An Open Dialogue Regarding Forum Moderation

I've been pretty open about the fact that was mainly an effort to stop the idiotic amount of spam that we used to get on the forums and it's worked. There are people in this thread (not many but a couple) who haven't logged in for months. Their opinions are still valid.

I reviewed your suspension on January 26, 2014. You posted forty four times in 3 days about an extremely controversial topic (The membership update) and were nabbed on some non-constructive comments along with a ton of other people. I could list out examples if you want and by themselves they look pretty weak to me. At the time we had to come folks down and people who wouldn't, we gave temporary suspensions.

If you have a very specific example I'm happy to comment on it and I'll be completely honest. Our mods were not perfect. Part of my job was to spot check what they did to ensure things were documented and judged properly.

Zil, one thing that I have often seen within these forums is a group of people that appear to be unable tell the difference between expressing a dissenting opinion and being insulting (I'm not saying that it is necessarily what is occurring in this specific instance, but it is possible). For example, let's look at two fictitious comments (i.e. not actual comments, but ones created specifically for the purpose of illustration):

#1. I disagree that reddit should be the primary source of feedback for the beta of the Rum Cellar DLC. These are the reasons that I disagree -

• The upvote and downvote system is susceptible to being gamed by folks with an agenda.

• It adds another place that players must track in order to stay current with EQ2 issues.
• Any official communication that originates from a medium other than the EQ2 forums should also be posted on the forums.

Additionally, I think that the cost of the DLC is higher than it should be given the sparsity of content. A price of $10 or less would be sufficient, since $7.99 in 2006 dollars is only $9.30 in 2015 dollars, and there is less content in this DLC than there was in The Fallen Dynasty adventure pack.

#2. You guys are ****** up in the head if you think that I'm going to post feedback on ******* reddit, or go to *********** Facebook or ************* Twitter for updates. And you guys have **** for brains if you think that I'm paying $15 for a **** DLC, you ******* *******.

If you examine both of those comments, you'll find that each conveys approximately the same idea, but the first one is considerably less inflammatory. As such, it is a whole lot less likely to be moderated into oblivion. The second one, on the other hand, would (at the very least) be removed, and might also result in a temporary enforced vacation from the forums.
______________________________________________

Another thing that I see that results in posts being removed is having exactly zero content that is directly relevant to the original post in the thread. If the conversation drifts from the original topic, expressly responding to only the subject to which the conversation has drifted can result in moderation. (This is the primary reason that most of my posts - whenever I'm responding to something that is either only tangentially related to the original topic or is completely unrelated to it - contain a section that directly addresses the thread topic.)
_______________________________________________

Yet another thing that gets posts removed is being insulting. Calling someone that disagrees with you a troll or a shill (or any other derogatory name, for that matter) is not constructive. Those are examples of ad hominem attacks. Ad hominem attacks occur when a poster attempts to silence a dissenting opinion by trying to paint the person holding that opinion in an unfavorable manner - thereby attacking the person making the dissenting argument rather than the argument itself. No matter how reprehensible a person may (or may not) be, that doesn't mean that their argument is any more or any less valid. The validity of an argument should be judged solely upon its own merits - independent of the person making the argument. IOW, if a person expresses a certain argument, the questions that should be asked are these:

• Is the argument a necessary consequence of the stated premise(s)?
• Is the argument a necessary consequence of one or more implied premises?
• Are the stated or implied premises valid?

If any of those can truthfully be answered no, then the argument is either completely invalid* (in the case of the third question) or is only conditionally valid** (in the cases of the first and second questions).
_______________________________________________

The above comments are based upon my continuing analysis of the 20+ moderation actions (spanning from removed posts to temporary bans) that have been taken against me since I created an account on these forums. After each one, I have adjusted the manner in which I post to try to avoid moderation. As a result, those actions have become considerably less frequent. (And no, I'm not implying that everyone else should do the same. People can analyze their own moderation history, or not, as they choose.)
_______________________________________________

The key point of this post (even if someone doesn't understand anything else about it) is that frequently what one posts is generally less relevant than the manner in which it is conveyed.
_______________________________________________

* i.e. Totally false.
** i.e. Only sometimes true.

One of the biggest challenges in working with an online community is figuring out what works best for the group. A basic premise we understand as CMs is someone is always going to dislike a decision. Sometimes a lot of people dislike it.

The decision to take some discussion to Reddit was a lengthy one but it's our hope we can grow the number of folks participating.

One thing to keep in mind, there is a much smaller CS/Mod team than there was previously. I am all for improved clarity on forum policies, consistency in application, and better practices when explaining breaches to individuals. Just need to consider the best way that can be done, with what they have. Some amazing ideas just may not be feasible unless they can get new staff in, or bring back some volunteer moderators (which is far from perfect due to the nature of the beast).

Every single moderation action on your account received a warning.

Although this one from Tuesday did not:

"Because they have hostile mods auto deleting feedback and they won't be able to do that as easily on the reddit page."

So here you go. Frinch while we do understand concerns surrounding moderation, please contact me regarding these. The above post is a violation of our forum guidelines which can be found here.

Given how...let's call it "vocal" he can get I'm afraid this is faulty logic.

Are you talking about this post here?

"We've been lied to for years.. can't be surprised by this at all.. Between shady price hikes right before discounts to content promises that never came and constant 180 turns on decisions promises that the cash shop wouldnt provide an advantage for pay to win (/cough grandmasters). Wasn't it like 9 months ago we were supposed to get a diety revamp in January.. yeah.. more lies.. Clean house with em all and get some honest, competent people running the show."

This is a great example of the type of insults I will absolutely suspend for. Every bit of your feedback is fine except the last sentence and if you aren't able to provide feedback without making those? The forums may not be the place for you.

I appreciate you stating that "being banned for liking a post that got banned" is outrageous. That's a relief to know you won't get into trouble for liking posts.

I looked over the reddit area. I'm sure it will serve some purpose for you all but I find it not appealing or useful for my purposes. I understand we have different purposes.. I want a community to engage with and a place to find answers when questions come up that I can't find an answer to with google search. When I am on beta or test servers, I want to first look to see if someone else already mentioned something before I bother to post (redundantly) about it. Obviously that would be something that required more than a simple /bug in game to explain. I don't see an easy way to do that on reddit, perhaps there is an easy way to do that but I have no desire to play with reddit. Everything has a learning curve and you have to actually want to do something before you will invest time into learning it. Facebook, twitter, and reddit are all timewasters. So are the forums for that matter, but I want to limit my time wasters.

Some of what we have said here you pointed out was off topic..... At least in my case it is because this is the absolute first time in a very long time that someone has actually communicated at length with us about something that truly concerned us. Since you were actually responding to us and talking frankly, I brought up something else that bothered me a lot in hopes that you would actually give an honest and frank answer to it. In a vacuum of no response or explanation, you can only draw a conclusion from your perception of the possible reasons and intentions. Sometimes your perception is incorrect but you have no way of knowing that because there is no information. Without explanations, decisions can seen capricious and arbitrary and toxic.

I'm curious. What IS the reason for wanting to move discussions (even just some) out of the forums and into Reddit?
"Why not?" Isn't generally the reason people try something new when they've got something that currently works. Either they think the current way isn't doing what it should or they think the new thing will do it better. The only potential positive I've seen cited is the up/down voting... which has also been noted by players and many studies to be a potentially harmful thing (the down votes at least).
An explanation of 'why', really why, would be helpful. Even if it's something like 'we think it might give EQ2 more visibility' or 'manager xyz hates the forums and adores Reddit'.

Also, when you're trying to convince somebody to try something new 'why not' is NOT a compelling reason. Would you change from something you know, like and understand to something unknown, because, well... 'why not?'.

I think this is the problem. It is all opinion. Sure, some posts are blatant trolling or insults, but someone posting passionate responses to a topic that is important to them may not be constructive to you but it may be to others. The big issue I have is the "rules" are very much open to interpretation. I have had some warnings in the past for posts that I made that were "non-constructive". If someone posts a topic question saying "Is celery tasty?" why can't I post why I hate it so much? (Yes, an example but understand what I am saying).

Reddit - again, avoiding like the plague

To be fair, have you considered how many thousands of pages the forum guidelines would fill, if they tried to detail every single conceivable situation? And even then, people would still try to push/blur the lines. Things are not always black and white, they ARE going to be influenced by opinion so long as humans are involved. And cumulative effect does play a role in how DBG handle forum moderation.

If someone wanted to compile a fully comprehensive forum guidelines, that covered ALL current and future situations, in a manner that leaves no room for ambiguity, I bet the DBG team would be happy to review it. But I have a feeling if someone started on it today, they would still be working on it a few decades from now.

Alright, I skimmed the posts here. I might've missed it, because hey, I'm human. And I was also at a metal concert last night and am paying for it this morning.

Anyway...

Radar, I'm curious. You admit that Xenforo's user experience is "terrible" when it comes to a person getting banned. My question is thus:

Why the hell would you continue the policy of "ban now and ask questions later?"

I was on the receiving end of my first ban a couple months ago, not on these forums but on the EQN forums. I received no warning. I still to this day do not know what post triggered the ban. I could NOT get in touch with anyone to appeal. The e-mail address I was directed to is an invalid email address. I finally had to resort to TWITTER to get any sort of resolution. I was unbanned 2 days into my 5 day ban. I had to send a tweet to Dexella directly to get anyone to look into it.

And guess what? To this day I still have no knowledge over what triggered the ban. I was a frequent poster on the EQN forums, posting upwards of 20+ a day, so it's impossible for me to know which post triggered it that day. Especially considering there were a lot of heated discussions going on at the time and I was participating in nearly all of them.

My point is, your company policy is BS. You even admitted the user experience is "terrible." So I'm asking why you and others at DBG allow it to continue knowing full well a person who is banned cannot do ANYTHING on the forums (even log out!), let alone participate in a dialogue with you.

When you guys switched to XenForo, didn't any of you stop to think "Hm...this is what happens when we ban people. Maybe we should re-evaluate our policies and revise them so they make sense with our software..." ???

There is absolutely no argument Reddit is a little different. The biggest difference is how conversations are surfaced. There aren't 2 week old threads that people keep bumping which lose relevance after 15 pages. Threads are always fresh and usually relevant.

Now saying that, Reddit is not a perfect solution and no one will tell you it is. It has flaws just like having forums do. This an expansion of our presence, not a reduction.

Are you proposing that because Xenforo doesn't allow you to send private messages when you are banned that I should just stop banning people? In 99% of cases, suspensions are 5 days and at the absolute worst case you can ask after those 5 days.

I'm also guessing based on your "When you guys switched to XenForo..." comment you don't remember our old forum system. Those who do I'm sure don't miss the regular slowdown, crashing, and general bugs our homebrew solution provided.

Your case on EQN, you received 4 warnings by PM and responded to 2 of them. Your last response that triggered the suspension was probably pretty minor but I could honestly make a case either way. It was definitely not on topic.

It was:

"This thread is pointless, but just to point out....Archeage isn't a future MMO. It's already here. And it sucks."

I'm sorry you disagree with the policy, but this is how things are done.

THAT post triggered my ban? That's ridiculously funny. I thought it was a completely different post, one that was much more vile and heated than a post started by a forum troll saying "EQN is dead. Here's all the other MMOs we can look forward to!"

Seriously, you guys need to re-evaluate that policy. I got banned over on-topic commentary on an OFF-TOPIC post that was only meant to stir the hornet's nest? That's hilarious. Pointing out Archeage is a terrible game isn't trolling. I was doing you guys a service.

You seem to completely miss my point. I'm aware of the other 4 warnings, and yea I responded to 2 of those because quite frankly, they were BS. If "open dialogue" to you means users sending PMs to moderators that go unanswered more times than not, then grats. You achieved that. But that's not the real definition of open dialogue and you're kidding yourself if you think it is.

I'm proposing that if the infraction isn't terrible, you send a PM first and if the conversation doesn't go in a constructive way, THEN you ban them. At the very least, an e-mail citing which offending post got themselves nuked completely out of the forums will go a long way. I was perfectly in the know of my other 4 infractions. The one that triggered the ban? Not so much. So the company fails in the transparency department in that regard.

I'd like to think you're creative and intelligent enough to come up with solutions to work around the limitations of the company's software choices. But this attitude you're showing isn't really living up to that thought in my mind.

Also, since you're digging around my account, you would see that I was also a poster on the old forums as well as these. So yea....let that sink in, if you will.

That statement shows exactly how clueless some people are. This is an MMORPG. The community is a big part of this game and the forums are a way for the community to communicate when not in game or when people have questions. While the money we pay may only be for the game itself any game company with any sense has forums for it's community to interact with each other and they are usually the forums of the company/game involved not some outsourced third party pile of dung. It WAS a service and a medium for feedback but as each day goes by it becomes less so due to poor moderation and bans over minor stuff that wouldn't bother most kids these days much less adults. Mods need to put their big girl panties on learn how to deal with people without the constant need to dump posts for basic silliness. I know I am rambling so I will stop with just saying the way the game itself is going is just a small part of why I may be gone soon. The constant bs being dropped by certain employees of Daybreak is a big contributor.

You should have gotten a PM regarding your suspension back then. If you didn't, then the process failed. I want to keep this in perspective. Forum moderation is one of the least effective things community managers do. It touches the fewest amount of people and it's almost always negative. It is not part of what you pay for when playing the game and is an additional service we provide for the purpose of building community and gathering feedback. Removal of your ability to post does not impact your ability to play the game.

We have to find a medium that is both efficient and effective which I you may not be considering. I'm not saying we have that completely settled at this point, but it's the goal.

And yes, you are absolutely right you were on the old forums and I'm afraid I am familiar with your account. Given my role, that's not usually a good sign.

I can respect where you are coming from but the forums are not the only avenue for growth. They still absolutely have a place. If you manage to do enough to get suspended, there are other mediums to provide that feedback.

Also this is a great example of what's moving towards non-constructive. It's possible to show passion without being insulting. We're all adults here so let's treat each other like it.

That's exactly what I'm saying. I did NOT receive a PM.

And even if I did, how would I view it? Every clickable link gives you the "lolurbanned Send an email to a fake email address to appeal" message plastered all over your screen and you can't do anything except read that message. (By the way, according to Dexella, the appeals process has been abolished. But I got unbanned, so is it true or not?) You said the user experience in that regard is terrible. Your words. You're aware of the issue here, yet still hold the old policies as if they were a royal decree. It's ludicrous. You speak of problems with the old forums, yet when you get shiny brand new forums, you guys refuse to look at your outdated, archaic ways of determining what's considered trolling and what isn't. You've upgraded the forums. Now it's time to get your moderation up to speed and let it make sense with the newer limitations you have.

Your passive-aggressiveness in your last statement is noted. I'm glad you're in a job where you can speak so disrespectfully to people (not just me, it's all over in this thread towards multiple people) and still manage to keep your job. If I ever spoke to a client the way you've addressed others in this thread, I'd be fired on the spot. So congrats to you.