I didn't mean to imply that I got a warning for that. More of a warning of a possible warning sort of thing. Just kind of struck me as a little lame to find out that people are annoying the mods with reports over things like that.

I don't think there is one, but you can forward the PM to a Moderator, or Moderators if it's one containing content you want to report.

Absolutely agreed. Remember when users on this site didnt enjoy creating so much trouble? And we all co-existed as happy little nerds and geeks?

Here's a general problem with moderation on Dumpshock:

It's hard to trust that any action is being taken when the policy is to never tell even the reporting party what if any action is taken. In other forums the mods publically call out offenders in the concerned threads, and so everyone knows that and why someone gets warned. On Dumpshock someone could get 9 warnings, or 0, and no one but the mods would know. Offending posts are not edited/deleted either, which is another problem in itself, but also means you can't be sure if a post you reported was deemed to have been a violation of the ToS or not.

Compare ENWorld and Dumpshock:

On Dumpshock, in a flame-prone thread, you may get some "please play nice" post by a mod, but that's it. Any action is taken behind closed doors, in secret. You report a post, but it remains unchanged. If you read the thread you have no idea what was a violation, and what is ok. So people keep posting, and may even answer violations of the ToS "in kind" since they think that's ok.

On ENWorld, mods quote offending posts (may delete them in some cases, not sure) in the thread, and state what happened to the offender - often a thread ban, or even a temp ban. That means people know what's acceptable and what's not, and even more important, know action has been taken.

ENWorld is much more open. You still get claims of the mods being biased, but it's easier to trust them to be impartial if you see what they do, and to whom. On Dumpshock you are left in the dark, which only fosters distrust.

So, I'd propose to stop with the "secret moderation", and start to publically warn an ban posters. It would in my opinion both serve to build trust in the moderation team's impartiality as well as make it far easier to know what goes and what goes not, and people might be a bit more cautious if they would be publically warned for violations.

It would likely cut down on the number of reports the team gets as a result.

I'd propose we keep with secret moderation, but the moderators somewhere post routing information for their checking accounts, so we can either make 'discrete donations', or we can track them down and threaten their families. You know, Shadowrun style.

I prefer my donations in cash, small unmarked bills.

What exactly is the reason that warnings and bans are not made public, and offending posts not marked/edited/deleted?

Preference and desire not to get into public pissing matches most likely, but then again I'm not a moderator.

Ding ding ding... pick up your prize by the gate.

Other forums simply forbid threads about warnings, telling people to take it to PMs. That prevents such "public matches".

Generally speaking, we don't get a ton of reports in every day. That's changed somewhat, first because of the CGL issues, and the heat it's produced, and second, because someone decided to report every single post he felt was in the slightest way offensive because he got a warning. Those two current issues tend to bog things down.


First, and foremost, we don't intend to air everyon'es dirty laundry. "Hey, this guy did this, we slapped his hand." Some times we do, when it's a particularly bad case, or on the very rare occassions when we edit something. Very much not fans of editing someone else's post, even when it's offensive. The only times I can recall in the years that I've been a mod was editing out a link, or the rare bit of personal information.

Second is because whenever we post a thread with a warning or ban, there's always a flare up. It never goes quietly, and it always drags more people in. If someone has an issue with the Warning they've received, they can PM us. We have reversed decisions before.

We have proposed putting the warns up in the bug section very recently. It was decided against. Then we had a User chime in about the perception of someone getting banned in the "News" section, and the threads about it being locked becuase of arguements. That reinforced our decision to keep them how they currently are.

As another little adendum, there isn't a rule about cussing in general conversation. I can say fuck yeah. You can say fuck yeah. We generally avoid it out of general consideration. I'm in the Navy, I swear a lot. I don't generally do it at home, and I don't generally do it on the boards. It shouldn't be directed at someone however. If that's the case, we'll have an issue.

We do understand having issues with what you perceive as wrong, and wanting clarification. We try to give people as clear an understanding of acceptable behavior as possible, but with a group of people as large as this, there is going to be gray areas and personal interpretations. Not everything can be set in stone, or the Terms of Service would look more like a sofware agreement. We try to keep it open, we try to let things slide if they're not major. But as things get more congested, again, such as with the CGL issues, or we see repeat problems with users, we have to step in more and nitpick more.

I do apologize if my tone is coming across as sarcastic or harsh. I'm tired. We're all trying to be patient, because , and this is the important part to me at least, these issues and others don't seem malicious. You and others are concerned users on these boards. That's graet. Rather have you care than not. Understand as well that we've got changes going on in our ToS, we've got new mods, we've had old mods leave, and we've got our own concerns about what's going on with the game we're all here for, and our own feelings on it, but we're trying to remain objective. In the mean time, we're trying to referee as well.

If that doesn't answer your questions, ask again. I may have missed something.

You may have answered your own question.

Look, you are mods. You know if someone gets warned.

Now, try to see it with the eyes of a user. Say I call someone an idiot. He reports the post. I get a warning. But he will never know that. He sees me still post, maybe even snarkyly, and he has no idea if I was warned, or if I and the mod had a laugh about the idiot. And when he sees the "idiot" remark still standing... and me still posting... what will he think?

Imagine how that feels.

Imagine if this was a court. Someone punched you in the face. The cops tell you "We're looking into this". And nothing else. You later see the guy walking on the street, grinning at you. You have no idea if he was punished, or not.

He would think:
a) maybe it's taken care of
b)maybe it's not taken care of
c) maybe I should post somewhere else
d) maybe I should move on

You asked the question, I answered it. So did you.


This is name calling, not assault. No one got their nose broken.

If it's nothing then there wouldn't be a warning - insults can be taken to court as well, for example.

If you want to keep your actions and inactions secret that's your perogative, but it does run counter to how other forums handle this, and it does not help building trust in the moderation - quite the opposite.

It's also a bit contradicting how you expect people to stop reporting minor infractions but never tell them what a minor infraction and what a violation of the ToS is.

1)under defamation of character. Please stop arguing something that is not the point.

2) It's not a matter of "perogative" (ok , well, it could be yes), because it was put to a vote. I actually proposed we start doing this a few weeks back when Cain brought it up. At the time, we decided against it, then I went ahead and was upfront about a ban. Someone had specifically asked for a notification for when a user is banned, and I thought that made sense. Then we ended up with two locked threads. Now we're got another thread that is going on for three pages with the same question that has already been answered. We're not other forums. We're this one.

3) My personal rule of thumb is one used in a lot of text book law definitions. " ... A prudent and reasonable person." To fulfill that criteria, we have a whole bunch of mods. More now than we did. People said "hey, get more mods". We got more mods. Now we have more people to decide on that. Because we're not going to write out every possible thing a person could say and say "this is ok", "this is not ok". There's simply too many things that could be said.

So we resort to " a prudent and reasonable person" , then add a few more in. Which, incidentally, is why it sometimes takes a couple of days to get a consensus.

It's funny how few (if any) people had any trouble with the moderation until a bunch of people crawled out of the woodwork and started accusing them of being in some kind of huge conspiracy to... Hell, I'm not even sure what the conspiracy is about.

All I know is that it is apparently full of Mormon hate-spewing and utterly irrational paranoia hidden in the guise of pretty words, hypocrisy ("We hate Coleman for stealing money, so to show them we're going to steal their books if they publish anymore! Rabble rabble! We have the power!"), and preachy speechifying. It's even more mystifying because they sit around stewing on other forums, cursing up a storm, mocking anyone and everyone under the sun (but only if they're not member of the forum), and even managing to get threads locked on a forum that has next to no moderation to begin with. Which, to be absolutely honest, is fucking impressive. Of course, then a few of those same people come here and start acting holier-than-thou or baiting the moderators into doing exactly what they've been bitching about behind those not-so-closed doors. All the while slinging "omg, they're not to be trusted!" crap around.

People are just irrationally insane sometimes.

Well, in Switzerland, calling someone "idiot" would be able to be taken to the courts. I had such cases, actually. And my point was not "hey, list every possible infraction", it was "hey, if you think too many posts are getting reported, at least tell with regards to the specific reported posts if those should be reported or not".

Because "Baiting" and "Inflammatory" may not be as cut and dry as you make that out to be.

Is snarkyly even a word? And if so, you spelled it wrong. How are you gonna rise up against the mods if you cant even accomplish basic grammar?

My apologies, I was basing my position under my understanding of U.S. law. I'd forgotten your perspective.

Your point would have been much easier made then by asking for better clarification, rather than filling our mailboxes in what, from our perspective at least, would only be perceived as harassmant. Although, to soothe your mind, some of those are being looked at as possible Warnings. Even when we question your motives, we are still looking at the issue. Hope that helps.

And I agree, baiting and flaming are not cut and dry. I don't believe I ever said they were. I said it was the interpetation by people that would be (hopefully) "prudent and reasonable".

In any case, I do appreciate this chance to have an honest look at what it will look like if we do post Warns.

Please try and make positive contributions to this thread.

Stop "helping". Grammar and spelling aren't required, and you don't know what someone's native language is.

(Thank god on the spelling part. Redjack is always giving me crap for that)

We told you we installed the spellchecker modual for you and Bull... not that you guys actually use it

Yeah and RJ told me to use firefox.

Mark Twain once said that people who spell a word the same way every time are uncreative. I can get behind that.

Sorry SinN, but in addition to previous warns, this instance of baiting gets you a 'vacation'. You were warned. Anyone else want to step up to bat?

Firefox has helped me quite a lot in that regard, actually. I had no idea I was misspelling certain words ("accidently" being a big one) for, well, forever. Plus MS Explorer sucks anyway.

Apparently my proper spelling is a bigger concern than I thought...

*lips moving completely out of sync with the words* And for this... You must pay! Here in Land of the Rising Dumpshock, all bad spellers' lives are forfeit! If you use IE, we double the penalty!

I am fairly certain that nobody can claim ultimate spelling/typing mastery 100% of the time. Calling people out on spelling errors is just nitpicking and potentially baiting, given some circumstances.

Unless you're a professional writer, where i can see it being a serious pet peeve/ hang up. In which case, at least do it tactfully.

I'm going to put a new link in the posting guidelines. "Don't do what uncle SinN does."

Bah, professional writers do it too, often times as much as the rest of us. They just tend to take it personally when it is pointed out.

I'm pretty sure that they're in a conspiracy to moderate.

~J

Is there a reason why offensive posts are permitted to stay, unmodified? In a forum I moderate, I generally require the user to modify or delete the offending post within a given time-frame. That establishes a record of permissible behavior, both for reference and as a teaching tool.

Because we don't like editing people's posts. I'm all for people doing self editing, and we've held back some warns for it, in the past and recently. Some of it is "what is said, can't be unsaid" blah blah. You said it, now you're accountable.

If someone wants to clean themselves up, I support that. At this point at least, it's not something we're going to direct people to do. I know Adam for one is really touchy about that. While he's not an active moderator, like Bull, he still has a lot of say. He just doesn't have to do any actual moderating. He still does plenty for the boards.

One of the thing that really struck me as intersting when I crossed over into the metaplane of Moderation was how few members actually have warnings. The vast (VAST) majority have none. A handful have one or two; these tend to be long time members who have seen a good flame war or two. And then there is a small subset of individuals who have much more. Obviously these are people who have both strong opinions and forceful personalities, neither or which are bad qualities. It just predisposes them to having issues with moderation.

The point here is that warnings in general only affect a very small segment of the greater membership and the the ones who generate the most work for the moderators already would love to have a public forum in which to debate their warnings. Conversely, the majority of those that recieve singular warnings for isolated incidents seem to appreciate not being put out in stocks for all to see. So "open moderation" (if you want to call it that) would garner very little benefit relative to the amount of work it would generate for us.

Just to make sure you are not adressing me:

I don't want a forum to adress specific warnings, but I would like to know who was warned for what, especially if it concerns me. A forum to discuss moderation policies and procedures is something else. As DireRadiant can attest to I never argued my warning should not have been given, my issues were with the way it was issued.

As far as singular warnings go - I got two warnings, and have been around for several years.

Also, I am not sure how much additional work a copy/paste of the warning itself into a special warning thread (which could be deleted after a while, if needed) would be, or into the thread itself would be, but I don't think it'd be that much. I also do not think more transparency would create more work - it might cut down on both questionable posts and reports when one doesn't have to do the learning by doing wrong thing.

Honestly, it is easy to follow rules like "do not make threads about a ban/warning". ENWorld works like that. People who cannot follow those rather binary rules tend to end up permabanned in short order.

Fuchs: no that comment was referrig to the very small subset of users that have 8 or 9 warnings on file. (edit: and I should add that this does not apply uniformly to all of them either)

Also, I would conceed that the mods could be more visible with the colored inline text, posting something like "this thread is being reviewed due to possible ToS violations" or what have you, but I don't think specific details are useful. Like I said my gut feeling is that most members don't want their dirty laundry aired and don't care to see others'. I could be wrong.

I do think too that most offenders do not want to see their dirty laundry aired. But I do also think that giving public warnings would make people a bit more cautious.

I also agree that others do not want to see the dirty laundry of others - but they do see it though. They do see the flaming posts, the baiting, name calling, and personal attacks. What they do not see is the "cleaning up", aka the moderation action. Seeing that would be something I think many would like to see.

Also, if there was a "ban/warn thread", no one who did not want to see that would be forced to see it.

The penalty box is still the best feature of Penny arcade's moderation. I also like whirlpool's Aura rating.

How do those work?

Whirlpool you can vote on the contribution made by members to the forum, which generates an aura ranging from



Which is displayed when people post. Access to forums likely to generate contreversy outside of the core forums (Telco/IT discussion board) is limited to 'bright' users and above.

Penny Arcade publically logs all infractions and bannings with reasons, links to the thread & post that generated the infraction or banning, a copy of the PM sent by the mod to the user (except for spammers) and (generally) a copy of the orginal post in two stickied threads, and if a user is penalty box'ed, it causes a reduction or elimination of posting privledges and changes their avatar.

This gives very good transparency. Both methods would obviously be good.

Thanks for the info Cthulhudreams. The Whirlpool system sounds interesting but I don't know if that would be supported by the Invision software. The Penny Arcade system sounds like it would be way too much work for the few mods we have right now.