Seun, I wanted to be sure you read this post as the other one is already several pages and I decided to create a new thread for it as a follow-up to https://www.nairaland.com/1458958/response-open-letter-seun-osewa to advance some suggestions, hopefully you find them useful.

You have a great product and I can only wish it gets better and better! One day, NL will be a big data mine and the content will be worth a lot more than it is now, requiring more servers and resources. It is refreshing that you regard the opinion of we the people who help to create the content and not throw us aside like some of your people have done. I for example have been on NL for quite a while and I enjoy it like most people but at some point I contemplated leaving for good after some of your moderators appears to be monitoring my posts and bans my ID repeatedly because he knows he can! After banning an ID for 1 year or 10 years or 100 years for example (a really ridiculous and wasteful decision), how can a user complain, or ask questions or do anything when the ID is no longer able to make a post or ask a question? I would rather just be glad to delete that ID myself and edit any posts that I made with it.

Since your moderators are not paid employees but volunteers, would you consider having a list of people who have expressed interest in moderation and then you can rotate them for periods of time? Say a group of moderators or a new person every month or couple of months? You may want to experiment with it for a bit if you are not sure on a smaller scale but if found effective, implement it for the high traffic sessions like Politics or Romance, etc. The advantages of this is obvious:

1. The better quality moderators will bubble to the top in ranking and quality of the forum and user experience while the poor moderators who even insult some posters will naturally go down in rating!

2. Overtime, every person gets tired or needs a break just like for any team, rotation helps the good moderators for example to relax and get re-invigorated for another stint of moderation for a couple of months.

3. NL as a business will improve in quality because the moderators that are apt to lash out and insult posters will always have the reality that their moderation privileges are only for a season and are more motivated to do it right for the 60 days or 90 days or whatever timeline you choose for them to be in the saddle.

4. Should you ever be in a position where you ever needed to recruit any employees, you will have a pool of hands who are tested to some extent and you have a decent measure of their work ethic and the quality of their work.

5. A moderator review system. For those who schooled in foreign countries, we are familiar with how every term, before the finals you get to review the performance of the instructor or professor for any particular course across different areas. At the beginning it could just be as simple as the poll we used to have with Yes, No, or multiple options, etc. It doesn't need any new features to be built into the NL server-side or front end to offer this feature but this will give you an objective measure and statistics. Of course, you can always filter out multiple voters by filtering by their IP addresses - really straight forward.

6. This is all I can think of now and others can add to the list but I think this is another set of ideas that could make NL a self-sustaining forum in which progress and development is sustainable, irreversible and quality will only appreciate in a geometric fashion.

i concur wit da valid points
-only

Exactly! Mods should not take hold on to their posts permanently. Just take a look at the national leaders who do and how bad their countries are, it gives them an unreasonable notion of unquestionable power. Instead they should have fixed terms, and they should even be voted in, just like that miss nairaland stuff. Not only will it increase traffic, it will also make most members feel like they are recognised. That will be really good for Seun's business.

Anyway it's a step at a time, hopefully we are getting there.

Topic record should be allowed to be presented for total delete from database. Topics that don't fulfil the purpose of its creation.