Are there real people behind the message boards? I was curious, so I sleuthed out Jacquilynne Schlesier, community manager for Chowhound.com. An avid Chowhound poster from Toronto, Schlesier was invited to work for the company full time based on her energetic contributions as a volunteer moderator. Schlesier can’t cook. (She says cutting onions makes her cry.) She just loves food. Her job is to supervise Chowhound moderators in each geographic region, making sure that all posts on Chowhound message boards — several thousand a day worldwide, according to Schlesier — are consistent with Chowhound’s triple mission: to keep the site “friendly, on topic, and honest.” Although she can’t read every message, she works with regional moderators to monitor the site for posts that are rude or suspicious. “Raging people just don’t fit on our site,” she says. “We are not out to punish restaurants, even though people do say some negative things about restaurants on the site.” Maintaining the civility of the site means a low tolerance for “agenda posters, name calling, ‘flame wars,’ and ‘astro-turfing.’ ” (This last one, says Schlesier, describes online shilling, such as having your friend, mother, or press agent pose as a customer.) Schlesier describes Chowhound as a “big, sloppy kiss to the whole industry. We are a community of people without an agenda who want to know where to get great food.” Moderators may or may not live in the region they moderate. Want to volunteer to be a site moderator? You can’t. Simply participate in the site and flag inappropriate posts for the moderators. “Don’t call us, we’ll call you,” says Schlesier. >> A reminder: the 11th annual Chefs in Shorts event, a fundraiser for the Greater Boston Food Bank, takes place on June 27, from 7 to 9:30 p.m., at the Seaport Hotel. Tickets are $60 per person; to get them, along with information on participating chefs, visit www.seaportboston.com.
