Complaint against the moderator on Gastronomia: Double standards and blatant hypocrisy

Look, we’re dealing with a relentless cycle of double standards, blatant hypocrisy, and straight-up incompetence from the mods over at the Gastronomia subforum.

I’m not pointing fingers at specific mods because I have no clue who handles what or which individual makes the call in any given instance, but...

After being insulted, the post where the insult actually happened stays up—totally untouched—until the exact moment I snap back and reply. That’s when the magic happens: my response gets nuked, the guy who started the whole mess gets a slap on the wrist for "insulting," and I get slapped with an equal penalty for "trolling." It’s like the aggressor and the victim are getting treated as two sides of the same coin.

Fast forward to today, three days later: I get insulted again. This time, the mod doesn't just ignore the post—even though they clearly saw it since they replied to it—they basically sit there waiting for me to bite. It feels like they’re just biding their time until they can hand me a card for trolling, while tossing a pro forma warning to the guy who was being a jerk to begin with.

It’s becoming a predictable pattern, where I’m essentially being punished for nothing. I don't even engage with these people; I don't interact with the person insulting me at all. I get hit, the moderation team does absolutely nothing while the insults fly, and then the second I react, I'm the one getting penalized.

I’d love for a moderator on Gastronomia who actually knows what they're doing to explain the logic here. What is the point of having a mod team if, instead of keeping things civil and preventing blowups, they actually encourage confrontation through sheer inaction—or maybe even intentional bias—and then punish both the aggressor and the target identically?

There is way too much hypocrisy and lack of skill for such a small niche community, so I’m asking for someone to actually step up and look into this. Right now, this subforum is turning into a private playground for a specific clique of users who seem to be working hand-in-hand with the mods.

Thanks.

P.S. To anyone trying to spin this as "we didn't know" or "we wanted to help but couldn't"—save your breath and just give up now. I’ve got the screenshots and the full timeline to prove otherwise.

Unbelievable. It hasn’t even been two minutes since that post above, yet the guy insulting me gets a warning only after I snap back, while my actual reply gets nuked from orbit.

Now we just sit here and wait for them to slap a strike on me.

The pattern here is about as consistent as a three-term Taft presidency.

It’s honestly hard to believe how ridiculous this is.

Nobody was sitting around waiting for you to reply just so we could penalize you. We honestly weren't sure which type of warning to hand out to someone who decided to get insulting for whatever reason. The phrasing she used was pretty weird, so we didn't want to jump the gun without checking in first. By the time we all agreed on how to handle it, a little time had passed—we're talking a few hours, not days of you being this pissed off because we didn't act instantly. You replied before we could settle on it, but since the warning period had already lapsed, we pulled your comment to stop any further, totally pointless back-and-forth. That’s really it.

Is it just a coincidence that the exact same thing happened twice in three days?
Is it also just a coincidence that not a single moderator bothered to lift a finger even four hours after someone dropped an insulting post aimed directly at me?
And is it purely accidental that both times my response was wiped out within sixty seconds and I got slapped with a trolling warning?
Funny how the mods only seem to take action after I push back, despite having seen the insults thrown my way before I even opened my mouth.
It’s quite the coincidence that I’m the one getting flagged for trolling just because I reacted to the fact that the moderators aren't doing their jobs.
Isn't it weird how the guy hurling the insults gets the same amount of points as I do for supposedly "trolling"?
And isn't it strange that the posts where I'm being insulted stay perfectly intact on the forum, while mine get deleted instantly?
Am I just imagining things, or is all of this happening exclusively on the Gastronomia subforum?
Why doesn't this kind of stuff happen over on the Politics board, where there are a hundred times more people arguing and a hundred times more tension?
Then, to top it all off, a moderator actually has the nerve to tell me they didn't give me a harsher penalty because I'm a veteran user who has made a "significant contribution" 🤮 to the subforum.
So, does that mean users who have made even "bigger contributions" basically have a free pass to act however they want?

There are just too many "coincidences" here for my liking.

We are looking at some seriously incompetent and biased moderation over on the Gastronomia subforum.
I really hope someone actually steps in and deals with this.

Your post was deleted specifically because it wasn't a sanctioned thread. As you probably know, replying to locked threads isn't allowed, which is why I left hers alone but didn't do the same for yours—since yours wasn't locked—to keep the conversation from spiraling. Honestly, in my view, preventing a reply is part of the penalty when someone loses their cool and starts throwing insults for no reason.

This is primarily an appeal regarding what went down yesterday. I don't know how much time usually passes before a thread gets locked, but I don't see a four-hour window being some massive issue; it’s not like it took four days.

I went back to check the previous incident where you got flagged for insulting you, which happened two and a half hours after the post was made. I'm not sure why you think we didn't react until you pointed it out, but I don't see anything weird about you filing a report and us then moderating it; that's literally what reports are for.

This time, you didn't even get a strike when you claimed the moderators weren't doing their jobs, even though you easily could have. I'm sure you're aware that criticizing moderation isn't allowed in these threads. So, I think you're really exaggerating by acting like the victim every single time with your "both times" routine.

Anyway, my take on all this is that next time you report a post and notice something similar happening, just wait until the next day for things to settle. For more serious matters, the mod team usually needs to sit down and discuss how to handle it, and you can't do that in an hour. If you want to complain that we're slow or inefficient or whatever, go ahead and file a formal grievance with management; don't do it in a thread where it doesn't belong. If you had handled things this way every time, you wouldn't have any strikes at all, and the issues would still be resolved.

darkotter35 said:We're looking at some seriously incompetent and biased moderation over on the Gastronomia boards.
I just hope someone actually steps in and does something about it...

Honestly, it’s nothing new—the mods are basically just part of the cliques that run Gastronomia.

For instance, look at this thread:

Just check the post counts for the top five or six users who can pretty much say whatever they want. They have their own dedicated threads for things like Sufi, yet they wander over here to talk about Sufi on this topic and nobody ever calls them out on it. It goes on and on...

So yeah, you hit the nail on the head—it's incompetent and biased moderation. We old-timers started pointing this out ages ago, but honestly, we've just kind of lost the energy for it...

Gerald Rivera17 said:This isn't news to anyone; the mods are basically part of the inner circle running Gastronomia.

For example, check out this thread:

Just look at the post counts for the top 5 or 6 users who basically have free rein here. They've got their own dedicated threads for stuff like Sufi, yet they jump into other discussions about Sufi on this board and nobody even bats an eye. Same old story...

This is totally off-topic and has nothing to do with the actual discussion.

Are you seriously suggesting we should penalize people just because they talk about Sufi in the Where was the last place you ate out? thread instead of keeping it strictly to the Sufi thread?

And just because we let that slide, does that mean we're part of some clique controlling Gastronomia? 🤔