OMG! Would you look at that! They finally took out xoxsarahxox and iperry82 from being a super moderator. That's a shocker.

Yes Barbara. I will always turn to you on advice on handling confrontation.

Yes, there are slim pickings moderator wise. I honestly don't mind that. Too many mods and it gets ugly quicker. Just a small group of supervisors would work better anyways. With more mods on the staff, too many different opinions and things get out of hand.

The two mods that were just removed were inactive back in my time too. So they've been out of it for a LONG time. You're right about too many moderators causing problems. IMO the moderators are there mostly to break it up when an argument gets out of hand, and that doesn't happen very often. When you have too many mods it can turn into micromanagement and that's bad.

As long as the threads are the repetition of themselves, like people asking 5588966680 times how to stop their new bird being unfriendly, you shouldn't have a problem in your hand. I'd go as far as to prepare a few replies that can be reused. Most of these people won't even follow their own thread.
It's when you have pro troublemakers or two people who hate each other that you know you need to be creative.... Which i am pretty sure you are capable of.
If you like I can come around and pick a fight with one of my favourite people... So you can practice a bit

I'm sure that wouldn't be too hard for you.

Congrats! As you know, I still visit TC regularly and since all that ugly stuff was before my time, I think it's a nice forum. It does seem like there's a bit of group think there that makes me cringe a little whenever someone new posts, but it seems like that happens at every forum that gets large unless a newbie friendly vibe is strongly embraced by the majority. I like this site a lot for that. It's the non-shaming board!

Also, if I hadn't posted on TC, I would have never found my little man Coyote.

I will say this though, I noticed that when I started visiting TC after posting on TB for a couple of months, TC is noticeably slower. I don't know if that's due to past drama driving people away or maybe a larger number of competing forums or what.

I can't say what's happened in the last year on TC, but prior to that a lot of people were driven away by the outpouring of negativity that started around the time that I became a mod. A lot of good, productive members went elsewhere, and the mods who were stirring up the negativity ultimately got mad and left too.

Facebook has turned into a major venue for cockatiel-centered groups. Since Stephanie became a TC moderator I have hopes that TC will be a saner place now, and I've been thinking about whether I should go back. But I can't say that I actually have any desire to do it. There are a lot of things that I don't like about Facebook - I hate the format and greatly prefer a traditional forum setup like TC. But Facebook is where the knowledgeable people are now and I can have better conversations there. Some of them are ex-TC members who left when it turned nasty.

I think it's mainly due to the same questions repeated a million times, the only thing that changes is the original poster.
Plus there are no experts who can give clear answers to specific problems.
The constant influx of kids asking questions included in the FAQ is a bit disheartening.

Cloudy skies, would you mind telling me your nickname in TC? if we ever interacted there, it would be nice to know

The same questions get asked a million times on any forum. There aren't very many people who will try to look up the answer to something themselves and instead they rely on other people to spoonfeed them. I tend to go the opposite way myself - if I ask a question on a forum it usually means that I couldn't find a satisfactory answer on my own. When I do feel too lazy to look for it myself I'll say so. But the usual result of that is that no one gives me a good answer so I end up researching it myself anyway.

The laziness of other people has actually been very good for my own education. A lot of what I know about birds comes from looking up the answers to questions that other people have asked.