Regarding administration on MSB

Three-Eyed Crow

Maybe a new Reviews section would be useful. I did a lot of posting in the pro-'getting commentary out of ad threads' camp when that came up, and I still think that's ultimately a good idea. But it feels like there's currently no good "home" for discussion of specific games and what they're doing right or wrong (wrong, specifically, since no admin is going to ask for praise to be removed).

ETA: And making it a separate thing from the Hog Pit would make staffers less able to obfuscate criticism from the masses, which I do think happens as things stand now.

surreality

I would like to quietly request a 'constructive dev' section for game feelers/development questions that are not general, all-purpose topics, such as those in mildly constructive.

I will add pleases and cheese if it helps.

Apos

@ganymede The hog pit and mildly constructive and ad threads being indistinguishable in tone wasn't a big deal before, but it would be a big deal now moving towards moderation. But on the subject of a 'constructive criticism' area, I'm not sure it would help, or it would take a herculean effort to set a tone that will catch on, and here's why.

Ditko or Vaultgirl registers and posts a thread about UH or Fallout respectively.

There is absolutely no way, none at all, either of those regardless of content become anything but a shit show. And if they are moved immediately, then it has the appearance of protecting abusive people. I personally would just call the area 'MU Reviews' and leave it to the same moderation standards as the hog pit, because I believe that MUs are going to be so emotionally charged that it is going to be incredibly difficult to keep threads remotely constructive as soon as someone leaves a game for reasons that has them really pissed off. Now, on the flip side, I'd have the mildly constructive area have way harder moderation than it currently has, but yeah I think it would be extremely difficult to do that for any debate on actual games or people playing those games.

Ganymede

@three-eyed-crow said in Regarding administration on MSB:

And making it a separate thing from the Hog Pit would make staffers less able to obfuscate criticism from the masses, which I do think happens as things stand now.

I'm not sure if Yelp! allows owners to respond to reviews or not, but would it be reasonable to keep staff responses to reviews on the Advertisement thread?

Just feeling out ideas, here.

@Apos

I feel what you're saying here, and it is a concern, but I do think that there are many posters who want to express their concerns safely and in a way that isn't an immediate personal attack on one staffer or another. It would be a place where there'd be some assurance that responders wouldn't immediately launch into a derogatory diatribe at them for daring to speak badly.

It would require heavy moderation, yes. But I think it would be a valuable resource we don't have here. If we simply have all of such reviews in the Hog Pit, players who have legitimately suffered what they believe to be a bad experience risk being verbally assaulted personally, for lack of a better term, by staff and their minions. So, that's my concern with having a Review section being the subject of Hog Pit rules.

Thenomain

@ganymede said in Regarding administration on MSB:

@thenomain said in Regarding administration on MSB:

Would you encourage a bad enforcement because you don't have the resources?

I don't think this is a fair line of inquiry.

I think it's ~~the only fair line of inquiry~~ (sorry, hyperbole struck, but I feel that it's an extremely fair line of inquiry). The resources to accomplish your goals are entirely in your hands. It would be nice if (and when, as it happens often) the users help along, but its up to staff on any game or board to be the masters of those resources.

But inconsistent enforcement is a concern, not a certainty; it's not a matter of encouraging bad enforcement.

If it's a concern enough for you to mention it, it's a concern enough for you to try and resolve it before it becomes an issue.

Wizz

@bored said in Regarding administration on MSB:

Sure, in a very chain-of-consequences kind of way. But I don't think the average (again, sane) person writes a * yelp review thinking 'ahhaha I'm taking these fuckers down!'

I will be honest, it really does seem to me that a lot of us are working at cross purposes here, there are a lot of people who are not here with an average yelp reviewer attitude, come on. WORA had the reputation that that is where you go for "justice," and "throwing back the curtain," which in our community played out a lot like throwing a screaming, crying tantrum a lot of the time.

I've seen that less here, but that attitude still exists - shoot first, ask questions later, make as much noise as you can to ~~wallow in the chaos~~ OUT THE EVIL THAT HIDES AMONG US!!!! and all that. I am not pointing fingers or trying to call anyone out, but it seems to me like there's a prevalent attitude or perception that conflict resolution is about making the conflict as public and ugly as possible as the very first step, which turned this place into such a goddamn dumpster fire for a few weeks, with people gleefully squirting gasoline on it because that is just what they come here to do.

Three-Eyed Crow

@ganymede said in Regarding administration on MSB:

@three-eyed-crow said in Regarding administration on MSB:

And making it a separate thing from the Hog Pit would make staffers less able to obfuscate criticism from the masses, which I do think happens as things stand now.

I'm not sure if Yelp! allows owners to respond to reviews or not, but would it be reasonable to keep staff responses to reviews on the Advertisement thread?

I'm the wrong person to ask, since my original pitch in that other thread was an Ad section that ONLY allowed posts by the OP and mods and all commentary and questions somewhere else. And I do think questions need to be answered somewhere/don't think all criticism is valid and dumb shit should have push-buck.

Roz

Hoo boy. A few things.

First? There are some areas of the moderation reaction where I feel like people could ease up. There have definitely been some moments that felt like people were really eager to jump in aggressively at the slightest hint of misstep in a way that wasn't always constructive. I think there needs to be a space where we're able to respond to the natural missteps of growing pains as moderation is figured out with a little benefit of the doubt. But, like, I'm reminded a bit of when I was staff on Steel & Stone and we added a Chatter channel because we wanted to keep Public more game-focused and there was a high volume of chatter going on. Some people would get really offended at being asked to move, and they'd be super ready to point out if you didn't immediately ask someone else to move or something. Like. We're all human there.

That said? There's been a lot of defensive doubling down even at perfectly mild responses to inconsistencies. Which is only going to encourage those people who are starting at mild and civil to ramp up to less mild and less civil. I think we as the posters need to avoid having an attitude of "you fucked up, please commence public flogging" so that the mods can also have an attitude of "oh we fucked up, let's just fix it, we're all learning and it's not the end of the world." Like. Yeah, that one thread probably shouldn't have been moved wholesale over to the Hog Pit. But there's just a certain level of vitriol about it that I find honestly weird. Like. Is it that people really think @Ganymede was doing this to spite and silence people? Idek! But both sides have to be willing to have a certain amount of chill that is just not existing. These missteps don't have to be a huge deal for the most part. We're talking about how and when to move threads.

However. I will state that I don't think @Auspice has a good temperament for modding here. When the board was handed over to @Arkandel, I nodded and thought, "Yeah that makes sense." When he added @Ganymede as a mod, I nodded and thought, "Yeah that makes sense." When he added Auspice, I paused. This is not actually because I hate her as a poster or a player by any means. It's just that she tends towards a regular sort of defensiveness and temperament as a poster that I didn't feel was a great fit when she was announced as being on board, and I think that's kind of becoming clear.

I do understand that her real intent in her response to @meg was "Hey, if people really want to start sharing RL stories about this back and forth, it might work best in a different thread." I also understand how it felt very much like "This isn't the place to share your RL story." Meg wasn't sharing a story just to share the story. She was sharing an experience to directly comment on the conversation happening in that thread. Frankly, it's no one else's business to say "You'll be more heard with this story if you make a new thread for it. It'll be lost in two months here." Maybe she doesn't want it to be something that lingers after those two months? Maybe she didn't want to make a thread focusing on her RL experience because she only wanted to talk about it in terms of how it related to that thread. And at the point when Auspice commented, there hadn't been a major derail of topic by any means. A couple folks basically said "yeah I've had those kinds of shitty experiences too," and that was it. When people reacted negatively to Auspice's comment, her reaction was to basically say "You're only reacting this way because it's coming from me." AKA thoroughly dismissing the idea that people could have felt negatively about what she said. And in this thread, her reaction was to say that people were literally too obtuse to understand if they had any sort of confusion. Which is just, flat out, not something you can say as a mod, just like it's not something you can say as a MU* staffer.

The fact of the matter is that, as mods, you will never be able to post without some sort of mod voice. It will be seen as such whether or not you personally think you're posting JUST AS A POSTER, the same way people pay extra attention to when a staff alt on a public channel says something about knocking something off. It's the reality of moderating, just like it's the reality of staffing.

I don't know how much it's really going to solve anything to start making new forum sections, but I'm very happy to be proven wrong here. But I don't see how having a reviews section will end up any different from what already happens on the ad threads.

I think the bottom line for me is that the response a person has to messing up is vitally important. Right now, many of the responses to messing up from the mod team has actively exacerbated the conflict going on.

That said, this is a terrible forum to have to mod for.

Ghost

I think @Wizz has the right of it. The pervasive negativity would infect even the most constructive of posts. We have seen positive review boards attacked, and some kind of yelp system would really ultimately result in a demilitarized zone for people to hunt for their pound of flesh, regardless if their reasoning is justified or predatory in nature. Both approaches present themselves as the same.

So long as this board supports and openly negative and/or hostile environment, it will spill out into the environments designed to be constructive. Villains will be created on a weekly basis, which is what we are seeing here with Gany and Ausipice.

Understanding the problem is the key to overcoming it, and IMO the problem is cultural. It is easier to find entertainment in demanding blood than it is to constructively or peacefully find a resolution.

I say: Close the fucking hog pit

bored

@faraday said in Regarding administration on MSB:

@bored said in Regarding administration on MSB:

Or put it simply: it is currently against the rules to post 1-star yelp reviews where the public will see them.

I'm actually with you there. I just don't think that forum software like this is a great vehicle for reviews. Would yelp or amazon tolerate one of the review areas devolving into a "You!" "No you!" type flame fest, complete with "F You" meme GIFs? I seriously think not.

Good review sites let you give a star rating and your opinion, perhaps with a chance for a rebuttal from the owner. It varies of course, but a review is very different from an ad is very different from a discussion. What we have here is discussion software trying to serve many masters.

Sure, I agree.

But... we don't have an alternative right now. Which is a forum organization problem. Either you have to heavily censor yourself to stay in Mildly, or you go to the FUCK YOU GO DIE section.

That is a problem. And I feel like that the 'great reform' is missing a step. We need a proper venue for honest reviews.

@ganymede said in Regarding administration on MSB:

@bored said in Regarding administration on MSB:

Or put it simply: it is currently against the rules to post 1-star yelp reviews where the public will see them.

If we were to apply the current Mildly Constructive rules to a new section, would that help? I think you could make a 1-star Yelp review that didn't immediately devolve into Hog Pit territory.

That is something along the lines of what I'm suggesting, yes. I think there should be a 'Reviews' or similar section to compensate the Ad section essentially becoming a propaganda space. I also think the rules shouldn't be 100% identical because...

This isn't just a matter of our community behaving and self-policing. I, despite being a poster who probably leans more Hog than not, am capable of turning it off if there are clear rules. Smack the dog on the nose, I'll learn.

What I'm not capable of doing is preventing 1-day old accounts from coming in and derailing and getting the thread ruined. And while that sounds like some hyperbolic hand-wringing about an impractical situation... it already happened. I think the new forum ideally would have a threshold somewhere between Mildly and Hog. Outright personal attacks != cool (but those posts would ideally just get deleted or separated, not the entire thread moved into Hog), but probably little to no moderation on content topic (edit to add: obviously people could always on their own ask mods to branch off a topic if it really branched hugely, as has happened since long before the new mod-pocalypse).

As it is, the current moderation regime has served the interest of Claremont and other bad actors (by hiding, for example, frank discussion of actual sexual harassment, something we purport to care about these days) more than it has aided in defending... I don't know, whoever it was meant to protect. That guy with the D&D/FS3 game?

You guys need to figure it out. Your intentions may be good, but your current implementation is not serving the community interest.

Arkandel

@bored said in Regarding administration on MSB:

But... we don't have an alternative right now. Which is a forum organization problem. Either you have to heavily censor yourself to stay in Mildly, or you go to the FUCK YOU GO DIE section.

Is it truly that bad? Can we not express our thoughts about a game without resorting to personal insults or engaging in full-on attack mode? Because that's what flags a thread for the Hog Pit.

No one says we can't be in the Constructive section and give a completely horrible review for a game or even a staff member. Do we also need to call them a fuckhead?

I don't get it - and that's not a rhetorical statement. Please help me get it.

bored

@arkandel It's not that we can't express ourselves. We can. I'm Ok if it becomes the forum norm that anyone calling someone a cunt or a nazi or whatever just gets their post deleted. Everywhere if you want, even on Hog.

What I mind is that it seems difficult to properly condemn something that really deserves it without that thread ultimately getting sent to the Hog pit. Again, this has happened, and in the process you have burried, to the benefit of Claremont & co, for instance a player talking, in detail, about the specifics of the circumstances under which she was sexually harassed. That is a thing you have done, even while we write and upvote post after post about how we really ought to encourage this kind of reporting!

The approach is something along the lines of one bad apple spoiling the bunch, and... it's the internet. Every bunch will get spoiled, even if we police ourselves perfectly, because even then 1-day posters can come and shit on things. You need some tolerance for things to get, if not personally nasty, at least viciously condemning of things that deserve it.

Arkandel

@bored said in Regarding administration on MSB:

What I mind is that it seems difficult to properly condemn something that really deserves it without that thread ultimately getting sent to the Hog pit. Again, this has happened, and in the process you have burried, to the benefit of Claremont & co, for instance a player talking, in detail, about the specifics of the circumstances under which she was sexually harassed. That is a thing you have done, even while we write and upvote post after post about how we really ought to encourage this kind of reporting!

We've already admitted it was a mistake to do it the way we did. It isn't a systemic issue, and it's not something we'll do again. Going forward we'll be forking threads from the point they devolve. It's easier if it's done early, since nodebb is a bit annoying in the way you can split up multi-page threads that way, so for example @Auspice had to spend a long time yesterday doing that with the one you mention (which should be restored now, for the record).

Speaking of this though we've been talking among us since it seemed like the Hog Pit system could be used to try and shove threads behind its opt-in wall by a malovelent party. That's definitely something on the admin radar, which we don't intend to be manipulated into doing in the future.

I don't know if that addresses your concerns, so input is welcome.

Sunny

I have now been 'modded' for calling someone a liar who was DEMONSTRABLY lying. Like, we're not just talking about calling people dirty words, here.

I have seen someone be 'modded' for responding to another mod's vitriol.

We have reasonable people dropping mics and leaving.

And you, @Arkandel, and you, @Ganymede, keep taking things to hyperbolic places and extreme examples and flailing about like this is somehow bloody rocket science. Yes, there will always be extreme outliers that need to be dealt with in different ways. THAT DOES NOT MEAN THAT THE PEOPLE DISCUSSING THINGS ON THE REASONABLE LEVEL ARE NOT BEING REASONABLE.

What if..
What if...
What if...

I DO NOT GIVE A DAMN ABOUT YOUR WHAT IF.

I care about what IS. What HAS been happening.

bored

@arkandel You've fixed the... newer banishing.

The original thread, that was the ad thread, got banished to Hog, forcing people to start a new one in Mildly, that then itself yadda yadda <- this is what you're talking about.

Anyway, that specific situation aside, I still think we need a Reviews section, or a 'Deconstructive' section, or whatever. Even if the rules end up being similar or even identical, words matter, the names matter, etc. "Constructive" suggests... exactly that. It conjures to mind the holy land that @faraday (rightly!) desires, where we sit and engage in intellectual debate about game design and the future of our hobby. It is a noble ambition, that should be supported.

But we also need a place where we can be deconstructive, without being banished to the dark. There is, at this point, nothing constructive to be said about UH. So having a mildly constructive thread for it is really a fiction. I suggest removing that fiction. We can still do it without a certain threshold of bad words, but we need to be able to tear down that which deserves nothing better, and do it in the open.

Thenomain

@arkandel said in Regarding administration on MSB:

Going forward we'll be forking threads from the point they devolve.

As long as it doesn't catch those posts that are not devolved.

This was easier on Wora, because the whole board except for one area was Hog Pit. It wasn't that the whole discussion fork was thrown into the garbage, it was just moved from one part of the junkyard to another and people could move with it.

Now that the Hog Pit is an opt-in service to allow people to act in a way they can't in the rest of the board, it's a wall. You either make yourself vulnerable to all commentary or you give up your train of thought, all due to the actions of other people.

I have no solution to this, but it's a concern of mine with the current laws.

faraday

@arkandel said in Regarding administration on MSB:

No one says we can't be in the Constructive section and give a completely horrible review for a game or even a staff member. Do we also need to call them a fuckhead?

The problem isn't necessarily the "bad review", it's the snowball effect that one creates on a discussion forum.

Reviewer: "This game sucks"
Game admin: "No it doesn't"
Reviewer: "It totally does. Here's a log."
Game supporter: "Lies! Cruel lies!"
Bystander: throws fuel on fire
Other Bystander: jokes about getting popcorn

And pretty soon we're devolved into hog pit territory and it's hard to pinpoint exactly where along the way things went off the rails.

This is why review sites don't allow discussions about the reviews. They just don't end well. Ever.

And yeah, I get @Thenomain's nudge nudge about discussing something that comes out of a review. I just think that sort of thing works better when discussed in the abstract with cooler heads, like I mentioned to @Three-Eyed-Crow a couple posts back. "When is it okay to spy on players, if ever" can be constructive. "OMG UH Staff is spying on everybody" is a fine 1-star review, but unlikely to end in anything other than a dogpiling dumpster fire when turned into a discussion.

Sparks

@arkandel I think the idea is that a lot of the "negative reviews" around here tend to boil down not to what's wrong with the game but what's wrong with the staff, which is a) probably not strictly "constructive", and b) probably going to end up coming across as a personal attack.

So I suspect the fear is that, based on all past experiences on this forum, the following sort of exchange will happen:

Admin: Come play at Game X, we have churros for everyone!

Potential Player: Ooh. I like churros. Tell me more!

Former Player: Game X? That game is terrible. You only get whipped cream with your churros if you're one of Admin's TS buddies, and everyone else has to get the dregs.

Admin: What? That's a blatant lie. Whipped cream is available for anyone who runs a plot for other people.

Former Player: [screed about how they never got whipped cream despite running two plots early on]

Admin: [rant about how the whipped-cream-for-GMs rule post-dated those two plots, and besides, Former Player got banned for Egregious Churro Hoarding anyway]

Random MSB Poster: [gif of eating popcorn]

Former Player: [profanity-laden response boiling down to "No, you", and also how the churros weren't even very good]

Moderator: Okay, this thread is off into the Hog Pit if it's turning into this much negativity and attacks.

Edit: And apparently @Faraday and I went to the same place, only I had more churros.

Apos

Yeah discussions will be dumpster fires, buuuuuut...

Lock the advertising threads to a single post, editable by the the creator. Make a new area for MU Reviews, in between mildly constructive and hog pit. -Any- thread created relating to the game is linked to the advertising thread by a mod in a single posted reply by the mod, giving a list of all applicable threads, including every single time a discussion turns into a dumpster fire and is forked. Nothing is hidden, and anyone clicking on the ad threads sees a list of a dozen thread links. The pain in the ass this would be for mods to update that each time would be offset by getting to name what the thread is to, like, 'Why Terrible People Do Terrible Things'.

faraday

@sparks I like your example much better. Churros for everyone!