The moderators are basically house-keepers - I call myself The Skivvy, as what I do boils down to cleaning up and tidying up.
We check all applicants to see if they are genuine. For each genuine applicant, at least ten others are determined would-be spammers that we have to delete before they can do any damage (and many more automated spammers are kept out automatically by having to decipher the five-letter cryptogram in the registering process).
We send new forum members an individual welcome message. We ask all new members to feel free to contact us directly for any technical help, and do try to give this for instance with people who would like to post photos but need a bit of guidance on how to.
We check all new postings, NOT as a brake on free speech, but to check and if necessary correct plant names as it's important that these are correct, not just for the sake of accuracy, but so that anyone searching the internet for that plant would not miss information about it on our forum simply because the plant name was spelled wrong, or was an out-of-date name. If you see that someone's posting was edited by me, Fleur or Oron, that is the reason.
We keep an eye on the structure of the forum - for instance, if a posting about bulbs is included under Trees, we move it to the Bulbs section; or if there are two separate postings, both about the same sort of plant but under different topic headings, we amalgamate them into a single topic.
Occasionally we can help a topic along, by adding a link to another related topic.
If there is a topic that we can contribute to ourselves, and no-one else has, then we do.
When members post messages without saying where they garden (often an important consideration), we write to them personally, suggesting that they might like to add a signature line to their profile, so that this and any other useful information including their real name, if they use a mysterious screen name, comes up automatically.
Though it is extremely unlikely that anyone would start using wildly unsuitable or inflammatory language on this forum, we do have to keep an eye on that, so that we could stop it if necessary. And we could do the same if anyone started talking about topics that are not suitable for the forum.
