Checking the specific moderation examples raised

Our moderation team are top class, some coming through our MIT Program such as @Gogol who started as an MIT (welcome post) and then recently took on an in-house role (staff welcome post). Some bring in a wealth of experience from running other communities and bring that broader community experience to play, such as our very own head of community @PetraAnn , who started her IM career as a user on BHW before returning years later (with another account – not gaming the system ) and was instrumental in delivering ideas such as upvote processes (more on that below) and clarity for the community team where it was lacking before.

In response specifically to:

Beklink said:

I took a break from this forum for months when i realized that BHW mods were openly allowing scammers with bought accounts (100 posts) to sell AWS accounts ($400/account) with crypto just because these scammers kept coming back which benefited BHW owner with jr vip or marketplace seller subscriptions

Click to expand...

As I state just about every time the subject of a member’s account comes up, the value of the business as a whole isn’t worth devaluing over a single membership payment. It’s not how we do things. But we can see how this could be perceived. but if this is a perception, it's something we need to listen to and address as best we can.

How we will address this going forward?​

We’re only human folks, so mistakes can be made. We have internal policies to make sure that we’re holding ourselves to account. Each time you receive a warning, you have the opportunity to raise a ticket with support for another set of eyes to review any warnings you’ve received.

Going forward:

• A clearer process behind policy changes with pre- and post-analysis shared around changes. Further amplifying the changes that will be made here: BlackHat World News & Updates
• We will share policy changes and the data behind the reasons why we’re making the changes (i.e., allowing a perceived increase in low-value content – not AI, where it’s been used for translations, for example).

If you'd like to be part of this process, please read about the type of person we're looking for on the Staff application form, and if that works for both parties, we look forward to your application.

When will we next update?​

In the next 45 days we will update BlackHat World News & Updates with:

• More moderator stats,
• Difficult decisions and changes we made to the moderation team.
• And our clearer policy change process.