Seems to me the tcAdmin can still do all of that even when you make the rule that he should unconditionally obey the moderators. Making rules can never prevent people from violating those. Unless the only rule is that everyone can always do whatever pleases him...mclane wrote: ↑Mon Mar 04, 2024 5:21 pm Your words and your opinion is IMO wrong. What if the TCadmin is blocking someone’s membership without telling the moderators.
E.g. IF they find out, he still can say: „oh there are technical reasons for it.“ Or say: „oh we have actually problems with people from poland because of some DDoS attacks from there“ or „saying oh we have problems with people using hotmail accounts“ , by that creating a different force, kind of supermoderator the other moderators cannot outvote.
And my guess is that a cheating / lying tcAdmin would easily been found out. Refused registrants would complain by approaching other members with known e-mail addresses; and it is not like all TalkChess members are completely computer-illiterate, and would believe false excuses.
Seems you are mixing up the issue of how the forum should be run if everyone does his duty, and how to deal with malicious persons in key positions. We are talking about the former here.You claim the TCAdmin is a kind of neutral position, protecting the „machinery“. But what if this is not the case. What if the TCAdmin has decided that the forum belings to himself and that the moderators and democracy is destroying his business idea ?!
Not that i have to invent those things. They happened before. We HAD the situation where the TCADMIN overruled decisions of a MAJORITY of moderators. And it was not such a trivial decision like deleting the whole database.
Reason was TCADMIN began to talk in the forum about topics like a normal member, moderating the forum AND also have all the power of a Supermoderator or owner.
And then ?
You claim : oh the TCADMIN will then tell the members and ask them.
Problem is: if he is NOT behaving that nice and has his own interests in doing the business.
Then we have exactly the same situation we had in Talkchess.
Democratically elected moderators, suddenly outruled by an admin who says NO.
IMO if you have a majority of moderators who had been elected before by the members in a secret election,
asking the admin to do X, the admin has no democratical right to do NOT X because he NEVER had a mandat by the members.
There must be a mechanism that the new forum cannot be taken over by ONE single person as it has been done before.
Rogue admins are easily dealt with. You just revoke their admin rights. And if they erased the forum (which an admin can do any time he wants...), just reinstall a recent backup to minimize the loss. This is the only recourse we have, and the measures we have to take for limiting the damage have to be taken anyway for ameliorating the consequences of attacks from the outside. (Such as hacking of the site through ransomware.)