(As you may have guessed), I'm on board with everything Shuyin says about excessive optimism and the moderation/removal of things that aren't super positive, but may need to be talked over anyways. I didn't want to be the first person to say it! While personal attacks are inappropriate, I wish that the game in general was more open to public constructive criticism or questioning.

If someone really feels like they need to say something, it's generally going to be something they think was done wrong or could stand improvement. That can suck to receive, but it's just the nature of the beast. I think that if it felt a lot less like constructive criticism was being swept under the rug, there would be a lot more discussion on these forums.

EDIT: To be fair, not ALL of that atmosphere comes from the admins. There's a whole lot I often want to say (and can provide pages of justification for saying) that I'm not going to bother to even try and discuss here, because of trolls.

Now that I am home and can write something not on a mobile:
1) We definitely need more consistent rules. Rules that are applied equally to everyone.
- Examples:
i) Just because someone complains about a post does not mean that it needs to be removed. Posts that are removed shouldn't be unless they actually are breaking forum rules & policies! Otherwise, it's forum moderators making decisions based on their personal feelings, and that's not really conducive to a good environment for discussion.
ii) There needs to be a consistent policy for people seeking to get unbanned. "Sorry we're not reviewing those right now" for multiple real life years is extremely excessive. Sometimes people are able to learn from their mistakes. If not, they get banned again. It's not a huge issue imo.
iii) I've received forum PMs / read administration posts telling me that they don't want to give people warnings because there are people who would get the one last warning that would tip them over the edge into banning. That's also not terribly consistent; if you want to let people continue posting who are blatantly breaking the rules, why not let people who have been banned come back?
iiia) To be fair, when I pointed this out, warnings were applied in this case; but that was only because the individual in question had already been given multiple free passes before I got a little tired of it and complained.
Note that more consistent rules does not necessarily mean more rules, it just means less making personal judgement calls.
2) Be less harsh on heated discussion. Sojiro has already discussed this in depth, but there is nothing like players actually able to be fully invested in a game than actually being able to be fully invested. If caring gets you banned from a place where you can discuss (or even just lends the impression that you will be banned, which impression definitely exists here), you're either going to make yourself care less, or find somewhere else to discuss it.

Neither of those options are very good options for the long-term health and vitality of a forum, and caring less is bad for the game as a whole, especially when it feels like the Administration is demanding that you care less.

Those are the biggest things to me, really. Though at this point I'm not sure if there is any way to reverse the trend.

Generally, I think, constructive criticism threads are left alone - the only ones that aren't (the likes of Order Affinity) are things we've said in the past we simply aren't going to discuss, as everyone just gets upset but it's one of those things we just aren't willing to bend on. Unless its a perceived personal attack on another administrator, which we're quick to shut down - such complaints are always best handled by Support, not public vilification.

Eventru:

Generally, I think, constructive criticism threads are left alone - the only ones that aren't (the likes of Order Affinity) are things we've said in the past we simply aren't going to discuss, as everyone just gets upset but it's one of those things we just aren't willing to bend on. Unless its a perceived personal attack on another administrator, which we're quick to shut down - such complaints are always best handled by Support, not public vilification.

Posting at the same time as me. Nooo!

Xenthos:


Posting at the same time as me. Nooo!

My Xennysenses were tingling.

Xenthos:

1) We definitely need more consistent rules. Rules that are applied equally to everyone.

The issue of incongruent and abusive moderation has come up on another image board.

Here is the solution as proposed from a gentleman at MIT.

Today I'm pleased to announce a big improvement we've made to our ban system. In the past, bans have been submitted individually by moderators, leading to widely inconsistent ban reasons and punishments. Although we do have guidelines in place, they don't cover every circumstance where a user might be banned, and require slow, tedious entry. Ideally, all of this should be automated—and now it is. Every global and board specific rule has been imported into a drop-down list in the ban panel, and moderators must now select from a set of pre-populated ban reasons and lengths, all of which are codified in the Rules.

By standardizing ban reasons and lengths and making sure they correspond to the posted rules, we hope to make life better for everyone on the site. Moderators can perform their tasks more efficiently, banned users will have more insight into why they were banned, and everyone will benefit from rule-infringing content and offenders being removed from the site more quickly.

Enyalida:

Subforum #26?

The double secret 2009 Aetherspace Committe subforum in Ideas that all of eight people can see.

I don't think it's overmoderation, to be honest. While I think there's something to be said about it, here's the thing.

The forum traffic did not die down until sometime in Mid 2011. However, I've noticed a few other patterns occuring.

1) For the longest time, thread creation died down and everybody kept posting things in one single thread. Tweets, for instance. I remember complaining about that. I think since people started using the forum as a second twitter, people ended up graduating to Facebook instead. Maybe we're dealing with a paradigm shift in how we communicate. This could be truer because as older characters retire maybe newer ones prefer Facebook.

2) No offense, but the Default Skin (Lusternia Main) is off-putting, you should default to Simple Blue. I think the change in forum software may have turned off a few people.

3) I just wonder if people don't want to talk OOC in general...it seems that people who play the game longer end up fading out of the forums as time goes on.

Also, just out of curiosity, do we have any mortal forum mods anymore? It was Shiri, Richter, and Daganev, and all three are in retirement now. Maybe having a few of them might help again.

Phred:

2) No offense, but the Default Skin (Lusternia Main) is off-putting, you should default to Simple Blue. I think the change in forum software may have turned off a few people.

We are actually looking at switching the forums to a better format. Achaea has already done this as the IRE guinea pig, so if you're interested in seeing what the new forums' default skin will look like, feel free to take a peek at theirs.

If we're going to allow naming and shaming (aka rants), then we're going to devolve into the Idiots board pretty quickly.

I couldn't care less about the recent posts about me, except that I believed them to be against the rules. Just be aware that there will be replies, and the conversation could easily get ugly.

Phred:

3) I just wonder if people don't want to talk OOC in general...it seems that people who play the game longer end up fading out of the forums as time goes on.

See, I am a pretty good example against this point. I prefer the forums to Facebook as far as use goes... but I find myself using Facebook more for the reasons outlined in my post.

It's where everyone has migrated to. :(

I find the forum-features to be more robust and accessible, though. Facebook can't organize things, it's extremely difficult to search for stuff (whereas I can pull up posts here very quickly based on a handful of keywords), and so on.

Ironically, Xenthos, when I ranted about the tweets thread replacing the forum last year, suggesting we scrap that thread and keep creating new ones, you were perhaps it's biggest defender.

I think you're now seeing the end results of that stance...

Phred:

Ironically, Xenthos, when I ranted about the tweets thread replacing the forum last year, suggesting we scrap that thread and keep creating new ones, you were perhaps it's biggest defender.

I think you're now seeing the end results of that stance...

Nah, I still disagree with your reasoning / stance. At this point I'm not sure that things will come back here just because people are into their new habits.

I don't feel that Facebook killed the forums; I believe that people migrated there because it was easier and less restrictive than here.

Some justification: There are two Facebook rant groups. One is moderated. One is not. One of them had a last post created Sept. 27th. The post before that, Sept. 9th.

Guess which one that is?

Well, you and I are old folk. I suspect we're seeing a new dynamic. Facebook and Twitter is huge and forums in general are having tough times competing.

And that could also lead others to leave because if content comes in a single stream, the people who hate it will leave because it bugs them. Maybe having everything in tweets made the forum seem less easy to use and that's why some left. But then again, without input from others we wouldn't know.

Sigh. You haven't even met me and you are calling me old. :losewings:

Those rants are just another pool of poison, not really healthy in any way.

Zarquan:

Those rants are just another pool of poison, not really healthy in any way.

Actually, a few of us "older admin" were commenting on how much more tame the "unedited rants" group on Facebook is. I suspect, though, because the majority of the people are on the same side and the lack of ongoing conflict.

In retrospect, there have been a lot of moderated arguments that stopped being constructive because they devolved into pointless insults being thrown on all sides. So as far as those go, it's probably for the best that they end up getting closed and pushing people to move along.

Arguing isn't necessarily bad though, as long as it's civil. I don't have any specific examples but there have been a few instances here where the argument wasn't so bad, but it was still "moderated" and put to a close.

As far as "poison", I know a few people have seen the rants group and got a bad impression of the community, so we also need to watch the way we conduct ourselves at times too.

I almost made a new friend out of an enemy on that group, but then it fell apart. There are interesting lessons to be learned from that group, but that's a whole other awkward discussion.

I'd rather get a bad impression than a fake one, personally.

I figure people could make up their minds after being exposed to the game itself. It's not exactly fair to expose new players to the good elements of the game and not the...ones that need more work.

-Fake Internet Person