Backstage - OOC Forums
General Discussion => Moderation Discussion => Topic started by: Casiella on 05 Jun 2012, 12:26
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I saw this article recently and thought it might be of interest to Backstage members who occasionally think about forum moderation, community management, and similar issues.
Well-Kept Gardens Die By Pacifism (http://lesswrong.com/lw/c1/wellkept_gardens_die_by_pacifism/)
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You might find the article on Five Geek Social Fallacies (http://www.plausiblydeniable.com/opinion/gsf.html) interesting. GSF1, "Ostracizers Are Evil", is something that's been on my mind a lot in EVE.
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I find myself in total agreement with the article posted. Entirely so.
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I think policing has to scale. Small communities, if they are communities, will probably be self-moderating. Larger communities will start to get a lower signal-to-noise ratio as they grow and will need more active intervention to continue running smoothly. The real trick is knowing when you need to start scaling up moderation: too much too soon will kill it stone dead as quickly as not intervening.
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I, for one, am a supporter of heavy-handed moderation. I have yet to experience a case where too much moderation caused me to leave a forum, while sprawling idiocy often has caused me to move on.
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+1 for increasing the crown's authority.
More seriously, I cam glad to find people thinking the same on that matter, for once.
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You might find the article on Five Geek Social Fallacies (http://www.plausiblydeniable.com/opinion/gsf.html) interesting. GSF1, "Ostrasizers Are Evil", is something that's been on my mind a lot in EVE.
Very true in eve. You put the finger on one of the things that has always bothered me in RP especially, GSF2 and 3 in particular. Always putting my ideals before any loyalty, ICly or OOCly, I am almost always confronted to that kind of thing.
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I've been a part of a seriously dysfunctional community or three - NWN PWs, mostly. Many of them favor a style of gameplay where it's easy to invest a lot of time and feeling into the game, especially early on, before you notice you're sharing a server with people you just can't get along with at all.
A group of people who are basically incompatible but are staying together out of little more than shared addiction is as toxic as it gets, I've found. Utterly weird rules and customs spring up in a sort of immune response to the dysfunction; cliques and factions spring up like mushrooms after rain; crazy psychodrama is the order of the day, because no matter what silly stuff happens, someone'll be trying to make it into a stick to beat the people involved with.
Realizing what was happening, and that I could simply choose to step away from it all, not participate, and come out ahead was actually a major step for me.
So, all this public wound-draining to say - yay, Backstage. Trust me, simply owning up to the occasional incompatibility is a good thing. An occasional wrist-slap or ban leaves all parties better off in the long run.
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Can't agree more to the linked articles.
The kind of moderation we have here is a main selling point of this board/community for me.
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All for heavy moderation. Thanks for the work the moderators have done in this site. Its kept it viable.
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One thing I do like about the moderation here is the provision of a place to discuss it and the catacombs, so you can see why a post got pulled and take note in your own behaviour.
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I think something that has helped Backstage is clear rules established at the beginning.
Some members of the forum may not realize it, but Backstage's staff got to watch a more laissez-faire forum burn. They had the benefit of seeing the problems it went through before creating the rules here.