I've suspended a few members over the past few weeks for ad hom comments, name calling and general nastiness towards other members.

From the beginning, the way I wanted to set VideoSift apart from other online communities is by having actions matter. What you vote for, what you comment on - it matters. Lucky and I listen, watch and respond to you - and so do other Sifters. No cries for attention are needed here, because we're all clued into each other, at a high level.

If you came to my house for a dinner party and in seriousness called someone else at the table a dirty horse fucker - I would ask you to leave. It's not conducive to good conversation and brings the whole party down.

It's easy to tell when somone is earnest at a dinner party. It's much, much more difficult on the Internet. Because of that, sometimes I overstep, sometimes I misjudge completely- but I always try to be on the side of the person being vilified - because after all, you made the comment. Again, this is a place where what you write in comments matters. I am sorry if I have misjudged inside jokes as abuse. I do try and research it to determine intent.

But having said that, and even though I think it's really important and baked into our community - I tire of weilding the axe. I would also like to say sorry to people who have been wronged by other members but have had no response from admins. Last month we had 21,457 comments - Lucky and I just can't monitor them all.

I would love to find a way to transfer this responsibility onto the community. (we've been here before mein liebchen)

I'm open to ideas on how this could work - but I was thinking something like replacing the "flag spam" link in comments (which is now kind of redundant with the *spammer invocation) with a "flag inappropriate" link. 10 votes by gold star members or above would result in a one week ban.