Hoo boy. A few things.
First? There are some areas of the moderation reaction where I feel like people could ease up. There have definitely been some moments that felt like people were really eager to jump in aggressively at the slightest hint of misstep in a way that wasn't always constructive. I think there needs to be a space where we're able to respond to the natural missteps of growing pains as moderation is figured out with a little benefit of the doubt. But, like, I'm reminded a bit of when I was staff on Steel & Stone and we added a Chatter channel because we wanted to keep Public more game-focused and there was a high volume of chatter going on. Some people would get really offended at being asked to move, and they'd be super ready to point out if you didn't immediately ask someone else to move or something. Like. We're all human there.
That said? There's been a lot of defensive doubling down even at perfectly mild responses to inconsistencies. Which is only going to encourage those people who are starting at mild and civil to ramp up to less mild and less civil. I think we as the posters need to avoid having an attitude of "you fucked up, please commence public flogging" so that the mods can also have an attitude of "oh we fucked up, let's just fix it, we're all learning and it's not the end of the world." Like. Yeah, that one thread probably shouldn't have been moved wholesale over to the Hog Pit. But there's just a certain level of vitriol about it that I find honestly weird. Like. Is it that people really think @Ganymede was doing this to spite and silence people? Idek! But both sides have to be willing to have a certain amount of chill that is just not existing. These missteps don't have to be a huge deal for the most part. We're talking about how and when to move threads.
However. I will state that I don't think @Auspice has a good temperament for modding here. When the board was handed over to @Arkandel, I nodded and thought, "Yeah that makes sense." When he added @Ganymede as a mod, I nodded and thought, "Yeah that makes sense." When he added Auspice, I paused. This is not actually because I hate her as a poster or a player by any means. It's just that she tends towards a regular sort of defensiveness and temperament as a poster that I didn't feel was a great fit when she was announced as being on board, and I think that's kind of becoming clear.
I do understand that her real intent in her response to @meg was "Hey, if people really want to start sharing RL stories about this back and forth, it might work best in a different thread." I also understand how it felt very much like "This isn't the place to share your RL story." Meg wasn't sharing a story just to share the story. She was sharing an experience to directly comment on the conversation happening in that thread. Frankly, it's no one else's business to say "You'll be more heard with this story if you make a new thread for it. It'll be lost in two months here." Maybe she doesn't want it to be something that lingers after those two months? Maybe she didn't want to make a thread focusing on her RL experience because she only wanted to talk about it in terms of how it related to that thread. And at the point when Auspice commented, there hadn't been a major derail of topic by any means. A couple folks basically said "yeah I've had those kinds of shitty experiences too," and that was it. When people reacted negatively to Auspice's comment, her reaction was to basically say "You're only reacting this way because it's coming from me." AKA thoroughly dismissing the idea that people could have felt negatively about what she said. And in this thread, her reaction was to say that people were literally too obtuse to understand if they had any sort of confusion. Which is just, flat out, not something you can say as a mod, just like it's not something you can say as a MU* staffer.
The fact of the matter is that, as mods, you will never be able to post without some sort of mod voice. It will be seen as such whether or not you personally think you're posting JUST AS A POSTER, the same way people pay extra attention to when a staff alt on a public channel says something about knocking something off. It's the reality of moderating, just like it's the reality of staffing.
I don't know how much it's really going to solve anything to start making new forum sections, but I'm very happy to be proven wrong here. But I don't see how having a reviews section will end up any different from what already happens on the ad threads.
I think the bottom line for me is that the response a person has to messing up is vitally important. Right now, many of the responses to messing up from the mod team has actively exacerbated the conflict going on.
That said, this is a terrible forum to have to mod for. 
