Moderation and Forum Norms

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I just want to specifically address the “public shaming” part. I very specifically mentioned that I do not mean it in that way, for a reason, @Eiwynn. As @Sinnie said, I meant it in the “we are a unified front, but something messed up happened. We hear you, and we are working to fix this”.

Take a look at the thread from yesterday. The politely worded grievances all have dozens of hearts. The mods’ responses have an average of, like, 10. That has to tell you guys that something isn’t working. For the most part, nobody has been rude.

As @MoSalahscores stated, the vast majority of users on this forum are paying customers. Pushing people away ultimately pushes away paying customers. As representatives of the company - paid or not - mods should be willing to listen to feedback. You have dozens of people all telling you the same thing, but for the most part all thats happened in response is the digging in of heels.

Why even open things up for discussion, if you’re just going to tell people “you’re wrong, and this is why”?

@Eiwynn, once again, I brought up the “public shaming” respect specifically because I knew that what I mentioned could be misinterpreted. If Walmart gets found out to have let their managers yell at customers when customers requested to submit feedback, Walmart would end up apologizing or even having the specific employees let go. Same for most companies. It is not unheard of for companies, teams, etc., to stand together to try to make up for the wrongdoing of one person.

@Gower, I agree with you that things should move forward, but the reality is, I have gotten dozens of notifications over the last 30 hours - more than I’ve gotten in a very long time - all showing that the issue is far from resolved. Sometimes, in order for a group of people to move forward, things need to be hashed out. I do apologize if my response upset you in any fashion, though. I have a great deal of respect for you and wouldn’t want to disappoint you.

Personally, that’s more or less all I’ve asked for. I’m sure that’s not the case for everyone. I know that @Gower has this thread, but it also isn’t fair to the moderator team to have one or two mods trusted more by the community than the rest.

I can agree with this. I feel that issues should be allowed to be brought up in a calm manner, because in a community this large, it’s unheard of for things to always go smoothly. Giving yourself a chance to respond with less emotion and more empathy can truly make all the difference.

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Where in the rules said

We want to shame people who volunteered to do social work publicly.

Because last time I checked Walmart, people are paid, not volunteers.

It seems that people forgot to read the being kind and supporting in the rules .

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I don’t think the vast majority want to shame or belittle the moderators. But I do agree that the moderating culture can be a little heavy handed/authoritarian in tone.

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That’s a very valid view that the community should explore rationally without calling for volunteers that are as fans as you and I have to self-shamed and publicly apologise for doing the job they are not paying for.

I personally think moderations rules should be more precise and jolted down in a decalogue of sorts with a well measure scale of punishments and warnings

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Absolutely nobody said anything about shaming a single person, except for you and @Eiwynn, seriously. A team apologizing for a mistake is not naming somebody by name and saying, “this person is wrong. Throw tomatoes at them”. That was my point in both posts.

Mara, I love that you’re so supportive of the moderating team, and I’m glad you are. I just want to promise you that what you think I’m advocating for, I’m not.

I can agree with that. I kind of touched on that, as well. Knowing the exact processes expected of mods, and having that somewhere on the forum, and a standardization of moderator expectations and disciplinary actions would help to cull confusion.

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That is the very definition of self-shaming and forcing a public apology.

Comparing paid workers under a salary and contractual obligations and a public conduct code with volunteers in a forum.

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Mara, I was making a comparison. Representatives of a company, on a team, stand together to apologize when one person or multiple people make a mistake, on a regular basis. You’ll see it on websites about video games, on blogs about specific Fandoms, on other public and private forums, not just within companies.

I do apologize for using a comparison that could cause confusion.

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Thanks for that, It was an appalling comparison.

I think this thread should focus on Expanding the community relations and management; creating an unofficial rule of conduct may be ever a form to complain about issues to the staff using the official system addressed in the Faq.

As a lawyer, the first thing you are taught is to focus on the possibility of a satisfying solution for all parts involved—the path of less resistance.

Instead, on the past, we should, as forum members doing polls on how to improve the flagship system. Or adding a group of forum members that can mediate in certain areas and situations.

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Here’s a genuine question for the mods, or anyone that knows really. Are the mods actually representatives of the company?
I was under the impression that they weren’t representatives, rather volunteers from the community who moderate. I kind of assumed that it was only the staff that represented the company, and that mods were just community members that help out with the day to day rules issues on the forum. Was I incorrect? (Once again, this is a genuine question, not me trying to start something).

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They are volunteers with no legal boundaries or contract with the company.

Any legal approach and appointments should be directed to the staff.

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I understand your frustration. My point is instead of escalating things here, why don’t you send a pm to the @moderators Putting your rant publicly doesn’t help anyone.

That or directly to the staff

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Screenshot_20210501-013022_Samsung Internet
Screenshot_20210501-013022_Samsung Internet1080×2400 445 KB

In essence, yes. They represent the company and the forum, when administrators/staff are unavailable. They represent on a volunteer basis, yes, but they are still representatives of CoG.

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NOT legally, so They are not representatives in any shape or form, not in court nor arbitration, nor by any legal application.

Their work is always under the scrutiny of staff that can change their decision and revoke their position and decision in any moment

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Not legally, but moderators do help set the forum culture, which in turns affects the authors and audience.

If you have moderators fostering an unpleasant forum culture, well that affects if authors want to use choicescript, etc.

My intention isn’t to shade anyone, but I have stated multiple times that some of the rhetoric used by staff/moderators isn’t conducive to healthy discussion. I think if we could all adopt to some degree the principle of charity when reading/responding to posts it would do a lot of good.

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everyone affects to that it is even in the faq.

And I don’t see the usefulness or try to shade moderators without offering any single alternative and improvements

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I swear I’ve seen this thread a million times in every single entity that requires moderation, from that early 2010s Minecraft server with 20 players all the way to Twitch TV today. I doubt anybody cares, but I’ve been on the internet since the early/mid 2000s and I’ve participated in plenty of online communities (mostly gaming related), and also spent several months moderating a Minecraft server back in 2011/12. So I do have a little bit of experience.

Gaming communities in general are incredibly toxic, sexist, homophobic, racist, discriminatory - you name it and you can be 97% certain it will describe online gaming communities/culture. I invite people to take a peak at the comments any of the popular gaming subreddits, maybe check Steam forums of different games or even review sections [Pro Gamer Tip: Check historical games which feature women. Games that feature LGBTQ+ characters.] or read the comments on YouTube videos. Make it a fun challenge like I don’t know, a speedrun to see how quickly you can find a transphobic or sexist or racist comment/post, or the comment which insults the most communities in as little words as possible, or try to find the one with the most likes which has been literally sitting openly for hours, days or even weeks without being removed by a moderator. I’ll bet you that after a little speedrunning practice you’ll be aiming for personal best times of under a minute.

Anyway, enough rambling. What I want to bring with this is that with the growth and exposure that CoG have been steadily gaining in the past years, I’ve always thought that it was going to be just a matter of time before this forum became a literal toxic cesspool that 90% of communities are. In my humble opinion, this community is nowhere near that. Every once in a while I notice weird users pop in with hot takes, but moderation (and the community itself) quickly take care of them.

Moderation is pretty demanding, taxing nonstop job that goes thankless on 95% of the cases. If you want to maintain any semblance of order and civility you need to act with some heavy hand. So many grievances boil down to “He said she said! I saw them do this and that! She’s lying! It’s a conspiracy against me! It’s on Discord or Tumblr! My totally SO that totally goes to another school told me this and that! etc. etc.” and there is only so much a moderator can do about it. In real life we have a court system with judges, lawyers, prosecutors, different schools of thought regarding the meaning of constitutions and laws, etc. A moderator only has themselves, a extremely simplistic ruleset (compared to any legal rule/law), their personal ethical/philosophical code and a couple of peers to discuss things with.

Anyway my point is: People who haven’t been much outside this little, pleasant bubble, expect too much while not understand all the thankless, unseen work that goes behind the scenes that prevent this place from becoming another toxic Mos Eisley in the ocean of villainy and scum that we call the Internet.

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The Forum FAQ explains:

The moderators are not employees of Choice of Games LLC or Hosted Games LLC. They are volunteers, contributors, and community members. Their statements should not be taken as coming from the companies.

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Didn’t mean to get back in this thread since I think it’s started going in circles (but with the discussion being what it is you can’t very well have a mod going in and say that it is, because that would prove some people right). That being said…

The quote above is a very common misunderstanding in these kinds of circumstances. Just take a step back and think about it.

Who is going to come into a thread like this and read it in the first place? Mostly people who are disliking/questioning/not fond of the current moderation and forum norms, and in this case, also people who came here from a thread that was talking about bans and shaming. The readers of this thread is not exactly representative of the general forum user (I mean I only popped in because Gower liked one of my old posts on this thread yesterday and I couldn’t remember what it was about).

So, focusing on who gets the most likes is not very useful. It says nothing apart from the fact that the majority of people who read this are (rightly or wrongly) worried about moderation.

And @el_coracero is correct. On the whole, things here are pretty calm compared to te rest of the net, especially with the subject matters at hand.

One final word from me, and then I am really out (got editing to do): I know that it’s a very common saying “the customer is always right” but if you run a bar, sometimes you need to be harsh with a paying customer because if you’re not, ten of the quiet (also paying ones) in the corner will leave and not make a fuss about it.

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So I planned on dropping some of my thoughts on this today but my Second COVID shot knocked me on my ass with a massive sustained headache, a high-grade fever, and muscle aches, but I had some time to gather my thoughts and just wanted to share some of ‘em.

I’ve been a moderator quite a few times over the years. Typically speaking, most moderators who are consistently active and involved in every aspect of a forum/site only lasts for around three years, with some lasting more because it burns them out.

Being a moderator is a job in which you never win in. You are given the job of being an arbiter of a bunch of people you never met in person on top of the fact that you have to make judgements on things that are written by posters of whom you’ve never heard speak so you can’t tell what’s sarcasm or real. You make an isolated judgement based on what you see plus the context you read from the thread and then when your decision is made, you know what happens next.

Someone will most likely get upset. Dealing with flags is always like that, you get the flagged post and then you click it and read it, then make a call based on what you read and what you saw in this isolated moment of time. You can’t know what the poster was thinking, all you know is that you have to go and enforce the rules.

Now with bans, that is personally the most difficult thing to do. Sometimes, it’s very obvious and easy to do. If someone comes into my PMs and tells me to go f myself then that’s an easy ban.

Now let’s say- that someone gets angry at someone’s take in various threads and blows up at a user. The individual who had the bad take didn’t technically break any forum rules, they just said something that you personally disagreed with but the second individual got enraged and insulted them.

That’s when we open up a thread to discuss it amongst ourselves and try to iron out what to do.

Now our worst fear is that while we wait for our fellows to get posting their opinions on the matter that more people get involved and it becomes a flashpoint. So sometimes, immediate bans are issued and a warning is slapped down.

This isn’t as common as people think it is, there are dozens of active users at a time with many posts written and not even put into the moderation queue. Sometimes, people flag their own OPs because they need a moderator to make it a Wiki or update the thread title because they can’t.

For the most part, the forum runs on autopilot with a few notable hiccups erupting from time to time and hurt feelings being the result. I do want to stress that we are all trying our best and that we do sometimes make a bad call or an unpopular one because we have to factor in the rest of the community or other factors that you guys can’t see.

I became a moderator here because I love what this company does, is doing, and the bulk of the forum base as well. I understand that sometimes people want to throttle me and that’s alright. But, all I ask is that people do remember that we are also people who try their best and sometimes we come up short. But, I promise that if you need someone to be there for you and it’s serious. Everyone on the mod team will work with you when we can and do our best.

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Get well soon!

So, I’ve been reading these topics, and I got thinking, that if the ”questioning” justification for mod action is causing people to get annoyed/confused/angry, could it be reworded? So that it’d be more clear you wouldn’t get banned by politely (instead of aggressively?) asking (in pm) what happened and why?

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