Don't let the Spanish moderators ruin the Spanish subforum

Dear Jan,

We are a group of Spanish forumers that want to inform you about the situation existing nowadays on the Spanish subforum. Some time ago, some changes in the moderation group of this subforum were made, substituting some moderators from other ones. Some of these new moderators are applying the forum rules in a totally arbitrary way, specially in the general forums. So, the situation in the Spanish forum has become so weird that it is not possible to know when you write a new message, if it is going to be considered as a reason to send the writer to the brig or if he is going to be punished in some other way. This irrational behaviour is applied to all the forumers, even to those that have been in SCC for more than 5 years and that have never caused any problem. Most of the "disciplinary measures" are applied without a previous notice and also without any explanation for the brig and their reasons via PM to the affected user. This measures are taken against forumers for the same behaviour that moderators performed in the past.

The inflexibility of the forum rules causes a loss of coherence and has deteriorated the life in the forums, and that can be easily noticed just having a look on how the participation at the Spanish forum has decreased within the last few months.

Lots of forumers have manifested in public their disagreement with the moderation team and those messages have been deleted and their owners put in the brig for a week or more, just for the fact of pointing out their disagreement with some of the actions of the moderation team. Some of these brigged forumers have been for years in SSC and have never had any problem with the moderation team... until now. Moderation does not accept any critic, and even very correct, respectfull and educated complaints from some forumers have caused a brig and the deletion of the post/thread where it was exposed.

The generalist subforums are the meeting point of the forumers, where we meet each other and we adquire the category of "persons" and becoming friends, turning the forum into a Community, and not letting it only be a "data warehouse". Moreover, the bad atmosphere created on the forum has affected not only to the generalist subforums, but also the specialized subforums, where the participation has decreased significantly. For example, the subforum of Madrid has been without almost any movement for several months, while the equivalent one at www.urbanity.es has a huge participation about all the new projects that are running now in Madrid.

So, the consequences of the attitude of these moderators are that not only the fellowship between the participant is being deteriorated, but also the quality of data submitted to the forum is decreasing enormously. It is very unpleasant trying to speak about a topic if you do not know when and under which circumstances a moderator will decide wether closing the thread, putting you in the brig or both things at the same time.

We would like to know if it would be possible to substitute these two moderators by others more suitable to perform moderation labours, because rules are useless if they are not correctly applied. Even former moderators of the forum are very surprised by the current situation.

We enjoy very much SSC and lots of forumers are worried because the current situation is strongly degradating the good atmosphere that has existed always in the forum, and at the same time is damaging its main theme (urbanism, skyscrapers, infrastructures), which is the main reason that keeps all of us visiting the forum on a daily basis.