Right, right, and right.

It's just 2 totally different things. One thing is the need to moderate a forum, which includes moving threads, banning users, maybe even deleting posts (although I'd rather not have that), changing thread titles so they somehow reflect the content of a thread... Good thing.

The other thing is "rating" other people's contributions and deciding what's useful and what's not. I'm not sure if this should be part of a moderator's work. I've thought about it, but I'm still not sure. If I had to decide here and now, I'd say "No". If a thread's really irrelevant and useless because it discusses the matter of resistive vs. capacitive for the 341st time, it'll move down the list and disappear from public attention soon. If this 341st thread happens to bring up new points, well, then it's good to have it.

Of course, if the community wants moderators to decide and pre-select what's good for them and what they shouldn't read, we'd need a place for the unwanted threads. "Off topic" is not the place for them, because "Off Topic", as the name says, is a place for threads not related to Maemo. If we want moderators to decide about the quality of threads and remove the low-quality ones, they'd have to do the same work for "Off Topic", too, and make a clear distinction between good and useful Britney Spears threads and Britney Spears threads of less quality.

What's just really annoying is having discussions about the Hildon Application Manager in "Off Topic". Bad thing.