An Open Dialogue Regarding Forum Moderation

Maybe "the whole "I'm disappointed" was a bit overzealous. I disagree on calling out someone (and I'm just making assumptions without their side of the story) who potentially went into a second account to avoid moderation on their primary one and made what I'm sure they knew was something that was going to be moderated. I've now described what happens in those instances.

Putting a note in a thread when a post is removed rather that just vanishing it was mentioned too.

And people may well get PM warnings, but it doesn't automatically make it easy to avoid yet another - erratic moderation or replying to something (much) later moderated can result in the suspension as well as blatant violations. And then you don't know what happened as you can't read the latest PM till after you come back after however many days. This last bit is a big issue, hence the requests for a courtesy email. The 'existing process' is flawed, and can actually make things worse by causing anger and resentment over perceived injustice and lack of adequate timely explanation.

48 hours and 11 pages with a lot of people making great and constructive suggestions, yet until now, none of those sensible suggestions have been properly responded to. That's why I commented as I did.

I'm really glad to hear that you're paying attention, but some more acknowledgement of the suggestions as we go along would back this up. I still get the impression that you and the team don't really think there is a problem and it is all in our heads. It may or may not be so, but as I've said, much of the community shares the negative feeling about these forums, which is horrible and should flag up a need for change.

I'm afraid 11 years of SOE have taught me to be skeptical and cynical (and I'm British so it's pretty much a national trait), and I have no reason to change that feeling until DBG prove otherwise. I look forward to being proved wrong, finally

Well we'll have to agree to disagree in this instance then. You could have stated everything you did, and pointed out that you look at the linkages between primary and secondary account without ever PUBLICALLY revealing the identity of the primary account holder. By all means have the conversation with both accounts by PM's but the vast majority of players don't need to know that postings by player XXXX are the same as player YYYYY.

Don't know about in the US but here in the UK, this kind of "transparency" with just e-mail addresses would open oneself up to grounds of complaint from the Data Protection Act registrar with a suitably large fine attached to it! As the US is considered more ligitious than the UK, I'm surprised that you are not taking more care in a customer facing environment.

Just wanted to agree with this part; maybe it's because I'm not a stone in a shoe, but my posts tend to get overlooked. It's not a huge deal; I asked a super simple question and then posted some feedback, but it does seem to be something that tends to be reoccurring.
I don't want to be controversial to get noticed :c

Putting a note in the thread I don't believe would work in some situations. I've moderated threads where we have had to remove pages of posts from people. Now this wasn't here but it does outline that I'll ask you keep in mind these are changes that would have to be done on all forums for consistency sake. Just so you haver context you guys make up about 15% of our weekly moderation efforts.

PMs should provide an email notification unless folks have turned them off. I'd like to avoid redundant work but like I said I'm not completely against emailing a form letter when someone has been suspended listing the post that triggered it if we can make that happen. There are a few technical hurdles.

If I'm missing other suggestions please let me know and yes part of this has been an explanation (you can call it a defense if you'd like) of existing policy. Despite what folks think for the general policy (what gees moderated and what doesn't) has been unchanged in at least 3 - 4 years. There have obviously been one or two changes since February.

Our forums are separated from our general system for the purpose of privacy and security. I actually have to request access to what we call someones Personally Identifiable Information. It wast' necessary in this case and this is outside the bounds of what we'd normally do but this is an unusual thread. Like you said though we'll agree to disagree and that's ok. I do respect where you are coming from..

My apologies but I did read your post. I'm honestly not going to be able to respond to everyone but why didn't I respond to yours in particular?

I'm not sure how to communicate about the removal of Off Topic in a way that I haven't already. The subforum was really underused and easily absorbed into General Discussion where more conversations can be had. This is the same for the other subforums. I know folks were really attached to those sections and this isn't a decision made lightly (it was at least a year in the making), but I really don't believe based on the metrics I see it ended conversations.

As for your comments on the DLC that's outside my purview to respond to. Despite my familiarity with EQ2, Roshen is your community manager and he's going to do his best to provide you support and hear your needs. Otherwise I'm going to take all his beer and make him sad.

Promise not to ban me if I start threads discussing cooking techniques in General Discussion, and I won't snitch on you for swiping beers.

We need a proper appeals process again too. I know it takes up some time but makes things fair and open. It has already been admitted that mistakes do get made. Without a simple, clear route to open up the 'dialogue' that keeps getting mentioned then these forums can feel like a dictatorship, and we as users are helpless if we feel mistreated/misjudged. Again, this can cause significant bad feeling - anger and resentment toward the company and even the game we all love.

It's the little things that count, and for once I don't just mean us rats

This is something that while I'm happy to hear your thoughts on I doubt we can reinstate. As someone who did the bulk of those appeals over the last 2 years it's a time cost that our new team can't afford. For EQ2, it would be fairly nominal as we only see a handful of suspensions a week. Once you add in DCUO and PlanetSide 2, this would be a part time job and while I agree it provides a better forum poster experience we have to look at where our time is best spent.

Good Morning, RadarX,
Would you like some coffee with that hard bagel?

Well, I am positive you missed something too. Something vital that just about all are screaming about. "2-way communication off the boards." People need to know that they can contact customer service, support, and moderation (appeal or clarity). But given that you have spent a goodly portion of your own free time and responsibilities in the other game communities within the Daybreak family to be here to read and talk to us, I am willing to let some things have a stewing period while they have time to sink in.

#2 "Reassurance" that all community members are being treated equally regardless of who they are. (I'm not even talking about Feldon in this instance. That situation is a moot point at this juncture). I understand and I am sure many others do (but not all), that it is difficult to monitor these boards with so many personalities and try to get the same results. (My spaghetti sauce is never quite the same either even though I have perfected it for years). But the moderators should (and probably do) have guidelines they really need to follow and that even if it is a generated response in pm, that we have been heard and will be brought up to speed as quickly as possible. That's my solution anyway for overworked moderator's. Rudeness is not acceptable on either part.

#3 Again with Reddit. There is a lot of families here RadarX. A lot of kids. And while we can't always protect them from everything and surely they explore on their own many times, as is want to happen, do you really want to be the Pied Piper that leads them to that cesspool?
I get it, you are trying to lead the stuff from these boards that is too hard to moderate. You are trying to give some folks the ability to voice what you wish you didn't have to censor. You are trying to relieve the the overworked staff from non pertinent issues so you can better focus on what is important. But I too want to know why you guys backed "beta speak" on those boards unless it was the carrot to get us there. BTW, it's not working. And if, as some folks assume, part of the allure is to generate visibility for EQ2, why on earth would you want them to see that side of us? Even you can't truly believe the voting system there is viable.

I think something you need from us is for us to stop with the pre-DBG issues and move on with the post issues. At least that's the way I see it. But I also think you need to understand that the takeover was executed like a hot mess. Perhaps too much on your plate too quickly and it transferred over to us. Anyway, I'm hitting post reply before I come up with 50 more things. lol

So if I may be pointed as well. You did not answer the question. You said what the goal of the thread wasn't, but you didn't say what the goal was? I have made a couple of posts here that did not warrant answers, apparently, and that's fine. But what is the end game here? I'm sure there are people watching this thread thinking to themselves that a list is being made of all the dissenting opinions and that something will sweepingly happen to all those accounts. Others see it, as I do, as someone on high smacked you on the wrist for banning Feldon and told you to make it nice. Aside from this speculation I see no positive coming out of this topic. As others have stated the only thing you have been doing is regurgitating the company line. So, I will re-ask the original pointed question - Are you, as a result of this thread, going to summarise what learnings DBG has taken out of it and what changes you are either going to make or consider making to the DBG moderation policy? (Thanks to beagley for the original question).

I appreciate it is a lot of work but it is an very undervalued thing. A lack of an appeals process is one of the things that makes these forums feel so unfriendly these days. This may "just be a game" but people really deeply care about it and their forum rights. Imagine in other aspects of life if you perceive yourself to have been judged unfairly but can do nothing about it - it is far from pleasant, and you would probably go elsewhere to avoid it happening again. Combine this with the mistrust of mods and the general view that their judgement is inconsistent and you create the toxic, unfriendly atmosphere that is forming here, justifiably or not.

With reduced staff the situation is difficult I know, but honestly, it cannot remain as it is if these forums are to remain useful and populated.

On the subject of Reddit, (and this will be my only comment on the matter), I understand the need to slim down the forums (even if I am not happy about it) and it sort of makes some sense to push the "I don't know which class to roll" or "which tradeskill is better" or "how to kill <bossname>" type discussions elsewhere. I wouldn't have chosen Reddit for the same good reasons many others have expressed but that is neither here nor there.

However I do firmly believe that official, key game stuff like Beta Feedback should be on the Official Forums. Where only those who have game accounts can post. The Beta threads have already vanished down the list on Reddit - they should be here, simple as.

Putting almost all the forums that were removed into general just makes everything get buried in the general mish mash of everything under the sun. Some of the forums did not get posted in much because of what they were. The fansite forums got posted in when there were new features added to fansites, new content of interest etc. The guide forums got posted in when there were guide events. I followed the new guide thread for my server so that isn't a problem now but when I want to look for the information specific to quests and seasonal events its buried by guide quest postings.

What did you (the forum overseers) gain by doing this? Were you having to moderate the fansite and guide quest forums extensively? If it wasn't a decision made lightly, then there must have been compelling reasons to do this. We were attached to some of those forums for a reason. Because they were convenient to find specific content in and enhanced the community that looked there for information. Where do I find discussions on the lore of eq2 now?

The signal sent to me is this. Fansites are unimportant, guide quests are unimportant, lore is unimportant, etc. Is that what was meant to be conveyed by this action? How did those forum areas cause harm to eq2 and the people running the forums?

I'm sure you all had good intentions, hey lets put everything in general and then it will be more active and more people will see stuff. It has had the opposite affect on me. I would scan down the forum list, see which areas I was interested in had new info, look at that, and then be done. I am not going to slog through general looking for things.

I realize that this thread is about moderation of forums. As someone who does not make a living moderating forums, I have a more general layman's definition of moderation/administration being all part of the same job.

I'm going to share an ancedote.

I was an administrator for a community. The only difference is I didn't get paid for it. I did it on my own free time. But that's besides the point.

A forum user was in our chat box talking about his family history. He said something related to [those bad German guys in the 1920s-1930s] (since the actual term for them is filtered). A German forum user got upset and threw a fit. She spammed all the admins' mailboxes with hate mail demanding someone ban this other forum user. One admin caved and banned the forum user in question. I received a PM explaining the perma-ban and went on my way. I assumed it was handled properly.

Until I was contacted in EQ2 by this forum user. He explained the situation to me. Something seemed off, so I went back to the drawing board. Since chat logs aren't saved anywhere, I had to reach out to trusted sources for screenshots.

As it turns out, the whole thing was blown way out of proportion. The forum user in question said nothing inflammatory at all, just that he believed, while researching his genealogy, that he might be related to someone who was an SS officer. The German forum user threw a fit of epic proportions and the admin who banned the forum user in question only did it to shut the German forum user up, because she was prone to throwing fits on the forums.

I went ahead and unbanned the forum user in question, with a groveling apology, because the admin team was dead wrong in this instance. None of us were present at the time of the incident (it happened in the middle of a work day)

And that is why an appeals process is important. (And we didn't have any formal appeal process, just "contact us if you feel something isn't right.")

Well there you have it and probably the first honest statement from DBG in this thread they have no intention of fixing what is wrong with moderation it was what we thought nothing more then a PR Stunt to let people vent and close down dissent. Allow it to run a few more days then they will lock it and delete it and learn nothing from it.

If you had taken the time to add anything of value to the open discussion I might be able to sympathize with you. Instead, all you do is lob insults and half-truths around with absolutely no basis. Maybe you should consider how you approach things and realize that you are shooting yourself in the foot with almost every post.

Back on topic please folks,no personal insults.

We wouldn't want this important thread to become locked for becoming "non-constructive" would we?

With the amount of slack afforded to NickStern and others so far in this thread, I think it's completely fair to point out how little they are adding to this discussion.
Some of the themes I see so far are:
1) I was banned after receiving warnings about my posts. That isn't fair. There should be other processes in place that I can also ignore before being banned;

2) Moderation seems arbitrary and I think the rules should describe every possible reason for being moderated. Otherwise, the moderators are out to get me.

3) Moderators/admins have the ability to look at my Inbox. This is a sure sign of a conspiracy.

I find it pretty obvious when a post or a thread is going to be moderated, so I don't really understand why so many people are confused and indignant.