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[Casiella]

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 or the Forum Rules.

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.

[Nmaro Makari]

I'd like to play devils advocate and posit that this is because the forums are perhaps over-moderated?

[Morwen Lagann]

If the forums were overmoderated, we would've actually done something about the reports aside from bashing our heads against our desks.

[Silver Night]

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.

[Nmaro Makari]

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 ) 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.

[Lyn Farel]

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.

[Ken]

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?

[Nmaro Makari]

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.

[Nmaro Makari]

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?

[Silver Night]

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.

[Casiella]

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.

[Silver Night]

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[Morwen Lagann]

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.

[Gottii]

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.

[Vikarion]

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Thank you.