@apos said in Hello MSBites! Grade your administrators.:
So why not an inverse Hog Pit that's also opt in, but extremely heavily moderated and posts have to be in a respectful and civil way, with courtesy and care to avoid starting arguments?
Well, there's no reason why not other than... the rest of the forum outside of the Hog Pit is supposed to kinda be like that! And my worry is that people will read this as permission to be more snarky in the non-reverse non-Hog Pit categories as well.
But again to be honest, I don't want to enter nitpicking territory. As @Ganymede pointed out to me on our super sikrit admin channel yesterday, sometimes the difference between what constitutes a 'personal attack' and what's not is very simple:
"Your opinion is stupid" versus "You are stupid"
So yeah that's an easy one, but what about:
"You are being stupid" or even more veiled insults like "I love how you state the obvious with such a sense of discovery" or "nothing you have to say is of any consequence...to anyone"?
I don't want to police this shit, man. There are a myriad ways people can be cruel to each other without resorting to swear words and I don't intend to sift through them to figure out remark #1 crossed the line but #2 was fine, and then figure out how to be consistent about it, and on top of that try to ensure all three admins are consistent with each other.
So instead what I can (and intend) to do is curtail the worst of it. It's not perfect - as @faraday points out it's still sink-or-swim for some people, either because they have a thinner skin or just because they are targets for whatever reason but that's my threshold for administrating a forum like this. I can go after the people who bust out the fancy Nazi words or who're being creepy, but since the appearance of civility still leaves a lot of leg room to be a shithead to others, it's beyond the scope of administrating MSB.
Like the base tone of the MSB is pretty snarky outside the Hog Pit. That just doesn't work great for keeping threads free of people losing their shit because how dare someone impugn their MU honor or whatever.
That's true. There's definitely way more snark than I'm comfortable with. Not surprisingly when I speak up about it people are like how dare you single me out?? even (or especially) when they were being complete jerks to someone else.
Otherwise it's pretty much setting yourself up for some people to say, 'Hey you guys need to moderate people that upset me outside the Hog Pit, but all my own posts are totally fine since I'm an angelic scholar free from the sins of the world. Btw do this flawlessly and for free.'
And yeah, that's a big part of it as well. I sometimes see staff from games talking to admins in ways they would have banned people ten times over for. It is pretty hypocritical, but I guess it's part of the job.