into a corner and die. I don't know about you, but (since this site's headquaters is in the USA) the last time I checked, threats of death and/or illegal actions are against the law in America.

You say that this site is a community, but yet you can't understand why everyone complains about this site quite a bit. I think you guys need severe improvement on monitoring site behavior, as it is rather embarrassing when I, a normal user, have to smooth out arguments in an in-game chat room when someone calls somebody else a "puss-a**". sweatdrop

Of course, I'm not sure if this will even be seen by any mods or admins, as you all seem to fail and/or ignore to actually do something regarding feedback that users give that can be rather important to this site as a whole.

If that's the way this is going to stay, so be it!