The best example of unethical moderators that I have ever witnessed was during a three or four month period starting in roughly August 2000 with a Yahoo Club known as WebRingNews. I found this club (a club is a kind of enhanced message board) and immediately thought I had found a great group of people. There were quite a few people posting their views about webrings, which was a topic in which I had an interest. The community was closely knit and virtually everyone enjoyed themselves.

At that time there was a rumor going around that Yahoo was going to change webring into a new and wonderful place. There were some vague letters supporting this - which naturally led to many discussions about ramifications and possibilities.

In September 2000 Yahoo destroyed webring, which caused Webringnews group to get very active. Everyone was extremely unhappy, because Yahoo implementation was, well, severely lacking (this is an understatement if I ever heard one). The conversations grew heated and anti-yahoo sentiment got high.

The moderators did not like this kind of behavior and began deleting posts without warning. They banned people who refused to bow to their demands to cease discussing alternatives to webring, and even went through ALL of old posts going back months, deleting each and every one. These moderators became shrill and totally desperate, until group finally fell apart.

This is perfect example of completely unethical behavior on part of message board moderators. Yes, on occasion a moderator may need to delete a post or two (especially in regards to spam), but it is completely wrong for mass deletions to occur. When moderators start banning people right and left, perhaps they should step down and let someone else hold reigns.

In fact, a good indicator of a moderator who is out ethics is a vast number of posts from moderator attempting to explain his actions, and a large number of posts from others (sometimes on other message boards) who have things to say against moderator. Note that sometimes this is not bad - a good moderator may have to ban or annoy someone once in a while.

The key indication is that topic of message board changes to protecting message board. In addition if moderators seem to be spending most of their time keeping out individuals and deleting posts, then perhaps they need to take a hard look at their ethics.

It's as simple as that. Good message boards almost run themselves, and effort required by moderator to keep it going smoothly and on-topic is minimal. Bad message boards require huge amounts of effort by moderators and become barren wastelands in short order. There are few things on internet that are more sad than a once-proud message board reduced to rubble by an incompetent or malicious moderator.

So be very judgmental about what sites you allow into your ring. It's your ring after all! You don't have to explain to anyone why you have rejected their site, and personally, I would not do so. Just reject them saying, "does not match criteria" or some such thing, and move on.

Another strong ethical point - don't criticize sites. At best you will needlessly discourage a webmaster and at worst you will make an enemy. There is no need to do any of that.

You need to work hard to keep your ring intact. A broken webring makes it very difficult for surfers to navigate, and makes you, as ringmaster, look bad. Your first chore is to ensure that new sites add proper ring fragment to proper page on their site. You must then occasionally check those pages (either using automatic ring-checking functions or by hand) to ensure that fragment remains. It is also a good idea to check content occasionally - more than once I've allowed a good site into a ring only to find, a month later, it has become a hardcore pornographic piece of junk.

Promoting a webring is important but all ringmasters must be sure they use ethical means to advertise. Some ethical promotional activities include:

- It is generally acceptable to send a single email to a webmaster asking if they want to join. You should ensure that web site matches your criteria and email is well written. In other words, don't find email address of 10,000 webmasters and send them all same email asking them to join your ring - that's spam.

- You should include URL of your webring join page in all of your autoresponder messages from guestbooks, forms and so on.

- You might want to include URL of join page in your email signature line.

- Of course, you should advertise your webring in your own ezine.

It is also not a good idea to surf someone else's ring just for purpose of recruiting members for your own ring. That's considered unethical behavior. Find your own set of sites and recruit them yourself.

Ringmasters need to remember that they are judged, just as are webmasters and other creative people, by their creations. A webring is a creation made up of many different sites. Maintain a quality webring and you will attract quality traffic, maintain a poor quality ring, and you will not attract any traffic at all (in fact, you may turn it away).