1. We have a vast community on our site with a deep network of message boards. According to a query that I just ran on a back-up database (I wouldn’t run a frivolous query on the live database), there are at least 7260 different forums on our site. As they say on Twitter, this website is free. (Well, the message boards are.)

  2. There are rules! There must be rules! Everyone makes his own rules, though. Everyone wants his rules to be enforced. A user complains, about our moderation team: “please avoid reflecting your novice acts.”

  3. A user has posted content that is certainly not G-rated or PG-rated, and he wonders aloud why we keep deleting it. He keeps posting it. We keep deleting it. We have placed some narrowly focused restrictions on his account to prevent him from posting such content. He complains.

  4. We get a flood of requests from users for new features that they want for the message boards. They would like to know how many “thumbs up” (upvotes, likes, whatever you want to call them) each of their posts received, and they would like to be informed which post was liked when new likes are received. They want a much richer and more complex system of roles and permissions.

  5. While they rarely, if ever, come to the attention of the moderation team, the forums that strike me as the oddest are the world-building ones. The students in these forums assign each other a bunch of roles; they are countries and corporations and organizations of various sorts. And then they spend their time writing constitutions and bylaws and policies. They negotiate treaties and define monetary policy.

  6. Also more popular than you would think: Let’s count to 100000!. This thread currently has 22780 posts.