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Moderation puzzle
Gdemami
Member EpicPosts: 12,342
This thought is following me for a while.
With STO release and the riot caused on the forums, the topic of moderation and free speech was raised. There was an interesting discussion coming from there but got buried in time and emotional posting.
However, there is my personal observation.
In my experience and as I see the forums, the moderation on the site works mostly 'on demand', you report a post/thread that is evaluated by moderator team.
The point is, is that intentional to let forum users create standards what is acceptable posting for the forums or is it the lack of manpower?
Second point would be, if that is left to players to 'moderate' the forums, does it really work? Isn't the concept counter-productive and fails because readers are not willing to do the job?
What are your thoughts?
Comments
Our moderators are instructed to patrol the forums as well as deal with reports. Inevitably some things will be missed, but that is why we encourage you to report so as to direct attention to a particular post or thread. I hope that is helpful.
If you find a particular forum is not being moderated in a satisfactory fashion please give me a shout at [email protected] so I can investigate it. Thanks!
on average the moderator do a good job.not zealous!just proper moderation!if you feel slighted dont be afraid to report ,i never
had to report but like everything else its bound to happen!
I agree that moderators do a 'good' even though this is relative.
That was not the reason of the post. I do report if I feel some post if worth reporting...and that was the whole point I tried to make.
You can enforce strict rules and do some heavy moderation on your site or you just lose a leash for a bit to give the forums more air to breathe and power to the forum users.
Mike: Thank you for your concerned reply!
Not sure about that.
As lately I am receiving warnings for silly comments (not trolling).
Generally 90% of my posts are wall of text (like this one) where I try to give a good explanation about my thoughts, whether I am criticising or praising a game or a post I usually try to be constructive and I try to put an effort, but recently it looks like I get more attention to the 10% of my posts which are mainly short sarcastic comments (never offensive), which of course are meant to be negative (apparently a capital sin in this forum) therefore an easy target.
I never had any problem before, but in the last 6 months I got 3 warnings (2 of them withdrawn after I challenged the mods, the third I could not even be bothered with).
The way I see it is that if someone do not like your post (which I believe are mainly some game PR people who don't like you criticising their game), you get reported, and if the post looks negative you get a warning, without the Mods even double checking the post history of the subject...................sorry guys we cannot write an essay everytime we want to post something not positive about a game or a post (have mercy pls).
I am not saying that the Mods do it on purpose, because I see no reason for it, but certainly they could do a better job at double checking the credential of the poster (I know............it takes more effort).
As a result I do not frequent this site as much as I used to and I stopped posting anything at all. As you can see from my avatar I subscribed to this forum in 2004, I never had any problem until 6-8 months ago.
I am always the same as I was in 2004, but something else changed in this site moderation, not for the good IMO.
The reason why I liked this site over the others is because it gave a wide freedom of speech, now it feels more like SoE forum (sorry guys for being so negative as usual, I think it is called criticism though)
I have a theory on what's going on, I've been part of the managment of a similar website, so I know what goes on behind the scenes. Of course I am not gonna share it, because my post would look "too negative" and I would get another warning or maybe even a ban.
By the way, this is not a complain about my warnings (as I said if I cared I would have challenged them in PM), now I post somewhere else where mods (or maybe rules) are a bit more tollerant.
I just wanted to share my experience as an old date member on how the site changed during those years, personally I believe that policing too much the forums or restricting the freedom of speech with countless rules with lots of gray areas is never positive for a forum, but MMORPG.com begs to differ, and after all it's their site not mine.
But still I wanted to share my thoughts, because I used to care about this site and deep inside I still do, but I believe there is not going back to the good old days unfortunately.