[quote="Border42, post: 13986466, member: 101400"]Well, I can't say I'm all that surprised. Athene was quite active in debates here on SB, and it could be argued that her status as a Super Mod shut down opposition to some extent, especially when she was making jokes like this.

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Reputation can shut down opposition anyhow. I know I've managed to make claims and get a lot further than other people, simply because I have a ~reputation~. It's inseparable with the poster to a serious degree.

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It's obvious she's joking in that post, and would never actually do it, but even that's probably more than I think a mod of any sort should do. If you're going to post in debates, you should completely separate yourself from your moderator status, otherwise even the implication could potentially shut something down.

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The only way for you to do that is to have a literal 2-key system for moderator actions (SomethingAwful does that, actually, where all bans/probations need to be approved by 2 mods/admins). SB doesn't have enough moderators for that, and I'm not even sure if XenForo can even attempt to do that. Given this, the level of 'lack of bias' you're talking about is basically "you cannot actually participate in the board". You know, we tried that, guys. We tried having mods who barely participated in debates or anything. They didn't moderate. Because, you know, they didn't care.

This is something that comes up in real life arbitrations, where millions of dollars are on the line. It's basically impossible to remove arbitrators without actual, blatant, concrete evidence of bias everyone can see, because they realized that to arbitrate effectively, you kind of have to care about the issue in question.