Recent Forum Discussions & Locked Threads

[CautionToTheWind]

This Tired Thread was much worse than the last 2. I say let it rest and deal with it.

[Warlord Zsinj]

tombom; naming names achieves nothing and solves nothing; it simply puts faces to problems and points the finger. I want action, but I don't want scapegoats or pariahs. That will just result in 'what? I didn't do anything!' 'how can you point me out and not him!' etc, etc. The point is that there have been regular repeat offenders, and instead of retroactively banning, things need to change course from now on.

Swift, again, I agree that a warning before a ban is essential (unless immediate action is needed), particularly where the user might be unaware (and while people around here act childish, I think the vast majority should be held entirely responsible for their actions), the fact of the matter is that things are certainly not performing well at the moment, and things are out of hand.

If you have been PMing people with warnings, then it evidently is not working. If it is not working, and you are continually PMing people (as I assume you must be, if they do something, and then repeat it), then not only are your actions ineffective, but they are potentially counter-productive, because they quite clearly show a toothless moderatorship to both the original rule-breaker, and to any potential rule-breakers that may follow (potentially as a reaction to the original rule-breakers shit stirring).

[AF]

Indeed if someone is unaware they've been moderated then the original moderation is utterly pointless.

At the moment moderation is only ever seen to act when the community demands it. Big flame threads locked, that guy who landed and spammed hundreds of threads with GIFs banned, the extremes, the glaringly obvious in your face.

And I agree with Zsinj about naming names. This only causes resentment in some and gives an excuse to start flaming. As a result the thread gets locked and the flamer has won. The guy naming the names is labelled as a troll and possibly moderated and the whole community is worse off than when it started and the mdoerators are totally oblivious to it, the troll is jumping up and down at a double critical hit, and the guy who tried to point out the problem is reeling with anger and is likely to go critical in the next week or two.
When they do, they're labelled as thin skinned and over sensitive and dismissed, and once again they're moderated or dismissed out of hand causing the cycle to step up until they get so sick they either atatck the forum outright or go somewhere else.

And yes they have outright attacked the forum in the past. The prime example is ranetti who got pissed off by the cycle very very quickly and decided to launch a crusade against the moderators and the forum as a whole in revenge, returning several times to the lobby and forums to wage war. He's an example of a not so shiny forum goer being thrown onto the cycle and not liking that very first loop, combined with a somewhat tactless attitude, somewhat fo an own goal for the trollers throwing a potential recruit the wrong way.

[tombom]

The thing is I really have no idea who any of these trollers that are destroying the community are.

[Neddie]

If it is a problem, I can simply not lock this thread. Also, this is not a thread about Tired, or about AF, or Fang or the most holy of SYs. This is about policy, and about community.

[clericvash]

That's our point, it's not a community. We need moderation.

[Neddie]

And so you shall have it. Why, we've done work all through the day!

[SwiftSpear]

Well, I certainly don't give out 10 warnings a week... I'm guessing that either people are getting away with stuff I'm not seeing, or someone is being way too sensitive about stuff being done that I'm allowing.

[Warlord Zsinj]

Well, for it to have come to a number of closed threads, and a number of disgruntled people, and a few big blow up threads like these, I don't really think it comes down to people being wusses.

[LordMatt]

I think lenient moderation is best, and people need to realize this is an internet forum and not take things too seriously (if it was for the lols, don't have a tissue paper thin skin and treat it as such). Also, we should try hard to avoid banning people; however, if someone is banned I think it should be enforced strictly.

[Warlord Zsinj]

I would rather have a stern private warning (if you feel the infraction is minor but has the potential to cause trouble), a public warning, then very quickly progress to a short ban, followed by a long ban for repeat offenders.

The point of banning isn't really to remove troublemakers from our midst by literally stopping them from posting (as Tired so easily was able to ignore), but rather to signal to everyone in the community, not just the trouble maker, that 'this will not be tolerated', and 'if you want to act like this, go elsewhere'. The person will either return and realise what is expected in terms of behaviour, will leave and not come back, or will simply break the rules again, invoking the banstick of doom.

Now, I'm not advocating nazi-germany here, but the current laissez-fair system is simply not working, and shouldn't be held up as a succesful model, because quite clearly it isn't.

[LordMatt]

Well if you see something specific please report it to a mod. I'll ask again for someone with admin powers who can easily look up a list of forum mods to post that so everyone knows who they can report issues to.

[Felix the Cat]

Based on the social competence of the majority of the forum users here zsinj, my child analogy isn't nearly as invalid as you'd have people believe it is.

VERY few forum users here function with a fraction of the empathy and diplomacy I'd really like to see. I REALLY have never felt as if in my role I've been punishing people well knowingly and maliciously antagonizing eachother, the VAST majority of the work I do here is damage control caused by people making stupid social blunders.

It can be argued that they SHOULD know better, but most of the time they don't. I'm not mean spirited enough to ban people for two weeks for using harsh words against someone they perceive is infringing on their content rather than managing it personally via PM before it explodes publicly, quite probably entirely avoiding the event. Also, we have several users that quite literally are 12-14 years old, it's not sane to expect the same behavioral competency out of them that's expected from an adult.

The trick is to understand that we're mostly adults, and to treat us like adults. It's really rather insulting to infer that we commoners are children. That's the second condescending statement by a mod concerning non-mod community members that has been posted in this thread. One may be isolated, but two is disturbing; it tells me that there is a culture of condescension among the moderators here, which is unhealthy and needs to be reconsidered.

There's two sides of the coin on the topic of treating people like adults.

1) Don't try to "teach" trolls to be productive members of the forum by giving them multiple warnings. Only one warning is required, and that only because the current state of the forums may lead a newcomer to errantly believe that we're an Internet hellhole like /b/ where trolling is considered acceptable lulz. If they don't stop after that, ban.

2) As adults, we should be able to take care of ourselves in most cases. At this point in our lives, if we haven't learned to take shit in stride and not to be offended by what anonymous people say on the Internet, then there's a serious problem. Don't play "mean police" and go around warning people for "hurting others' feelings" and other vague and idiotic things like that. Adults should be able to take a hit and give one too; they should not run to the corner and whine and cry at the slightest provocation. Most of us fall into the former category. Some fall into the latter category and may be found demanding more protection from what they perceive to be grievous Internet insults (but what others see as either valid criticism or nothing to be overly insulted at, depending on the situation).

[LordMatt]

Felix a lot of people (I'm sure myself included at times) lack insight as to why what they do pisses people off, or how to best handle a disagreement. If that weren't true we wouldn't have 7 page discussion about why we have disagreements and how to handle them. The goal of good moderation is to change people's behaviour, not to threaten and ban them. There are times when people don't listen and keep causing the same problem over and over, and this is when bans are appropriate. Those bans shouldn't be reversed until the user demonstrates they understand that whatever they did is not allowed and say that they will not continue doing it.

[Dragon45]

half of spring is about trolling


playing takes too much time/effort

[Felix the Cat]

Felix a lot of people (I'm sure myself included at times) lack insight as to why what they do pisses people off, or how to best handle a disagreement. If that weren't true we wouldn't have 7 page discussion about why we have disagreements and how to handle them. The goal of good moderation is to change people's behaviour, not to threaten and ban them. There are times when people don't listen and keep causing the same problem over and over, and this is when bans are appropriate. Those bans shouldn't be reversed until the user demonstrates they understand that whatever they did is not allowed and say that they will not continue doing it.

My entire point is that a substantiative disagreement need not be subject to moderation. Being adults, we should be expected to handle ourselves like adults. If we do not, we are given one warning, under the presumption that we did not understand that flaming the shit out of someone or trolling or whatever was wrong. Being adults, we are able to understand the reason for the warning and change our behavior. If we do not do so, we are politely shown the figurative door.

I believe that the "rules for rules" should be something like this:

1) If a rule is so strict that a reasonable person could accidentally or unknowingly violate it in the course of normal discussion, it is too strict.

2) Rules should protect the forum against actions which are knowingly perpetuated in an attempt to disrupt the forum, cause undue animosity, or gain "lulz".

3) Rules should be of the kind that one would have to choose to violate in order to violate. This is an extension and summary of 1) and 2).

4) The strictness of enforcement should vary inversely with the strictness of the rules themselves. Therefore, as rules 1, 2, and 3 tell us that rules should not be overly strict, the enforcement can and should be strict.

All of these rules extend the theory that we are adults and should be treated as such.

The goal of good moderation is to change people's behaviour, not to threaten and ban them.

Go back and read my "forum purpose" post. Rules, objectives, and moderation principles should be formulated in such a way as to extend and protect the forum purpose.

In this case, I'd have to ask - is one of the purposes of the Spring forums to teach people proper behavior?

I would guess that most of us have been operating under the assumption that proper adult behavior is expected here. I'm reasonably sure that very few, if any, people were told or realized that the Spring forums double as a manners school or troll/flamethrower rehab center.

Again, first figure out what the forums should do, and then and only then figure out how policies should be structured in order to allow the forum to do what it should do.

If a scientist just walked into his lab one day and conducted random experiments that seemed like good ideas on their own, they are essentially worthless, as the experiments do not contribute to a purpose. Likewise, if a bunch of moderators sit down and write rules that seem like good ideas at the time, the rules are worthless, as they do not contribute to a purpose.

[Felix the Cat]

smug is destroying the community

Editing ftw?

[DemO]

2) Rules should protect the forum against actions which are knowingly perpetuated in an attempt to disrupt the forum, cause undue animosity, or gain "lulz".

Serious forum is serious.

IMO the "seriousness" of the discussion in threads should differ between different sub-forums, dependent on the type of threads that are posted in them, and indeed it already does.

General discussion and Off topic tend to get a lot of non-serious threads and/or non serious approach to discussion in these threads, whereas Art and Modelling, Development, Feature Requests, Help and Bugs, LUA Scripts and Feature Requests sub-forums tend to have a much larger proportion of serious/profound/intuitive/constructive discussion. The Mods/Mapping forums get about an equal mix of both.

It also stands to reason that the sub-forums with more intuitive discussion are those where a larger proportion of content creators, contributers and people with some degree of expertise on the general topic of that forum will post compared to the number of General forum go'ers.

Keep in mind that a lot of the users on these boards don't necessarily join these forums to join in on serious discussion or development of Spring. They may well read into it, but likely will only make small posts if they ever do in these topics and will make most of their posts in General Discussion/Off Topic/Mods/Mapping forums, more or less just to give their opinion on whatever the object of discussion happens to be.

Personally, I enjoy reading topics from all of these forums, including those that I don't have a very high understanding in, just to gain some insight and information. I usually only chip in on the discussion if I think I have something constructive to offer, but in some General Discussion/Off Topic/Mods threads I don't always feel this is necessary, as the discussion is often pretty casual/non-serious anyway.

Forum moderation shouldn't apply uniformly across all sub-forums, rather it should be relative to each, depending on what the purpose of these sub forums is.

Edit: And by uniformly, I don't necessarily mean give one sub-forum more moderation than another. I mean that the rules for sub-forums shouldn't be the same across them all.

[Felix the Cat]

2) Rules should protect the forum against actions which are knowingly perpetuated in an attempt to disrupt the forum, cause undue animosity, or gain "lulz".

IMO the "seriousness" of the discussion in threads should differ between different sub-forums, dependent on the type of threads that are posted in them, and indeed it already does.

Agreed 100%.

Simply put, there should be different goals and thus different rules for the content creation forums than for the general discussion forums.

The content creation forums should be serious. By serious, I don't mean that you can't maek a funneh; I mean that attempts to derail threads into uselessness, irrelevant comments, and the like should be disallowed.

Discussion forums should be a bit less strict and more free, since they are not work-oriented but leisure-oriented.

By "gain lulz" I didn't mean disallow humor, I meant doing stuff like trolling AF because his hyper-defensive overreactions are amusing.

[edit] Wanted to give an example of serious vs. not so serious. Tabbed Explorer thread. As you can see it got derailed (tbh the topic sucked to begin with, but whatever). In a content creation forum, stuff like that would not be allowed. In off-topic, it should be allowed.

[Warlord Zsinj]

Dare I say that there is a perfect example going on right this moment that could and should be dealt with by moderators?

I certainly wait eagerly to see what will happen now that these long-whinded morals can be put to the test. A pat on the wrist?

... Or does a repeat offender deserve worse?