Agreed,

Usually the people that are around the most are picked as moderators on most boards. The problem is that once you are a moderator you really have to change they type of stuff you would normally post in content and replies. You have to be politically correct, can't take side, have to bite your tounge and can never post anything that can be taken the wrong way. This lowers the amount of posts the user has and certainly robs us of one of our internet personalites that makes the forum fun.

I have been a moderator of another site representing a manufacture and after that I could never post reviews or my feelings on other products. I just sounded like bashing and a one sided opinion. In the end I only posted if the subject went way off subject (asking them to open another thread as the discussion was in a speciality thread), posting announcment or answering direct questoins about products or links to the information they could not find.

A solution we have found on one of the forums I am on is to have a "Moderators" login. This means that you could have however many moderators you trust and give them the login id and password. The person ca then log in as username "Moderators" and do what they need to do. This way it does not effect their personal login and posting. To pull it off we did have a private moderators bucket that we would post what we did and why. In some cases the entire thread would be moved into the private section for a review untill a consensus was made of what action to take even if it was just to move it back untouched.

hope this helps,

-marc