Sad but true. The MAD mods are never going to realize that the driving force of MAD are The Critics! The critics provide the energy to the board by sparking the debate with their questions and comments, and without critics and their hard questions the board will devolve into a Fellowship Hall.
Oh, I think they do realize that. It's just that they want the impossible - they want a setting in which critics only provide material which can be clearly and successfully rebutted by the apologists. They want the apologists to always appear to be the hands-down winners in these debates. The hard fact that this idyllic dream is not possible is what creates this no-win situation, in which they are driven to censor and ban critics while, at the same time, needing SOMEONE to fill that role.
Of course many of the believers seem to actually think the apologists do clearly come out on top - amazing, but apparently true, unless they're blowing smoke. Some of the believers are able to be convinced of this simply because they don't have adequate background knowledge on a given topic to judge the interaction between the apologists and critics in the first place. That ignorance, combined with the desire for apologists to be right, results in a distorted perception of the interaction. But I suspect that some of the apologists, who DO possess enough background information to know what's going on, are a bit discomforted by the lack of clear victories.
One of my old favorite posters who abandoned us for his real life (the nerve!), gadianton, once commented that LDS apologists, in general, were very bright people, and yet critics with average intelligence often whup them in these debates, because we, frankly, have the easier course. It takes an active and bright mind to come up with some of these tortuous theories they construct to support what would, in my opinion, appear to be quite insupportable to outsiders. A comparison would be a scientologist apologist who constructs theories to support the idea that life on earth originated with an alien race dropping frozen aliens in a volcano (at least I think that's their theology). It takes a bright, creative mind and lots of hard work to create some supporting theory that sounds plausible even to other scientologists who WANT to believe. All believers really want is some smart person to tell them it's not silly to believe what they already believe. Despite their insistence that all that matters is faith, they desperately want to believe they're not being silly and foolish and buying some theory that only a sucker or dummy would buy. So it would only take an average critic to come along and point out all the nonsense in these carefully constructed theories, and think how frustrating that would be to the scientologist apologist.
That's part of the reason MADdites, in general, are so sensitive to being "offended" by critics, even though they clearly engage in equally offensive behavior, and usually worse. They're frustrated by the desire for the impossible, and since they can't admit it's impossible due to the fact that they are trying to defend what is often extremely difficult to defend at best, they have to find another scapegoat. Aha, it's the ill mannered critics. (after all, we all know they're inspired by Satan even if some of them are too PC to say that out loud)
Since having ceased participating at MAD and hence having zero investment in any of their conversations, I am very amused and entertained by it all. I can't wait to see how it turns out. Will the mods realize their overzealousness may create a board inhabited by rude, sneering believers and a few extraordinarily careful and polite critics, and realize that may not result in a favorable impression after all? Will they realize that they may end up creating a board not even the most determined critics can tolerate? Or will they pursue this current course until they're left with a quasi-Sunday School, inhabited by a very small number of critics and a vast number of LDS cheerleaders, until the board becomes so uninteresting even the believers give up? Like I said elsewhere, it's like our own little soap opera. As the FARMer turns...