Moderators

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Dec 15 2010, 4:05 pm
In response to Zagreus
I suppose the only real other system comparable is the police -> judge scale, but that's the same in a BYOND game as a primary complaint from a client to administrators anyways.
Dec 15 2010, 6:39 pm (Edited on Dec 15 2010, 6:50 pm)
In response to Zagreus
No, I said that your moderators would be the same level. Nowhere did I indicate everyone in the whole game with authority will share the same exact authority. Just the moderation/administration.

No, I'm being dead serious. Some people like to go through the "The customer is always right" theory, and I like to go through the "Rules are rules, buddy" theory.

And yes, I still strongly believe that you shouldn't need to give moderators commands to solve problems.
In an example, there is a customer and a bank teller.
The bank teller can simply do the work for the customer as in transfer funds, cash checks and whatnot which would be equivalent to speech in my case. However, the bank teller cannot terminate or do anything beyond the powers of the customer themselves. The bank teller would have to redirect them to the people who actually have authority, staff/owner in this case.
Sounds nice, but that's absolutely what is not desired. What is desired is the bank teller simply solves problems for the customer to their abilities. The need for staff/moderators in my case would only be for a truly unruly player or cases of serious abuse that would require character adjusting, savefile editing, permanent banning, etc.

By the way, by 3 Warning = Ban, I meant temporary. Any permanent ban would be manual.

Automatic Moderation would be to the best ability of the programming. If a game has a seriously complex and overcomplicated chatting system, then the warnings would most likely not occur a lot but only in cases of obvious spam.
Whereas, let's say there is a filter. For some strange reason, the filter cannot distinguish the A-Word from let's say assassin. The warning wouldn't happen as often.

And theoretically speaking, if the game was designed correctly and properly, there wouldn't be a true need for automatic moderation. I'm only speaking mostly for the readers who have issues that require more than biased manual moderation.

That's another key that I don't think anyone has pointed out yet.
Bias.
Bias runs really rampant throughout BYOND for moderation. From in-games to the forums. We are people, after all, and there is a guarantee that not everyone on the moderation list has the same opinions. Setting every moderator on the same exact level, no matter their seniority, ideally breaks away the abusive and biased moderators.
Dec 16 2010, 9:29 am
In response to Zagreus
You're saying you'd appoint staff that would WANT to ban you? Why in the world would you do that? I'm saying that if you gave them the power to punish you, most of the time they would use it. And a staff member who would want to ban/boot/mute the owner is a bad staff member.
Dec 16 2010, 10:31 am
In response to Maximus_Alex2003
Maximus_Alex2003 wrote:
Whereas, let's say there is a filter. For some strange reason, the filter cannot distinguish the A-Word from let's say assassin. The warning wouldn't happen as often.

var/posSwearWord = findtext(text_var,"ass")
if(posSwearWord)
    if(copytext(text_var,posSwearWord+3,posSwearWord+4)==" ")
        text_var = copytext(text_var,1,posSwearWord)+"***"+copytext(text_var,posSwearWord+3)


Incomplete, and not efficient (I'm sitting here without a compiler or anything to write), but you see what I mean in terms of fixing a simple issue like that. However, I agree, I think it's difficult to create a proper filter system that would fix everything, y'know?
Dec 17 2010, 10:34 am
In response to Jaredoggy
Jaredoggy wrote:
I think the problem that a lot of games have out there in terms of moderation is a ridiculously over-bloated amount of staff.

A lot of developers get the weird idea that "bigger is better," thinking that the more active mods they have online at any part of the day equals fewer trouble makers slipping through the cracks unnoticed.

You're right, 3 bad mods does not equal 1 good mod. However, 5 good mods being able to moderate at different times of the day is better than one good mod only moderating from 5 to 10 PM Eastern Standard Time.

All that really leads to is "GM abuse" though. Either you'll end up with a police state of a game where you get muted for improper sentence structure, or you'll end up with a game full of people who think themselves completely above the law and will then abuse power just because they can. I could name any number of specific games I've played during my years on BYOND that would fall into either of those categories.

That's the quality of moderation. If your moderators are doing that, you should replace them. It's that simple.

I applaud you for achieving an equilibrium with your moderation. But if the "owners" of many of the fangames out there would take time to find the problems in their moderation systems and fix them, then they could achieve that equilibrium as well. It's just simple laziness that allows those games to fall apart.
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