Point 2 is one of the ones I care about most fervently, and 1, 4, and 5 are different aspects of the same issue, but all of them need to be addressed in turn.

1. Comes with the assumption that there is a certain amount of holding back, of hemming and hawing about what is or isn't trolling. If you have to ask, chances are pretty decent that it is. So make with the punching? It's about discretion. I'm asking that the mods lean more toward death than they have before.

2. If they have to continue then yes, putting them in a completely separate sub-forum is almost entirely necessary. No default putting it in hot topics, either. This is something that needs to be available strictly to people who want to see it, so that people aren't driven away by drivel.

3. NeoGAF isn't actually my model forum here, though I haven't mentioned that much in this thread. It would be the Penny Arcade forums, which uses this system to great success.

The problem of "What if I want to discuss something that was last talked about six million posts ago" isn't actually a problem. It just means you start a discussion about the thing you want to discuss, regardless of when it was last talked about. One of the realities of forum conversation is that you are not going to talk about a given subject only once. It will be gone over in detail. If I mention my favorite Krogan Battlemaster build on page 30 and you come in on page 48, I would that a person who wants to know would just say "Hey, what's a good Krogan Battlemaster build? I kind of hate Carnage."

"Well, friend," I would say, "I am glad you asked."

You are looking at threads as a reader instead of as a participant. Reading to find what you want is hard in this sort of thread, I admit.

That's why you post in them, and become part of the discussion.

4. Accountability as a clear thing just ties into greater discretion, so that people cannot claim tyranny on the part of the mods without indicting the whole site, at which point they might as well just leave.

5. I am gonna say http://gamrconnect.vgchartz.com/thread.php?id=144250&page=1# a stunning amount of this whole topic, because it's the first one that jumped out at me. Not even necessarily the OP (though the OP might qualify) - just read through a bit, see if you see what I mean.

6. No part of this is minor. I've had sigs turned off since before you joined the forums for just this reason. Yeah, that's right. Two weeks in, they was gone.

1) We receive far more complaints about how strict/trigger happy we are than how lenient we are on trolling.

2) That's settled, then.

3) Everyone is a reader before they become a participant. I don't like jumping into a thread with 200 pages, and if I do, I read the first couple of posts and then skip to the end. It makes it necessary to rely upon asking others to receive information, rather than simply being able to read it. And if you think our current situation is bad, what happens when we start seeing "GUYS I really need help how do I win with a Krogan battlemaster!" every ten posts?

A search function that works would go a long way towards solving this, but this function evades many larger and wealthier sites (like Reddit) so I doubt we'll get it.

4) With discretion comes deviation from site policy. It's pretty much the opposite of accountability. You can't prepare for situation, so you have to have mods whom you can trust to make their own decisions. Overruling should be a rare thing, and demodding should pretty much never happen.

5) The OP is fine. There is, however, some trolling in there, especially that one guy with the unintelligible rants whom I just permabanned.

6) Was that functionality even there? I seem to remember it being added by TalonMan later on.

But it's also more about the little things. There is an official Halo 4 thread. http://gamrconnect.vgchartz.com/thread.php?id=144263&page=1# This thread, for example, should not exist.

I highly disagree. The official Halo 4 thread deals with gameplay side of Halo 4. Gameplay and sales threads about games should not be in the same thread. There's no reason for it.

Even if we allow that - and I find that difficult to do, since sales and games are so closely tied on that site - then you agree that the Microsoft forum itself should hold one Halo 4 topic, and the Sales forum should hold a single Halo 4 sales topic?

3. This scenario is not something to be afraid of. Imagine if we had a large-scale VGChartz ME3 MP club, and we used our organization for good. People being brought into the fold accumulate knowledge naturally over time. The idea that each discussion would be brought up over and over again, at least in rapid succession, is largely a fantasy.

I understand your fears, but in my experience things just don't play out that way. Come in. Ask your questions. Get them answered. And participate. We want peopel to participate, and this setup is a great way to encourage participation in a constructive way.

But it's also more about the little things. There is an official Halo 4 thread. http://gamrconnect.vgchartz.com/thread.php?id=144263&page=1# This thread, for example, should not exist.

4. In theory, yes, the slap-hammer on a mod should never come down, but we already have a strong example (Maxwell) of a mod whose position was compromised by a long, long, long-standing compromise in his behavior, and it should have been addressed before. If you feel that Maxwell wouldn't be mod for five minutes under the current admin team, super. Great. This is illustrative more than instructive.