It's a community for socialization. People will form beyond-forum connections with other people, and sub-groups will materialize. One or two subgroups will tend to include the majority of the admins and mods, as admins will choose mods they consider suitable for the job, which means they fit some sort of criteria. These criteria will result in a higher degree of like-mindedness and seeing eye to eye among the mods and admins, leading together with having to deal with each other more to a higher likelihood of beyond-forum interactions and friendship.
There really is no constructive way to prevent this. In an ideal world, perhaps mods and admins would have good interpersonal compatibility evenly spread around the forum (which would probably also imply a diversity among modmin personality that would mean some of them have personalities unsuitable to moderate somewhat objectively), but it can't really happen.
Knowing people better can result in seemingly more leniency towards them due to understanding the actual intentions and meanings behind their utterings better, which is more of a case of being too harsh/quick to judge on people one doesn't know well rather than being too lenient towards people one knows well. In the mind of the mod, objective criteria in judging based on understood meaning may be followed perfectly while interpretation may err in a way that from the outside may seem to simply be favoritism.
Or someone who doesn't know a poster very well may assume meaning and intent behind the uttering of a person the modmin knows well that isn't actually congruent with the real intent and meaning, while the modmin understands the actual meaning and intent. Such cases could be regarded as blatant favoritism leniency when they actually just didn't cross the line one perceived them to cross.
Preventing these things are quite impossible. Misjudgment of actions due to misunderstanding them due to not knowing them that well can be mitigated, and the high degree of patience and carefulness of the mods of this forum (compare it to INTPc or personality cafe or pretty much any other forum) works very well towards the prevention of this.
Things beyond what I described does and can happen on forums, but on this forum I personally have the impression that it's about as rare as a strawberry glazed pinata in a funeral. The forum is very lucky to have an administration as unselfish, unbiased and patient as it has.
This isn't kindergarten. People spend their time with whomever they please, and if that involves extra-forum communication, there's nothing to really do about that other than enticing them to spend more time on the forum through creating interesting content to which they feel inclined to respond to with contributions of their own, and to contribute interesting content in response to their contributions when they do contribute.
*hugs you* awww. You needed that.
