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Hello. My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die.

I post pretty frequently on boards that are significantly more heavily moderated than these. It's not really an issue that you create an expectation of behavior and then hold people accountable to that. I don't get why there should be resistance to such things here. We have an off-topic forum. If you really feel the need to post something tangental and not include something on topic, it seems easy enough to stick it in there, or even just PM the poster in question.
 
To answer your question regarding reporting posts:

When somebody flags a post we moderators see an indicator that something in that section needs our attention. If we click on that little indicator it brings us directly to the message that was flagged and shows us the report submitted by the user (if any). The action from there depends on why it was flagged.
 
Ondreij said:
Chazz said:
..clip...
Just to reciprocate. Hi, I am Chazz. 10 year player and currently hold the title of "Chazz" in CT. Just a go to guy who fills in any and all gaps there. I was the former AGM at HQ for just shy of 2 years. I am a marshal at HQ and CT and have done monster desk as well as weapon, ...clip...That is seriously off topic though. Or is it?

--Chazz

And Chazz is one of the most awesome players IG and OOG (I love chatting with you over at the smokers' guild, man) who, as an NPC, is fair to all players both new and seasoned, both high skilled and not-so-high skilled. You keep being awesome. My original thought when I saw the start of this post was "Man! Someone misinterpreted something Chazz said and it's probable that they just don't know Chazz 'cause that man doesn't have a mean bone in his body and is as nice as they come -- even if he can be highly charged, deeply involved, and very intense, 'cause that's one of the things that rings my respect to him.

Now, back to the main topic of this thread:

I haven't finished reading all of the posts in this thread, but so far as I have read no one has mentioned that little red explamation point in the triangle that is at the top of every post. Does anyone ever try to use that instead of raising heck in a reply, or instead of complaining through an email or a PM? If I do report a post (that's what that little symbol is supposed to be for) I wonder who reads the reports, and what kinds of things happen after a post is reported, and who is ultimately responsible for dealing with reported posts.

If we use that mechanism for managing OUR forum with the assistance of the "moderation staff" I think we can make things work better here. I don't think we need to make it more complicated than using the tools we already have to develop a stronger and more friendly and supportive culture.

Can the managers of this board tell us what happens when a post is reported, and who are the people who deal with those reports?

We can post and over time modify rules posted at the top of each section regarding what kinds of things are allowed with a section.

We all should know how to follow rules -- we play a rules-based game together. This is not too different.

Thank you, everyone.

Having moderation powers myself, I can attest that the button is used, and generally the issue is dealt with fairly quickly (hey if we do it right most people won't notice!)
 
I think it is actually important that people know something is being done. Not necessarily in any given situation, but in general. If they don't know, they will assume nothing is being done and will be less likely to use the procedures in place to handle such things.

Just a thought.
 
Ezri said:
To answer your question regarding reporting posts:

When somebody flags a post we moderators see an indicator that something in that section needs our attention. If we click on that little indicator it brings us directly to the message that was flagged and shows us the report submitted by the user (if any). The action from there depends on why it was flagged.
Michelle,

It is good to see that your SIG includes an indication that you are a board moderator. I don't often see such an indication. I know you, and I trust your even handedness because whenever we talk or play together you are level headed and even handed. You are consistent in your posting, as well. I have come to trust you, and so I trust your moderation, too.

I have a suggestion: Moderators should have a separate account, here, which indicates that this is a MODERATOR account -- that way, when officially moderating a thread use the Moderator account; when posting as a player, use the player account. In either case, we should also know that the two accounts belong to the same person, but at least we will know which hat is being worn at any given moment.

SOME owners and moderators have been known to act badly in their posts.

If an owner or moderator's posts are reported, what safeguards are in place to prevent that person from moderating their own reported posts?

So, who watches the watchers? I propose that MODERATOR powers be moderated so as to prevent abuse.

Lastly, who are the moderators? How many are there? How are they picked?
 
A team of moderators would provide accountability for any given moderators.
 
All moderation actions are also automatically logged, so there are records of all actions taken. I'd rather not see extra accounts just for Moderation, its the same person performing the moderation in either case so I don't see how confusing the issue by hiding behind a differnt name helps things.
 
There is a list of moderators. You can simply click on Global Moderators at the bottom of the index page and it brings them up.

Scott
 
Dreamingfurther said:
A team of moderators would provide accountability for any given moderators.

IMHO I believe that this is an assumption.

Do you have specific knowledge to base that upon, or is that your own opinion or extrapolation?
 
It is my opinion, that "team" of internally reviewed individuals has more accountability than individually operating un-reviewed individuals.

For example a group of 6 moderators in a team that all check up on each others moderation is more likely to operate responsibly than 6 individual moderators that don't have any plans on checking up on each other. Accountability tends to produce responsible behaviour.

If I know someone is going to look over my work and make sure its up to a certain "code" you can better believe I'll put that much more effort into it to make sure that what I've done is in fact accurate and up to "code". (Personal experience, I've worked on and observed teams, this is a generally applicable "tendency", so yes I do have experience to base these assertions on.)

That's all I'm saying. And it sounds like something like this is already in place to a degree.
 
We're working on specific guidelines now. We don't want to set up a team of moderators without them all understanding what should be moderated and what shouldn't.

Announcements will be forthcoming.
 
If everyone were a moderator, then we would all be kept civil by the omnipresent threat of being moderated into submission. Unless, of course, this just kicked off an abuse of mod power war. But nobody would be crazy enough to do that.

If everyone were allowed to vote on who should be the moderators, then the individuals best suited to represent the interests of the average forum-goer would be elected. Unless everyone elected represent a small majority. Then the minority would be totally disenfranchised. Naw, the system would work.

If one person were the benevolent and beloved head moderator, and that person empowered other trusted individuals to assist in the duties of moderation, then everything would be great. Unless the head moderator were helping moderate some other message board, and took all his best moderators with him(her) and left his much less benevolent brother in charge. Then we would all be heavily moderated in a unfair fashion by the new corrupt moderators, until such time as a brave and noble moderator returned from that other board and gathered up a band of those loyal to the original head moderator and somehow defeated the corrupt usurper head moderator by outwitting him and also arrow are involved and then Patrick Stewart makes a toilet joke.

Wait, what?

This is probably going to get deleted.

In all seriousness, I think that being more open about who we actually are puts a human face on us and helps cut down on anonymity driven rudeness.

I'm not going to, though, because my name IS my username. Well, my real middle name is Sanders. Like the Colonel.
 
Octaine said:
Is it that hard to not read a post or thread?

Just to pull out this post and pick on it (sorry man :) )...

I want to feel like I'm part of a national Alliance. I want to feel like I'm contributing something useful in the discussions here. I do my best to go through the Rules board, and would really like to go through the General Discussion board regularly because it has plenty of good discussion in it. As a member of ARC I think it's important that I have some idea of how the players Alliance-wide are feeling about some of these discussions.

That said, my time is precious - and this is true of many people who want to contribute here. Let's give an example. I want to contribute to this very thread! Yet, already, in a thread that is in some way about being on-topic, there are ... counting ... 7 posts that I would personally say are completely off-topic and do not contribute to the thread. That's not even counting the ones that don't substantively add to the discussion, or could be removed if there was a simple rating button on individual posts (like/dislike/up/down/whatever), but I don't expect those to go - I'm a bit of a hardass on moderation, personally :). Sorting through the replies to get to the *useful* information becomes much, much more difficult when there are randomly-placed off-topic replies. Instead of spending a few minutes skimming through posts and collecting information to get an idea about what's been presented in the thread, I'm now also spending additional time to mentally skip over and toss out the useless off-topic posts. That time adds up quickly when you want to keep track of many threads. In numerous threads here that I have wanted to contribute to, there are far higher percentages of irrelevant posts than that - to the point where I generally skip this forum entirely as I feel too much of my time trying to peruse these threads is lost. If there's, say, 5 threads I'm interested in at any one moment, and I spend half of my time clicking to view the latest posts only to find out they're rubbish, it's a lot of wasted time that I just don't have to spare.

So yes, it *is* a big deal. If people want to post off-topic, they should keep it in the off-topic section - even if it's just a silly, irrelevant post here and there it adds up to a lot of wasted space and time. It's easy to say "eh, it's just one or two here or there" but the actual amount of time that gets wasted trying to sort these out grows big pretty surprisingly quickly.

I want to contribute to the Alliance and keep up on the views of its players. I don't want to feel that I'm wasting a large amount of time to do so. In my opinion, civility is a far lesser problem than simple signal-to-noise ratio.

-Bryan
 
Polare said:
in a thread that is in some way about being on-topic, there are ... counting ... 7 posts that I would personally say are completely off-topic and do not contribute to the thread. That's not even counting the ones that don't substantively add to the discussion, or could be removed if there was a simple rating button on individual posts (like/dislike/up/down/whatever), but I don't expect those to go - I'm a bit of a hardass on moderation, personally :).

You sir, are being conservative (I counted 15, but I included one word "I agree" or "This" posts). I think this will be the 75th post on this thread (25 per page). Reading through it, it definitely seems like a fair bit of noise, but the 'bad noise' makes up for about 10-20% of the total bulk of the thread. I'd say about another 10-15 posts don't substantially contribute anything, which takes us up into the 25-40% range.
Definitely too much, IMO, but I like things quantified, especially if rules/guidelines are being made about something.
(By that I mean that numbers help define the problem, not that they should necessarily be in the solution, because that, while humorous, would be ridiculous.)
 
And now I believe I could fairly ask whether or not "posts aimed at disusing the numbers" is on topic itself at all? In which case the very posts that have mentioned this could be deeming themselves "noise" which is so many kinds of contradictory/confusing I'm not quite sure what to think at all! ;)

Seriously guys, if we wanted we could set up certain sections of the board that are much more aimed at being "the face" of the organization. Currently as I see it pretty much every board with the exception of the ARC board is "free form conversation/discussion" and I don't think those sections have ever been aimed at being "very clean and concise". If we want something that IS like that I think just be explicit that is what is wanted in a given section would probably go a long way towards establishing the "credibility" of those sections. Additionally if posts that "just added noise" we added in those sections I think that it would be fairly reasonable for moderators to remove them. Because people who posted there should know better than to post noise. In other words "poster beware".
 
((slightly off topic))

If the board were upgraded to one that is more capable of breakout threads and more "tree like" threading, we could allow people to create new topics off of an old topic and then those can be ignored as being irrelevant to the discussion at hand. Something tells me that google wave could do something along those lines... unfortunately it's not a completed project yet.

((end off topic))

I think the focus should be more on setting a good example and consistent encouragement to adhere to the proper posting philosophies (along with perhaps "read here before posting" perma-threads that indicated what that policy is for a given forum).

So it sounds like the two biggest problems really are purely negative posts and pure noise posts. So encouraging the opposite would be the goal in my mind.
 
I know I am chiming in quite late in the discussion, but I have one request, since a "Moderation Board" is being formed. Please, make sure we are pulling people from all parts of the Alliance. Make sure we have people that represent chapters from both coasts, as well as those in between. Just a simple request, after seeing who were the current moderators, and noticing none were from farther west than PA. :)

If this topic (moderation and the purpose of the Web footprint for Alliance LARP) is still something that needs to be worried about, perhaps this can be addressed at the symposium this summer by the owners, and any concerned individuals that want to take part in the discussion?

Meant with no snark, and all hope that things can continue civilly,

Rob Sachs

DISCLAIMER: This post is my personal opinion. JUST my personal opinion. It has nothing to do with any position I hold.
 
The moderation board has been formed with people from across the Alliance. Once guidelines are in place, we will be opening up for more to be involved - the initial process is being restricted to a smaller number to facilitate things moving forward at a reasonable pace.
 
Thanks for being so open Christina! :)
 
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