Running and moderating an online community is a tough job, especially when you come across situations where you need to stop a certain thread/discussion to prevent a rift between members of your community.

Martin Reed recently wrote an interesting post on this, titled “Should communities ban the discussion of certain topics?”

Martin has managed to hit the nail bang on the head by not only talking about discussions of certain nature (politics, religion) which at times can go badly out of control, he has also managed to provide crucial advice on how to deal with the situation.

According to me, the best thing to do in such a scenario is to remain calm and try not to appear bias towards a certain section, even if you strongly agree with their points. This is also something which needs to be conveyed to the rest of the moderators and forum staff to ensure that it doesn’t appears that the staff is taking the side of a particular group. Which if it happens, would alienate the members belonging to the other school of thought, and can actually make the situation worse.

What do you think needs to be done in such types of situations and in case if you have been through one, what did you do to calm every one?