General discussion of moderation procedures

Gary, I agree with you in the main. Especially in reference to your first link, the quibble that has held up promotion seems to be rather trivial. I disagree that the second link you provided represents a topic that should have been promoted, however. It is literally incomprehensible. Whether the problem was the poster's ability with English or simply with expressing him/herself, there doesn't appear to be any merit in promoting something that is over the borderline gibberish.In the moderators' defense in both cases, however, I would submit that they have a really difficult task trying to balance the promotion of marginal topics with the generally high quality of this discussion board. This difficulty quite properly leads occasionally to topics that should have been promoted but weren't. On the other hand, there has been little or no obvious reluctance to promote either controversial or contentious topics - rather the opposite. It is mostly a question of writing style and moderator judgement. Mistakes are inevitable, but overall the system has served to keep fairly high-quality.

Ned,I know why you haven't promoted the topic. I almost always read the proposed topics to see what's coming up that I might be interested in responding to. I'm aware that your reasoning was the link was controversial and the topic originator refused to respond to mod requests to delete it. I almost never click on people's sig links although I know there are posters who do so regularly (Tal was taken quite to task during his initial forays here over that issue, for instance). My post was neither an implied criticism of your moderating nor was it intended to be a negative comment on moderating here overall. In fact, if you read the rest of my post, I quite clearly state that the moderation and topic promotion on this board is quite good overall - and go on to explain to Gary why some posts are less than useful topics (like the second one). No need to get defensive.