theodoric wrote:I understand
part of the problem with me was except for you ... and Mlatch (who very childishly pronounced his "awesome" moderator powers when he shut down a thread because HE though there had been enough discussion in it) ... there is no way to identify the mods in here
Actually you are wrong on two points here. A) No mod shuts down a thread simply because they, personally, are tired of it. If they did a lot of threads around here would have a short shelf life I promise you. However when threads start going off in tangents that are well outside the realm of where they started and/or might head towards a flame war they may shut it down. They also notify all the other mods they've done it. The mods and I do communicate regularly, just becuase it isn't public doesnt' mean it isn't taking place. We have all of us been mods in forums for a long time, what looks like a perfectly innocent thread to the average user can usually be identified by us as one that has the potential to go south (or perhaps just orbital) and gets monitored and potentially shut down. Not because we don't personallly like it, but because we don't want it to get bad. I and the others have seen some damned ugly flame wars both in prior versions of this forum and in Jspot - we do our best to keep it nice here.
Secondly all the mods names are Green. They are the only ones with green names. New users (less than50 posts) are purple, swap meet banned are black, everyone else is sort of a brick red I think. VV isn't a mod here, thats why her name isn't green. K2, Mlatch, Cirquemom, Itsaiya, Kourika they are mods here. When I set this forum up not all the Jspot mods had moved here yet and I thought I'd give other folks a chance too. Mods also have really really wierd custom titles. Our titles don't change with our post count the way other members' do.
being cautious is not "freaking out"
I stopped freaking out about just about anything when one of my jobs in the Navy was to practice sending the authorization codes to start a nuclear war ... and I am not joking about that ... I still get nightmares from it occasionally
There is nothing wrong with being cautious, but by posting not just here, but other forums of a pontential hack, you did end up causing other people to freak out - which impacts Emory's business. There just were better ways to handle the question.