Whenever there are members who need mentoring...and what I mean by that is that they aren't exactly being nice and I try to work with them to change their posting style...do you have a private forum they can post in or is it all by PMs?
Also, how how long to do you work with them before you totally give up?
Do you let them flame you as they vent their frustrations about having to be mentored?
Are you ever successful at getting them to see a new way of posting that is beneficial to the community?
I don't think any leader should feel that she/he has the right to give up on another individual. At the end of the day, that individual will go through her/his own life experiences and may learn to become a better person. No leader is perfect, so everyone learns through the experience.
So, I think it's a matter of giving up on the forum or the entire concept. Sometimes, a forum can gather a toxic community. In such cases, it might be wise to "give up" to free yourself to do other things that are worthwhile.
Whenever there are members who need mentoring...and what I mean by that is that they aren't exactly being nice and I try to work with them to change their posting style...do you have a private forum they can post in or is it all by PMs?
Most forums use PMs, simply because private forums never caught on. It was a relatively early feature (with vB, I believe), but it just never caught on universally.
I think a private message works better in situations like this, but @Rick Ace nailed it 100%. It's very difficult for one to change their personality/post style, at most I'd probably give the member at least two chances and then probably ban them if things get too out of hand.
I like our Private forum (we have vbulletin) instead of PMs because people tend to not always do a Reply All and in our version of vbulletin you have to add the name since there is no option for Reply All...at least not on my screen! Yikes. So if the site owner and I are both adding our 2 cents we like to be able to see who said what and it's also easier to keep in an archive than relying on our PMs in case we need to refer back to it later.
I recently dealt with someone I think has a learning disability or is autistic and it was very difficult for me to even get the person to focus on what I was trying to convey. There was absolutely no personal responsibility and everything was everyone else's fault and they were all attacking him. 6 pages of that in over 2 hours and we got nowhere. I used to be a substitute teacher so I'm very patient with people...but even I have a point where enough is enough.
