Tom consistently tells us we are doing well. He rarely complains about our decisions.
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Which of course is not to say he doesn't question them at all, it's just he does so rarely. So it's pretty apparent to us at least that we are being suitably and regularly supervised by him, because once in a while a moderator will remark to me that they made a bit of a boo-boo and Tom spoke to them about it.
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Zecronious wrote:
Perhaps you shouldn't be moderating content of other people's discussions that don't concern you then. To me it feels like I'm having a discussion with someone in at a park then a random member of the public wearing a badge comes over and says they don't like what I'm talking about or the way I'm talking about it then puts sellotape over my mouth when I don't stop. That's nothing like what happens on BYOND because, in your example, you got a warning before they taped your mouth shut =) Yusuke13 wrote: Tom consistently tells us we are doing well. He rarely complains about our decisions. Tom hardly uses the forum and no moderator would mess with his posts, so he'd be happy with the moderators no matter what. You can't go by what Tom says, it's the average forum users who would be displeased with how the moderators act. The BYOND staff thinks poorly of the majority of the community. If there's a name they don't recognize, their instinct is to treat them like a complete idiot. They're convinced the community needs fixing so the mods go looking for problems and are far more active/involved than they need to be. Instead of fixing the users you've got (which doesn't seem like it's going to happen) it may be a better strategy to make BYOND appeal to a better kind of user. To view it a slightly different way - the average BYOND user wants to rip a DBZ game so they can have a game that attracts players for the sole purpose of being an admin and to assert their power however they wish. That kind of person isn't going to respond well to a forum where the moderators lurk the forums with the sole purpose of asserting their power however they wish. If you don't want these kinds of users, instead of going nuts on forum moderation, remove their reason for hanging around BYOND. If you want to keep these users around, you'll have to find a more effective way to deal with them. | |
A.T.H.K wrote:
You mentioned that changes can be made, Will they? I think it would depend on the moderator. I am willing to make changes which would benefit the community. At the same time, if a moderator isn't willing to change, then his position in the community should be reconsidered. Realistically I could post warez on this site (if no mods were on) and have it sit there for awhile if I wasn't aware of the rule .. no warez then I would assume that its fine... There comes a point where you'd expect a user to have some sort of common sense. It would be a losing battle to continue to list every single malicious act as unacceptable. If a person decides to post porn on a gaming website and believe it's acceptable, well maybe they do need a slap on the wrist to knock some sense into them. Could the posting guidelines go more in depth, sure. Do I personally believe it'll be helpful? I'm iffy when it comes to that. I can see it being used as an attempt at justifying an act deemed malicious by a moderator. But as many have said, a moderator could be wrong. At this point, I believe we as a community (mods or not) could come up with a set of guidelines that would please everybody. | |
Forum_account wrote:
The BYOND staff thinks poorly of the majority of the community. If there's a name they don't recognize, their instinct is to treat them like a complete idiot. They're convinced the community needs fixing so the mods go looking for problems and are far more active/involved than they need to be. First off, stop speaking for me and the moderators. You have a contagious negative attitude and you are constantly complaining about things that aren't even problems. This is barely an issue. The people who are frequently moderated are totally aware of it because the biggest offense they commit is reposting stuff that has been previously deleted (stuff like "You are a moron, go f yourself"). The #1 reason anyone is banned from the forums is for continuously sparking flame wars through personal attacks-- and only after being warned repeatedly when their posts are deleted. This is not a big deal. Stop trying to make it sound like it is. | |
A.T.H.K wrote:
Has Tom ever taken control of the moderators? I know there is an admin log but has Tom ever told them this is not right,you shouldn't of done that or hey I think we need some guidelines take this with you. I peruse the moderator logs (which we can always make public again... we pulled that because of some technical reasons of how they display deleted posts). Every so often I will see something that seems like over-aggressive moderation, or else someone else will bring that to my attention, and will mention that to the mod. But really, almost all the mod actions are no-brainers, either in deleting the "asdf" fluff posts or in deleting personal attacks. Now your case was a bit more complicated because technically what you posted initially (if I am recalling correctly) was not in violation of our guidelines. But it was attached to a recently closed flamewar, and the mod did not want that to re-ignite, as it were. Then you kept reposting the topic, which is not cool. Better would be to contact the mod who took action. But I see now that that may not be obvious, so what we can do is make it so that the alert comes from the mod, and you can reply like you would any other pager message. Some people may wonder why we bother deleting fluff posts, and the reason is not to turn this forum into a trolly chatroom (the kind of forum where everyone is bagging on everyone else and posting those stupid cat images). Those places are fun and I visit them now and then but the intent of this forum is primarily to be helpful. The reason I say that people are making this a bigger deal than it is is that this forum is serving its purpose very well and we have had a lot more activity since moving to this new system, primarily because the "help" forums are a lot more visible. | |
I agree that some "fluff" post should be removed as they are clearly idiotic and useless to the community.
As for contacting the mod I had done so which is in my initial post I had to go out of my way to contact that mod othe mods in this case and it was a hassle and yet I was treated like trash talked to like I was some sort of moldy tuna...... Which obviously isn't nice a simple warning Would of sufficed and I would got the hint... Shit I better stop posting on that I'll get banned... But instead like I said before I got crappy responses as to why it was removed.. It's fine if you want to push away non English speaking users you seem to have a lot of Portuguese users using/playing on rips and that's fine but they make up around 20 - 100 users even more in the community and if they can't post and your mods cant use a translator then shame on them and you... | |
Well, we will try to improve the dialogue between mods and users. The mods are not out to get anyone, but of course they will be upset when someone keeps reposting the same thing they've deleted.
As far as the language thing, well, we have to draw the line somewhere. The Portuguese users seem to primarily play a few games, and those game forums are full of non-English discussion (which is fine). | |
Now that is fair enough but I would suggest noting somewhere that it is an English only forum, That would be easy.
One would have to agree that the mods need different sets of tools to achieve user happiness some posts on here have stated some very good points on the harshness of removing posts that could easily of been split. A proper warning system would be nice also and proper use of the said tools would be great, Mod's should have a different colour name when they post so people are aware. I think this is the first forum I have ever seen that doesn't list the Moderators. | |
While not completely what you mean, you can tell if a user is a moderator or not by clicking on their names:
Having a differently coloured name/post colour would be helpful though in moderation situations. The old forum had that I think? | |
Yes, the old forum had a feature where a person could post with 'Mod tags,' which put [Moderator] somewhere on the top of their post or under their name.
To be honest though, it doesn't really matter if someone is a moderator or not if they're asking you not to personally attack someone, for instance. That's a fairly basic social rule that everyone is capable of respecting and which we shouldn't really need the Internet Police to force on people. The English Language only thing is something that every single forum I've ever been a member of does. You post in the main language of the forum unless there's a (sub-)board specifically for foreign language users. The things we delete posts for tend to be things that shouldn't come as a surprise; This is basically a technical help and programming philosophy discussion board, with some engine-specific suggestion/bug report boards. You wouldn't pull up a picture of a naked lady or start ranting in Portuguese during a meeting at work, so don't do it here. Equally, you probably wouldn't send someone a letter just to say "Asfdgs" - it doesn't make any sense and doesn't accomplish a thing. I suspect you wouldn't bring up a six-month-old conversation out of the blue, either, because you wanted to say something but missed your chance before. You also probably don't need to be told explicitly not to punch people in the street, or start insulting their family - this is a rule that everyone is pretty aware of if they function in society. There's no "Book of BYOND Law" for the same reason there isn't a "How to Function in Society Without Offending Everybody You Meet" manuscript. You just try not to do things that your present company won't like. Complaining that people are stern with you after you've ruined their house and irritated all the neighbours doesn't make sense; now imagine that this happened to the same house, every night, at the hands of a bunch of people. That is basically the reason we just delete "adasd, your mother is unpleasant" comments, and the reason you get to see is "This was a useless post." It was useless. Silly at best, malicious at worst. If you can't understand that, I really don't know how we can have a functional relationship with you. | |
I believe that this is OUR "house" and that no one in this thread is really arguing to "dirty it" more.
I'm just curious about a few things. 1. Were there any concerns from actual users about the previous forums? 2. How much moderation deletion went on in those? Perhaps I'm not interpreting you correctly DeathGuard, but you seem to be suggesting that the mods are God and that God isn't happy with how Earth turned out. So now God needs to hold everyone's hand and smite people with ruthless efficiency at even the slightest thing (provoked or not). You seem to suggest a society in which there is no humour, there is only sharing of information about programming. Again, perhaps I am misreading. Personally, I think there is room for humour in any discussion, even if only to lighten the mood. Does humour get out of control sometimes? Definitely. One example is the ^ tangent, cotangent, arctangent, arcsine, acrcosine thread from... what... 2 weeks ago? tangent and cotangent were probably acceptably silly, the rest were just overkill. I'm not arguing "freedom of speech" and I know that we are all subject to the rules we agree to when we sign up for BYOND. I am arguing that perhaps BYOND is seeming to trend towards Nazi Germany and your user-base wouldn't mind going back to the days of Bismarck. | |
Lugia319 wrote:
I am arguing that perhaps BYOND is seeming to trend towards Nazi Germany and your user-base wouldn't mind going back to the days of Bismarck. Excellent. | |
Tom wrote:
Forum_account wrote: Ignoring your thoughts on my personality which isn't even related to the topic at hand, most of what you said isn't correct. For one, it is my problem because I've constantly got mods deleting my posts. Two, this isn't "Barely an issue" because Byond looks like kiddy program and it's moderated like a play ground. How can anyone mature take it seriously? Three, I don't see how knowing that you're being moderated proves anything to support your argument that it's not a problem. If anything, it shows how much you're angering people because they obviously thought they were doing nothing wrong and now you're just aggravating them and causing them to lash out. Also, like I said if anyone is posting something blatantly offensive.. By that I mean verbal abuse, not saying things like "holy s****"... Then it can be deleted. Finally you said "continuously sparking flame wars". There's a difference between having an argument and having a flame war. A flame war is when people post constant nonsensical statements that inflame the other side. That's different to for example having a discussion that goes back and forth. Also, I just have to add something I forgot. On the text-mud topic my posts were deleted seconds after they came up and the moderator said they had notified me and I should contact them on the pager. I decided to do it his way... Checked my notifications, nothing. Tried to talk to him on the pager, was ignored. Personally I think I'm the constant victim of mod abuse which different to a constant negative attitude. If someone says something stupid or does something stupid like using braces when they're totally unnecessary then I'm going to let them know, saying "Oh how nice, you made an interface tutorial" doesn't solve anything. Saying, hey you were retarded just then actually solves something. Being realistic is different to being negative, so please stop the persecution of me as a negative nancy. Seriously, if people can't handle the truth then they shouldn't post. | |
Lugia319 wrote:
I am arguing that perhaps BYOND is seeming to trend towards Nazi Germany and your user-base wouldn't mind going back to the days of Bismarck. I declare this thread closed. | |
Keeth you had me then I had to click your name to check if you were a moderator or not ..
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Aww darn, you beat me to it. I've been waiting all day to get home to post that ;)
Also, Zecronious, I never received a page from you, and you should have received an alert for each post that was deleted. Are you sure you spelt my name correctly? (ie incorrectly) | |
DarkCampainger wrote:
Aww darn, you beat me to it. I've been waiting all day to get home to post that ;) I'm absolutely sure I 'spelled' your name correctly, you also appeared online in my friends list. I sent you about three messages with no reply. Also, like I keep telling you... I didn't receive any notifications when my posts were deleted. | |
It seems that proper communication between the defendant and the pros acuter is needed...
As apart of this I think some Moderators could go through some politeness training as they can be abrupt and rude, they do also expect you to know the rules already before posting which is practically impossible as we aren't given warnings to go by. | |
"The mods are doing fine. There are a few users who relish in the drama (and basically led to the demise of the old members front-page) and we should not accommodate since they ruin the community.
An English-only policy is totally logical for our community."
I suspect Tom may not be 100% with my cross-posting that (to which I apologise), but as you do keep bringing a matter of Tom's awareness and/or approval to the fore, and he has spoken on just this very topic, it's a very pertinent post.