Right -- members post on any web-based forum only by the suffrance of the website owner. (Usenet has no central server for anyone to own so newsgroups have no owner, but mailing lists have owners and so do dial-up BBSs; some IRC channels on some networks have owners and guardbots; others don't.) The owner of a website has no obligation whatever to publish anything he doesn't want to. What's more, if he wants to set arbitrary rules for posting, enforce his rules inconsistently or not at all, delete posts that don't violate any of the rules he's posted, lock threads -- in short, he can do whatever he wants and no one can make him do otherwise. That's what anarchy is all about -- no one can make anyone do anything they don't want to. (Anarchy is not at all the same as democracy; newbies often get confused assuming the net is a democracy.)
A website owner can delegate his authority to any moderators he chooses, too.
That's why when an unmoderated forum decides to institute moderation they think long and hard about what the rules are going to be and who they're going to trust to enforce them fairly. (Finding moderators everybody knows and trusts and who also have time to take on the job is often difficult; it took over a year of discussion to agree on moderators for rec.martial-arts.moderated, for instance.) That's why when people go to an existing moderated forum they read the rules (if they're not idiots) and decide whether they are rules they're willing to abide by, too. Usually they don't worry about whether the moderator is trustworthy, assuming if he weren't the forum would have died before now.
Many people refuse to participate in any moderated forum, no matter how reasonable the rules seem to be even to them, no matter how well they know and trust the moderator -- many people on the net regard it as a matter of principle.
I don't know of any forum that has decided to institute moderation by choosing a moderator at random and authorizing him to make up any rules he wants and enforce them any way he pleases, but that's what we would be doing if we authorized anyone who starts a thread to moderate that thread.
If we did that this whole website would die in a heartbeat -- no one would be willing to participate under those conditions. (Of course a few people would, for a while anyway, but nowhere near enough to keep a forum going.)
People who are new to the net might not appreciate what an amazing achievement it is to build up a forum to the size and traffic of this one. Try starting a forum of your own sometime -- the usual fate of a new forum is to get several posts in the first few weeks and then die of lack of interest. So many forums, and only 24 hours in the day.... There are about a dozen web-based forums currently open and I wouldn't even guess how many mailing lists, and rec.knives, of course, and that's only counting forums for discussing knives in general -- many more specialized forums for discussing a particular manufacter or maker's knives or for discussing particular kinds of knives, and many more forums that have a different main focus but where a lot of discussion of knives takes place, such as martial arts, hunting, survival, and military forums.
Mike Turber and associates deserve a lot more credit than some people might realize for creating this place and building it up to its present size and quality -- and it's growing all the time. That took a lot of hard work (and costs money, too, for a website with this much traffic -- you can start a forum without spending a cent, and only investing a few minutes of your time, but if it ever gets this big....)
-Cougar Allen :{)
