An Open Dialogue Regarding Forum Moderation

Reddit's feedback system has been proven to be flawed and actually encourage negative behavior based on how the voting system is currently working. One source: http://cs.stanford.edu/people/jure/pubs/disqus-icwsm14.pdf goes as far as to say it actually creates negativity. This combined with total anonymity and the ability to create hundreds of user accounts seems to be a poor medium to use as a feedback tool on future content.

What surprises me the most though is that it has been stated that this change in how we submit feedback is not influenced by the top brass at DBG. As recently as March 12th of this year we had a change in our forums to where only players who have recently logged into the game could post in official forums. and up until recently we had "focused feedback" thread to communicate better with the design teams. Using reddit you aren't even required to have a real email address to comment much less be a verified member of the eq2 community.

Is it not more likely that when the forums were downsized the new budget has no allowance for an additional forum when Beta testing is happening? I would feel a whole lot better about using Reddit for Beta feedback if someone would just come out and say the move was done to reduce overhead and the saved funds would better be used in designing the game.

As for transparency in moderation it's a non issue on reddit. As for these forums I think RadarX is probably one of the most relaxed mods we've had and he's given me more than my fair share of breaks. But he's a mod and has all the power because as Feldon said, "the house always wins" and unfortunately that prevents what really needs to be said in many threads.

Flames was a trollfest, it was good for getting the real scoop on issues sometimes but the moderation in that game was hilariously disasterous.Removing posts and suspending people are one thing but completely changing the text of someones post eventually drove a lot of people away.

I'm a moderator on a forum that behaves exactly like that, and it has far more traffic than these forums do. Transparency is nice, but I can understand why a company official forum wouldn't be transparent.

Flames is where the loudest voice usually wins, but its also like being in a high school cafeteria fight where each clique is huddling together protecting their own. At one time there was also a few posts with very thought out, useful information contained within, but that left the building long ago.

1. Yes, but you can't read it until your ban time is over since you can't log on to read why you where banned.
2. Yes. On the screen that comes up when you try to log in, it tells you how.
3. Yes, all of my bans have been that way, forums only.

Hey Radar, is there anyway that we can get a little icon or something like under "Active Member" or under the "ALL ACCESS" to show how many times we have been banned. Kind of a status symbol, you know?

Feldon and a very small contingent of others have received I'd call it more additional effort vs special treatment. We have to weigh the history of the individual and their contributions to their forum infractions.

The comments in question, did you report them? Even if you want to link them now i'm happy to take a look.

95% of this is well outside the bounds of this thread. I don't see what consolidating forums and exploring additional mediums for communications (adding isn't a good description) have to do with each other.

This is a great example of something completely non-constructive and what would normally be moderated if reported. You made a little jab and added absolutely 0 to the thread.

There are 9 PMs about warnings sitting in your inbox right now so I'm going to have to disagree with your first statement.

As I've stated elsewhere, yeah the subreddit needs a bit of updating but the links on the side seems to be folks just looking for reasons to hate. We are asking folks try it out.

Hopefully I proved you wrong!

It's actually not as complex as some people believe. At the end of the day, did your post contribute to the thread or insult someone/take things off topic.

A few of your posts get moderated because you sometimes have issues expressing your opinion without insulting people.

That is seriously the most ridiculous thing I've read all day. Of course you don't get banned for liking posts. Now obviously I wouldn't recommend liking something significantly inflammatory because yes from time to time if someone does like that I've glanced at their account. In general though, we don't look at Likes.

I'm not sure why that statement is confusing to you. Forum warnings come before forum suspensions. A knee jerk reaction would be no warnings at all. I also would argue almost 48 hours isn't a "quick 180."

Believe it or not I've had that request a number of times over the years (SWG players asked for it constantly). We don't want folks chasing THAT type of achievement.

I believe it would be the cited fact that in order to make it simpler for the devs to find pertinent threads and easier on moderation you consolidated forums, then the next movement was the community team saying "Use reddit for beta feedback" thereby negating any possible positive effect the consolidation had in regards to making it easier to consolidate feedback for the devs.



Just as a pointer, always remember one thing, the mods and admins should set an example of behaviour and respect on a forum. A few posts lately seem to have been made (at least a tad) emotionally and without necessarily all the professionalism that being a forum admin requires. It's fine, we're all human and sometimes we slip up, thus why Edit was invented.

Respectfully,

Terrius

This is not only extremely inefficient and time consuming but it basically calls people out. It's negative reinforcement and shaming people is rarely an effective tactic to enabling change. I would agree communicating with the individual is an ideal which we'd like to improve on. Our time is fairly limited in this regard but it's something I want to explore.

If your suggestion means outlining every single post we action, this just isn't feasible and in my humble opinion not a good idea.

There are a lot of posts in here and this is an open discussion. My goal is to communicate and in order to do that effectively, I'm not going to add the normal polish I would. If you find that offensive I really do apologize but this is transparency.

The reason for the consolidation was to put the forum structure in line with the existing community size and yes makes the forums a little easier to parse. Reddit by nature puts highly active threads at the top so at absolute best using this comparison I removed 3 or 4 subforums and added 1.

This simply is FALSE....
I have had comments deleted threads closed and bans with no communication from any one other then when I try to log in it says you have been temp banned for non constructive posts.
Never have I had a dialogue open up to even attempt to explain what was wrong or why it was not acceptable.