Moderation

That's your choice. But it's upending to think you're living in Norway or Sweden or Canada, and all of a sudden you end up under the rules of North Korea.

And on the no money, no health consequences thingy, fellows such as Jim Kasson, anotherMike, Horshack, Ilya Borg, Bobn2 for that matter (though we didn't overlap in many threads),contributed a lot of time, a lot of knowledge, many hours of posting to DPR. So there is other things involved that benefitted DPReview.

Not sure why you think that. I've been a member and (occasional) moderator on a number of closed forums. All of them have had spam posts to varying degrees.

Yes there is. Flamewars drive away the majority of users who can't be bothered wading through all the bile and don't want to find themselves a target of it.

If flamewars are left to run wild, before long the only people still participating will be the trolls.

It doesn't have to be as hard as you're making it sound.

Criticism should be directed at ideas/opinions and disputable 'facts', not at people. Mostly, it is pretty clear when that line is being crossed.

Any forum with a membership of several thousand or more is likely to occasionally see threads veering off topic and getting mired into the weeds, including political and/or religious views. It happened periodically at DPR, so there's no reason to assume it won't happen here too.

Realistically, whether they're called moderators or not, having people who have admin privileges and run the site is unavoidable.

Ideally, their actions should be transparent, rules should be clear and applied consistently and there should be as little intervention as possible. But I don't think we should kid ourselves about the need for some guardrails.

I don't think going off topic is a federal crime. Some times the "off topic" is more interesting than the original thread. Such as, in a thread like "is the D700 still relevant in 2023." You're entitled to your opinion, but your opinion doesn't bode well, if adopted, in creating a nice forum après DPReview. Things go off, things come back on. It's not North Korea.

I was a little surprised that no one took court action against Amazon. Also over the mental angst over the site being closed. There was a joke in a small town that I had lived in, that when a tavern burned down, 23 men were left homeless. (or some number) Same is happening with DPReview being shut down.

Court action against Amazon, why? Because they decided to close a website that does not represent any revenue to them?

Well, compare that to the wikipedia definition of censorship:

Censorship is the suppression of speech, public communication, or other information. This may be done on the basis that such material is considered objectionable, harmful, sensitive, or "inconvenient."

With the exception of some moderators, it surely gave them a bit of personal enjoyment. 😎

Shortly after the Sony A1 was launched, I started a thread in the EOS R forum basically saying that in most respects my R5 was as good as or better than the Sony which was $2,500 more expensive. Now, you may or may not agree with me 😁, but nobody was able to dispute it and/or convince me otherwise, because the thread was summarily deleted. When I asked for a reason, I was told that it was in the wrong forum because I wasn't discussing EOS R cameras!! (But remember it was deleted, not moved to the Sony forum.)

I used to moderate a very busy and successful forum (not a photography one) so I know what a thankless task it can be. But this decision was ludicrous, and I had no recourse. What's more, other threads making basically the same point appeared in the following days and were not deleted or locked, but if I had started another I would have run the risk of a ban for disrespecting the moderator's decision. Well, for the record I have no respect for the moderator in question, due to this and at least one more incident which I won't bore you all with. It's heartening to learn from some of the comments in this thread that I'm not alone!

No, because they decided to close a social media site that may have mental health ramifications for the participants. Maybe Amazon doesn't want the bad publicity. Maybe they would make concessions. Maybe they'll just say screw you.

And you have no idea if it represents any revenue or not.

LOL! Scared of losing their "power and influence" in internet photography land?

I believe that a brand new team of moderators would serve this site best.

Going off topic of course is not a federal crime - it just belongs in a separate thread with the appropriate title. When the content of a thread reaches the point that the new input on the original topic is exhausted - then time to wrap it up and move on. Most threads do end up in the weeds to some extent. I think for the most part the 150 post limit of DPR was just too long for most threads. More than once I contacted a Mod and asked for a post to be locked when it was clear to me it had run its course and noting new was being added to the original topic. So if something comes up in a thread that is "off topic" but of interest - start a new thread with an appropriate title.

Asking for a thread to be locked ... this is too much, IMO.

Threads can be locked/archived after certain time of no activity, if needed.

Why would they need to be archived? Is there a benefit to that (as opposed to just letting them sink down in the thread lists)?

One concern I'd have is that we would want the content of all threads to be accessible from a single search interface. If the content is unified for searching, then it's hard to say what meaning "archiving" really has. If searches are not unified, it will be a PIA to find old threads with important information (unless you already know their archive status).

You can't force a business to continue operating just because someone might not be able to handle it's closure.

Agreed.

Besides which, it would be a very slippery slope. If you could successfully mount that argument against Amazon, well... just about anything anyone (private person or corporate entity) does might have mental health ramifications for someone, somewhere.

In that respect, it's probably best if we are all left to take responsibility for preserving our own mental health, including finding ways to recognize and manage addictions (including social media addictions). ; )