Backstage - OOC Forums
General Discussion => Moderation Discussion => Topic started by: Casiella on 24 Sep 2012, 09:44
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We've had a rash of reports from multiple different people that stem from what I will charitably consider a misunderstanding of the guidelines here. Therefore, I would just like to take a moment and issue a friendly reminder that reporting posts to the moderators should only occur when a post actually violates the guidelines (http://backstage.eve-inspiracy.com/index.php?topic=16.0) or the Forum Rules (http://backstage.eve-inspiracy.com/index.php?topic=14.0).
Reporting posts for the sole reason that you disagree with or don't like the poster is not appropriate, wastes our time, and raises blood pressure unnecessarily. Reporting posts because the poster disagreed with you (and somehow therefore translates into "urdoinitrong") is also inappropriate.
If this is unclear in some way, please let us know.
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I'd like to play devils advocate and posit that this is because the forums are perhaps over-moderated?
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If the forums were overmoderated, we would've actually done something about the reports aside from bashing our heads against our desks.
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Moderation here is heavier than many other places, and that is by design. At the same time, we are aware that people sometimes try to use moderation to win disagreements, and we keep an eye out for that.
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Thank you for the replies, but I feel I should explain more.
I believe that over-moderation has created a culture of oversensitivity, not at all dissimilar to the over-litigious culture in the United States.
Put simply, the heavy hand applied to these boards has meant that some have come to feel entitled to mod "protection", where they report if they percieve that someone is criticising them, as they feel this is covered under prevention of "urdoinitwrong". Of course, the vast majority of the time the mods are right on the ball and appropirate action is taken.
However, this isnt really the problem, and only one side of the coin. Coupled with this oversensitivity, is a feeling among players that they cant actually say what they mean. They have to sugar coat it, or be selective in their criticism in the hopes that it can get past the mods and, I'm sorry to say, they have a reasonable chance of success.
Also, while many areas are overmoderated, as noted in this thread; ( http://backstage.eve-inspiracy.com/index.php?topic=3614.0 thread (http://backstage.eve-inspiracy.com/index.php?topic=3614.0 thread) ) some areas escape moderation, causing additional problems.
Contrary to cultivating an atmosphere and debate and friendliness, this over-moderation is serving to cultivate an under-the-skin problem of veiled hostility, back-biting and contrary to keeping IC and OOC seperate, it can, in the worst case become part of the reason why IC grudges become OOC, and OOC grudges blend into IC.
Frankly, I'm surpried none of the mod team seem to have anticipated this very problem of over-reporting occuring.
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Perhaps.
But I strongly disagree.
When you say that people have become paranoid or over sensitive, it may be true. However the rules are not to blame when they fear others to be rude, sugarcoated or not. The rude people are to blame.
It is a basic rule of society : you are to be respectful, tactful, and polite, period. If people can't be because they can't get past their grudges, or anything else, is their own fault. Not the forum's.
When you say that they have a reasonable chance of success when they sugarcoat their snipes and veiled attacks, you are absolutely right imo. The solution would however not be to loosen the rules, but actually to enforce them on sugarcoated shit as well.
My own feeling is quite different : I blame the people for being retards when they want it that way, not the rules. If people can not control themselves, I think it would be utterly foolish to blame the rules for people's lack of ethics.
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Contrary to cultivating an atmosphere and debate and friendliness, this over-moderation is serving to cultivate an under-the-skin problem of veiled hostility, back-biting and contrary to keeping IC and OOC seperate, it can, in the worst case become part of the reason why IC grudges become OOC, and OOC grudges blend into IC.
You do understand what the forum that Backstage replaced was like, don't you?
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Perhaps I should have made this clearer in the previous post, but the points I wanted to make are that people will always find ways to be venomous and that this crackdown only means that people bury their opinions and ferment it into a grudge.
It would be stupid to suggest modicide or some anarchic system, but what any group of players, especially RPers, needs is some sort of facility to freely air opinions and concerns and let off steam within their own community, or we end up driving people away as we already have done.
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Contrary to cultivating an atmosphere and debate and friendliness, this over-moderation is serving to cultivate an under-the-skin problem of veiled hostility, back-biting and contrary to keeping IC and OOC seperate, it can, in the worst case become part of the reason why IC grudges become OOC, and OOC grudges blend into IC.
You do understand what the forum that Backstage replaced was like, don't you?
Never got involved with chatsubo. I've heard it was dragged down by people with loud mouths and I can understand the motivaton behind backstage.
What I would say however, is that Chatsubo shouldnt be the yardstick with which success is measured, and also that many players like myself did not experience Chatsubo and frankly I dont hold with the way its used like a scare-story in the defense of backstage. By dint of the fact that backstage is alive and well, I know it's more successful and I can see why, but does this mean it cant be criticised?
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It was anticipated, and it is why the mods have quite a bit of discretion in how to moderate. Something being reported doesn't mean it will be moderated, and we will (and have in the past) take action against members who attempt to use moderation as a weapon against other users rather than as a tool to help the forum be a better, more useful place.
I don't think anyone suggested that Backstage can't be criticized (it's most of the reason that this section of the forum is here) - can you point out where it was suggested otherwise? I see someone saying that, to paraphrase, the lessons learned from chatsubo were applied to the rules and guidelines here, which is part of the reason they are as 'heavy' as they are.
You suggest that the rules here mean 'people will always find ways to be venomous and that this crackdown only means that people bury their opinions and ferment it into a grudge'. This isn't the only avenue people have to communicate. We all play the same game together, after all. This is also not the place for people to work out grudges - a public stage rarely is, in my experience.
If people have opinions that they feel like they can't express and stay inside the guidelines, we likely have one of two problems:
1) The opinion isn't inside the guidelines - "Everyone who RPs a Blood Raider is doing it wrong because obviously they should be sparkling" or "I think that Silver is a giant bag of dicks." Many opinions fall under this heading. My own opinion of Tony G's contributions to the game, as an example.
2) They have an opinion that is within the rules to be expressed, but they worry that it isn't in the rules and don't want to be moderated (or there isn't a problem with the opinion, but there may be with the wording (This is how it is and everyone else is wrong vs this is one of the ways it might be, or this is the impression I got from what I read, etc). There are certainly sometime borderline cases. Other times, really, just going over the polite posting guide in the FAQ would help. If you *really* aren't sure, contact a moderator and ask - it's what we are here for (among other things).
If the venom and grudge isn't a matter of oppressed opinions that would otherwise fall inside the rules, then it seems to me it is just venom or a grudge for good old fashioned reasons like you don't get along with the person, or you have a difference that can't be resolved through polite discussion. In which case, this still isn't the place to publicly try to resolve your grudge.
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The unclosed parentheses in Silver's penultimate paragraph will haunt me until I die.
Nmaro, please don't make assumptions about what we have or have not anticipated. This has much more to do with a number of people causing a bit of difficulty lately and my thought that a gentle post would hopefully have a positive effect.
If people are afraid of other opinions, then they probably should avoid open discussion of those opinions. The general goal of the guidelines here is to foster civil debate. One look at the EVE Online boards (or those of any game) should make it clear how daunting of a task that can be.
So in terms of trying to find the right balance, we can't let the perfect be the enemy of the good. People absolutely can express their opinions here as long as they can do so civilly. Some opinions cannot be expressed civilly and thus this isn't the place for it. I mean, I have my own as well, and sometimes I need a place to express them (just ask Kyber about the flaming I vent to him over IM). But I recognize the problems it would cause and so those opinions don't see the light of day on this specific site.
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Personally, I think the people who never got to experience Chatsubo should consider themselves blessed to have a forum that's moderated at all.
It is also a perfectly reasonable yardstick for measurement because Chatsubo is the reason Backstage exists. Chatsubo's team took a much more laissez-faire approach to moderation in the time I spent there, and the increasingly hostile and vitriolic atmosphere it helped create there (and elsewhere, thanks to the arguments spreading like herpes into places like OOC, and LM OOC, which is now Red's District) chased people out in droves. Did it have its good days? Yes, it did. But the bad days could get so bad in comparison that it was like shooting a kid's parents in front of him, and then giving him a lollipop as if it would make it better.
Pretty much nothing was moderated there outside of the sorts of things that would earn someone an instant ban from OOC/Summit, and the response was to try an experiment where many of the things that made Chatsubo an increasingly unpleasant experience for many people, were not tolerated. Not that it's the best metric in the world, but the fact that a number of Chatsubo's old/current moderation staff and bigger posters come here and are actively contributing, indicates to me that the experiment has worked. Obviously those people may have different opinions or views of how things were over there - they're welcome to them and are free to provide their own, but that is what I took away from my time reading and posting there.
Furthermore, it doesn't really matter whether people are trying to use moderation to "win" arguments, or if they're being "oversensitive": if the reported post is pretty clearly not a violation of the rules, we're going to ignore it once we've finished bashing our heads against our desks in such a coordinated manner that we would make Olympic synchronised swimming teams look like a bunch of amateurs. Normally these sorts of reports are spread apart. It's only when they start piling up in a short timeframe, as they have in the last two weeks or so, that we actually stand up, say "hold on a fucking minute," and do anything about it.
In this case, after some discussion on a couple of the automatically-generated report threads, Casi elected to make a public post about it rather than one or several of us contacting the offenders privately and individually - given there were several people contributing to the growing face-shaped dents in our desks, it was more efficient, and it served the purpose of also providing a reminder to everyone else not to do the same.
We try to take every report seriously, but it's really hard to do that when people start using the system to win arguments. Crying wolf and whatnot.
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Well, from me personally, thanks to the mods for all that they do.
I think its well run and well moderated, which is often a thankless task.
This site is great, and this site exists because of the mods.
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Thank you.
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Contrary to cultivating an atmosphere and debate and friendliness, this over-moderation is serving to cultivate an under-the-skin problem of veiled hostility, back-biting and contrary to keeping IC and OOC seperate, it can, in the worst case become part of the reason why IC grudges become OOC, and OOC grudges blend into IC.
You do understand what the forum that Backstage replaced was like, don't you?
And don't let Mr Jones ever come back!
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I really like the moderation here.
I do not remember posting much on chatsubo but I once went and read some of the old topics there. An unpleasent experience.
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I like it. It teaches me to be like "Wow, easy there bud" with my posts, and offers a bit of self-reflection through the light humiliation of having your post catacombed.
However, sometimes I feel myself guilty of 'worming around the system'...maybe others do it too. In which case, the lack of moderation when you worm around the rules can be counter to the forum's intended purpose. In the end, that just reflects on me though.
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As to the chatsubo-backstage compairsion:
I've never really been active on chatsubo, but I read some threads on them and I am honestly of the opinion that there were some threads with a quality that is quite rarely - if at all - reached here on backstage. It's true on the other hand that there were loads of threads which were so much below the mid-line that I didn't read them a lot because they were barely bearable, imho.
As to measuring backstage by the yardstick of chatsubo or not: I don't think that one ex- or precludes the other. As, as has been pointed out here, backstage was started in reaction to what was going on on chatsubo, it's a legit way of measuring backstage by the status of the late chatsubo. Still, on the other hand it should be also able to stand on it's own merits.
I, as someone who hasn't used chatsubo actively, don't see how I'm obliged to be grateful for being 'safed' from experiencing chatsubo or why I should feel 'blessed' because I have a moderated forum - especially not more or less so than someone who did experience chatsubo. Getting told that I have to feel like that, that I should 'consider myself blessed' feels quite like being patronized and is really one of the big problems I have with the EVE community - there is, I feel, a strong tendency of older players to be patronizing towards younger players, especially with those players who're mainly into pvp and have a track record of success in that department. (I also personally feel that moderation is more lax in regard to old, established players versus new people, though that is to be expected in a relatively small, tight-knit community. Still, I think that backstage is quite balanced in that regard, moreso than I'd expect from experience and I'd like to give cudos to the moderators for that, while on the same time raising awareness for that as the opportunity presents itself here, as it's still something one could work on in my opinion.)
So, I feel like a criticism that aims at whether backstage can stand on it's own or can/should be improved in one or another way shouldn't be merely responded to with something along the lines of 'but in respect to chatsubo it's a success'. The latter might - and I think is - true, but it's imho just not the proper response. There are many good things about backstage and I'm happy to have it. I'm also thankful to the moderators for the job they do largely to the vast profit of the community. I still think, though, that there's room for improvement - on both sides, of course, the moderators as well as the moderated, but standing on one side makes me see especially the failings of the other, I guess.