Forum Policy Update June 2017 | The GemStoneIV TownCrier

Punpleasant is now a thing.

Wyrom, PM

>> Punpleasant is now a thing.

As in… I attended Bremerial’s limerick reading the other night and it was very punpleasant!

I can work with this…

— Robert

As for the January 1st effective date, this is so we don’t have to pull records from 2016. This can be seen as a benefit to some (since we state 365 days).

Wyrom, PM

<this mean nice ole Clunk mebbe soon gonna be the only one postin?

I’d like to report Clunk for insulting by implication the entire population of Gemstone. Our glorious moderators have tolerated his disgusting toxicity for far too long. Ban Clunk!

P.S. Also, Zul Lugoth should probably be shut down as well as a kind of punitive measure. kthxbye

I’m sorry, but another character/account was just named/referenced directly; this will not be tolerated. 🙂

I haven’t been posting much in the last 6 to 12 months and I’m not sure when (if ever) I’ll check these forums or post more regularly. The main reason is I’m busy with work, but forum policy and rather bizarre enforcement was the thing that really made me decide I had better things to do with my time.

I do have some questions, in any case.

1) >Naming and Shaming

>All discussions on the forums can contain no personal attacks of any sort, even in the generalized sense. Naming another player to call them out, flame them, or otherwise ridicule them is officially against our policy. Any posts that contain it, quote it, or otherwise mention it will be pulled and issued a warning.

I’m not clear on the last sentence. How are we supposed to quote people for a discussion without naming them? This should probably be expanded and clarified in some respect, as it seems much too broad as written.

2) Review of entire thread before action is taken

Since the new policy is only going back to the beginning of 2017, it doesn’t really affect me. However, last year one thing that drove me away from the forums was that a thread got closed, and several days later, I got a warning for inflammatory remarks and even told that I had “continued” to post despite “multiple” requests which was demonstrably false. There was no record of more than a single request that came with the warning, and I had not posted once the thread was closed. I was pretty offended to have such a false statement said to me by staff. I contested the claim but received no reply at all. If we can get warnings days after a thread was closed (and apparently reviewed), it seems we should just go delete all posts we make in any thread that gets closed, particularly if we are now being tracked even for posts that are hidden when we have not been warned etc.

I can imagine moderating the forums is a tedious and difficult job. Both cases I got official warnings for happened at opposite sides of this context, so it is for me the rule and not the exception.

>> >> >All discussions on the forums can contain no personal attacks of any sort, even in the generalized sense. Naming another player to call them out, flame them, or otherwise ridicule them is officially against our policy. Any posts that contain it, quote it, or otherwise mention it will be pulled and issued a warning.

>> I’m not clear on the last sentence. How are we supposed to quote people for a discussion without naming them? This should probably be expanded and clarified in some respect, as it seems much too broad as written.

It is fine to quote people. It is not fine to identify individuals for flaming or ridicule. Or to include the quote from others that have done so or reference it (basically I take this mean to continue the shaming / ridicule by referencing the original post).

— Robert

* Wyrom was just vaporized!

>It is fine to quote people. It is not fine to identify individuals for flaming or ridicule.

It also says “to call them out” which sounds like quite a grey area when it comes to a basic disagreement. It looks like it’s fine to quote someone on being technically inaccurate and call out objectively false statements as long as we don’t bother to paste who wrote the quote. Maybe that’s not the intent but it sounds goofy. Probably this policy is not vastly changed from before so there’s not much point harping on it. The previous policy already resulted in lots of ambiguously-worded but still very clear statements all over the forums on hot topics. “The usual people are all complaining,” “It’s no surprise the names of respondents” etc which aligns with forum policy but hasn’t really helped anything in my opinion. It’s almost comical, like the tongue-and-cheek way my wife tells me that “someone” peed all over the bathroom floor.

Overall I was hoping for something more constructive in terms of forum policies. It seems the direction is to find more ways to penalize players.

I was hoping for some kind of more noticeable improvements, like the ability to actually close threads, or perhaps a change of moderation approach rather than written policy which might allow us to have an Edit button to fix grammatical issues, an easy way to just press a button a flag a post for moderation, a more effective “ignore” method that also dropped quotes and replies as well, etc.

There are quite a few things these forums could use, but “more of the stick” wasn’t really on my top ten list.

I would be extremely surprised if we got a new forum software. The current software is so intertwined into the billing system and anything else handled onsite account-wise that doing anything with it is nigh impossible, from what I understand.

Granted, I wouldn’t mind something much easier software-wise myself.

~Aulis
Forums Manager
QC’er

>Granted, I wouldn’t mind something much easier software-wise myself.

I’m glad we’re on the same page 🙂

I guess I could have listed another hope which was for “more moderators” (not replacements…just more).

Since I’m posting and…it’s me I’ll write a bit more. I would like to see a little more transparency offered in how moderating is done. Not the details mind you. And now, I need to be careful, but it’s my basic deduction that a lot of the moderation is spurred from private communication with the forum moderator. For a long time I had the impression that staff had loads of time on their hands, and it was relatively normal for all posts on the forums to be read by staff. I have a sense that I was quite mistaken.

Speaking of my first time (:cough:), I didn’t really get that. But there could be three routes: 1) Moderators sees it and smoosh; 2) Staff members sees it, soon-to-be-smoosh; 3) Player reports it. I don’t want to know the statistics, but after some time on these forums, I believe I mostly overlooked #3 as a major source of moderation. I might be unusual, but in any case, as a person that has posted and gotten in trouble for promoting a more “community moderation” approach (which is certainly edging closer to the “calling out” policy under discussion), it would be good to know that straight away.

The policies are pretty tough. However, I feel they are tough, and also enforced after the fact, largely because there’s just one moderator, much like within the game itself most the time no one is watching. Yet from the perspective of a less familiar poster (we all were on a time), sometimes these tough policies don’t line up at all with what we can find players posting. But only the most egregious things are pulled, and people learn more about skirting moderation than caring about the value it offers. “Why would I want to ignore some silly comment by a silly author…it hasn’t been moderated, so I better be sure everyone knows it’s a pretty silly idea!” That sort of logic.

Setting aside any software, or even the precise wording or punishments for certain forum policies, I think being sure the community knows that it’s very self-policed is extremely important. The obvious thing (for me) reading the policies as they are presently worded is to just think about my own actions, and what I shall not do (or I do it anyway because derrrr). I just went and clicked on it and read it over again, and it has a very negative flavor like the ten commandments (minus one) and reads in a kind of draconian way. In either case, I see a lot of policies and I see more rules and regulations and how careful I need to be and what I can’t say…when both the times I got warnings I knew I had it coming. (My objections differ to that aspect.)

I think it should be really important to make a 0th policy and some other things before this policy list that reads like it’s targeted at a criminal, or someone who is about to post something nasty. The policy should start out with something more normal sounding. “We all come here to discuss the game and we like it…” okay some hogwash. But an important thing missing is how to help moderation, and to know that it’s actually the player base that does a lot of the moderation by reporting things to the appropriate channels.

If its publicized what a poster should not do, it should be more favorable to read it like what other people posting will not do to you and what to do if you see it. Yet the existing policy reads nothing like that at all.

Also, thanks for the response. The forums also dishearten me because I feel like it’s falling on deaf ears and that.

>> The forums also dishearten me because I feel like it’s falling on deaf ears and that.

What?
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.
.
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Hah! Couldn’t resist! Note that I had to actually read to the last line in order to even see your note!

— Robert

* Wyrom was just vaporized!

I’m sure you couldn’t resist 🙂

My point with that sentence was to illustrate a general misconception I had about the official forums. There’s tons of rules, and I am willing to posit that a vast majority of the player base doesn’t post here. To what extent the forum is read I don’t know, but I can only get an idea of the usage by responses.

With so much red tape, and a pretty reasonable level of staff posts / responses, it was just natural for me to think that posts are generally read by staff. Lots of posts are read, and probably by more than one staff member. But other times it really does seem like deaf ears, though one can be surprised from time to time when a staff member chimes in.

In any case, my number of warnings is practically tiny (N=2…can’t run statistics on it). Still, the circumstances of my first one just didn’t pass any sanity checks. Posts had been pulled, and the moderator came in and made a post politely asking people to be civil. I scathing post against someone I have respect for, with some pretty choice words, was left to sit there, quite happily, above the moderator post. So I said “whatever this is ridiculous” and I pasted that quote as my new signature, and went on my way checking the forums. As you may guess or know, I got into big trouble because it was “not the way” to deal with it.

Right. Because moderating a forum and leaving things that are clearly against forum policy right above a moderator’s post is the way to deal with it? I just saw it as a glove thrown down and I said yeah sure I know how to play this game, and here’s about to be my first formal warning, but I’ll sacrifice it for a cool guy I want to defend and bite the bullet.

But that’s what I was talking about with needing more moderators, insisting that forum policy should be more clear as to how to go about a case if you read something absurdly offensive, or that an entire thread should be checked before action is taken.

No edit button.

>I scathing post against someone I have respect for

I see a scathing post against someone I respect for

In any case, the whole point I’m getting at here is the forum policy, including the updated one, just tells us what not to do. It takes experience to realize how to report violations and other things. For me it took getting in trouble. There’s no easy mechanic to flag a post for review. There’s not even a thread where you post. You better ought to just know the email address, change your web browser tag, copy and paste, and ask for moderation.

It isn’t transparent. It’s obtuse.

And I think we would all like a nice forum to discuss this game we all invest a lot of time and money into. So yeah, I’m pretty “meh” about a few more rule changes for the forums on how you can get hammered when there are probably more pressing issues as I’ve pointed out.

I think you make some great points around instruction, reporting violations, etc.

Reporting Violations: I’d much rather leave that to the forum moderators to handle (or not handle). I’m not really interested in determining or calling out others posts as inappropriate and frankly I’m not sure having that feature on the forums would be a benefit to the forum moderators (e.g. now instead of reviewing and moderating they also have to slog through a pile of inappropriate post reports). I get that others may want to take a more active role in this… just not sure that, other than making some people feel good about getting to report posts, it is a net benefit to the forums or the mods.

Regarding Policy and how you can get hammered: I’ll admit that I can’t tell you all of the rules and regulations in place for this forums… I read through them and then promptly forgot them (for the most part). If you treat others with respect, or at least don’t tread them like pond scum, and discuss ideas rather than people you’ll probably avoid most, if not all, of the areas where your posts might get pulled (that and profane/lewd comments). If you find that you just can’t avoid responding to that individual (I have no specific person in mind here) in a way that gets you in trouble then use the ignore feature or just avoid responding to that individual and move on. Do we really need more detailed instructions than that (or something close to it) in order to avoid getting into trouble here?

Sure some people like to walk the line and rules lawyer… I suspect they generally already know when their posts are inappropriate or not but its mostly a game for them.

— Robert

* Wyrom was just vaporized!

How were the rules relaxed?

NEVER NOT POST

I’ve been waiting a bit before posting my thoughts. I’m torn, on several levels.

First, I need to get this out:

>>Our Community Leaders are held to more strict rules, in that you will lose your Name in Blue status upon one warning.

This is perhaps my biggest challenge to overcome personally. There doesn’t seem to be anything that says “and furthermore, if you are a Community Leader, you also cannot. . . ” There still seems to be one standard against which all will be measured (amongst the non-staff names). Instead, I’m now faced with a potential privacy issue, in that it will be immediately evident should I receive a warning. Something that, I believe, for most non-staff name members remains between staff and individual.

But – I don’t believe it is ‘new’. I think rather it is now simply stated publicly. And I think that for the most part, these statements provided have long been operative (with perhaps a short duration ‘break’ from some of the tradition.)

I have yet to decide precisely what I personally will do with this challenge. I know the preferred answer is ‘just don’t – and it won’t be an issue.’ That doesn’t answer the privacy issue, though – and yes, I do still get in my own way sometimes.

>>How were the rules relaxed?

I can only answer for myself – but I think there was an earnest attempt to permit a bit wider a range of expressive exchange when sharing ideas on these forums. I very likely overdid it. I did purposefully go a bit beyond what I would normally do. I can justify it to myself all day long, but that doesn’t mean it was right. It never ceases to amaze me how often I can be 100% technically correct, and still not be right.

I have privately offered my apologies to staff members affected by my ‘relaxed’ posting style. And I do regret that I contributed to the downfall of the more freely expressive environment. Perhaps, over time, we can reload the thought and give it another round – see if at least I’ve managed to learn a thing or two.

Doug

>Instead, I’m now faced with a potential privacy issue, in that it will be immediately evident should I receive a warning.

You can pre-empt the possibility by publically resigning NIB status.

…

I think what is really needed is moderator posts when standards are enforced. Merely pulling posts without a notice that they have been pulled gives the wrong guidance to the general readership about what is allowed, because they’ve already read the offending post and concluded that this sort of thing is allowed. It may be apparent to a GM view that a post has gone, but the normal player view gives no indication that any action has been taken unless the moderator posts to say it has been. I think I’ve seen more players posting complaints about their posts being pulled for no good reason than I have moderators posting that something has been pulled. It gives a really bad indication of the standards expected on the forum.

I reckon automatically posting “Some post(s) in this thread were hidden” every time a moderator clicked on whatever tool they use to hide posts would do more for maintaining standards than any amount of policy tweaks. (even though I would recommend a tweak to forbid commenting on specific moderator actions, the other game forum I’ve frequented a lot makes a big thing of that and is far better behaved than this one)

>How were the rules relaxed?
If you don’t say when you hide a post, it looks like you aren’t hiding posts, and it looks like the posts that would have been hidden previously are no longer being hidden. Whether or not the rules were actually relaxed, that is the impression that was given when moderators stopped posting about hiding them. One hundred people read it and think “This is OK” and only the poster gets told that it isn’t (and is likely pretty annoyed because its no worse than a hundred things that they’ve seen no action taken on beforehand and it looks like the moderator is picking on them)

I usually spot hidden posts, if at all, because the sequential post numbering, isn’t.

That method fails utterly, however, for anyone who is reading in threaded view, or By Subject–or By Author, or By Date–rather than By Number.

>I usually spot hidden posts, if at all, because the sequential post numbering, isn’t.

This is also a side effect of having no post edit feature. I’ve caused huge gaps in post count from repeatedly “editing” posts on here.

>Rathboner’s post

The posts in question should just be edited by a mod to say “This post has been hidden”.

If someone’s overly worried about people knowing they had a post pulled, they should either stop posting, start posting better, or realize that what people think of them on a forum for a text based game from the 80s is irrelevant.

~ Methais

Everyone who receives a caution or warning is emailed such at the time of the post being pulled with the violation that was incurred.

The forum rules were relaxed in that we’re not pulling posts if a thread doesn’t take the shape we want it to, like what was done in past. Heated disagreements can stay on the forums. But the moment you start pushing on another player or concentrate on them, rather than the post, that’s when we have problems. When we relaxed it, people took that as an open invite to name call, shame, ridicule, and become vulgar. That was not what it was about. We are not here to babysit.

The posted policy updates are mostly not new. The forum ban is now structured, because there are a lot of warnings happening with no impact. The Community Leaders are something I plan to revive this year, and that rule was a rule when they were instilled. We just made it clear where something gets pulled and the violations they will carry. There are a handful of people that think because we don’t discuss disciplinary actions, that they are getting off with a slap on the wrist.

I have plans to update the policy link here on the forums to reflect my post.

Wyrom, PM

>>You can pre-empt the possibility by publically resigning NIB status.

What good would that do? Every Community Leader faces the same issue, and my ducking out (publicly, privately, through contrived means) doesn’t solve anything. That’s avoidance; not something I personally am – nor wish to be – generally known for. Yep, something about getting in my own way.

I’ve been thinking across the decades about what might or might not be good for forum moderation. The first would be a private / small group message capability. Yes, I know – email is supposed to provide that here. But email is so 20th century. Anyway, that’s the carrot side of the equation.

The stick side is simple. If your post is pulled and you receive notification, one day ban from posting. If your post is pulled and you’re cautioned, one week ban. If you upgrade yourself to a warning, one month ban. After the first warning, the first two categories are tripled, and the second warning leads to the current stick.

My reasoning is simple and sound – if you can’t spot a post that causes a problem and is likely to be pulled, you need a few ‘non-threating’ lessons. But such behavioral lessons are never learned without pain / reward. And if you can spot a post that causes a problem and you want to join in the fray anyway, the ‘non-threating’ pain is there to slow you down and cause you to think outside of the emotion.

For me personally, it would be absolutely alright for the Forum Moderator to also provide limited and anonymized information when ‘our emotions’ are running away with us. This probably wouldn’t be used in singular instances, but might be useful when several of us are engaged. Something like:

From: GS4-ModeratorName

Date: Some Future Date

Time: Probably earlier

Subj: Re: The current rave

Text: I want to remind you all that while discussing ideas and sharing thoughts is encouraged, our <link>policies</link> require respectful dialog. To this point, I have had to issue several <link>notifications</link> and a couple of <link>cautions</link>. My actions are merely to remind us all that we need to stop and count to 10. I have had to help some of you to do so, and it gives me no pleasure. Please help me help you.

Signature

As an additional matter, I would suggest stopping the closing of threads. Solicit the right behaviors, adjust where the behavioral adjustments are necessary, and let the dialog roll.

There are only three problems with these suggestions that I have yet to see a solution for.

Doug

P.S. No ewes were harmed in the making of this post, and any use of ‘you’ is not intended to characterize any specific individual or group of individuals.

>Every Community Leader faces the same issue…

What issue are you referring to? Being held accountable?

~ Methais

>My reasoning is simple and sound – if you can’t spot a post that causes a problem and is likely to be pulled, you need a few ‘non-threating’ lessons. But such behavioral lessons are never learned without pain / reward. And if you can spot a post that causes a problem and you want to join in the fray anyway, the ‘non-threating’ pain is there to slow you down and cause you to think outside of the emotion.

If they have to provide individual lessons to every poster, thats an awful lot more work for the moderator than if they make it public when they are taking action.

100 people seeing a post telling them that something they have read has been hidden, is an awful lot more effective at conveying the general standards to the general readership than 1 person getting an email and 99 people thinking the post they have read was fine. Even if that email and the way the penalties are structured is very effective at what it does, thats still only one person that has got the right message and the other 99 people have got the wrong message about what is allowed.

First impressions count, and when the 99 first impressions are that something is allowed to others, I don’t find it surprising that Wyrom notes there are “a lot of warnings happening with no impact”

>The posts in question should just be edited by a mod to say “This post has been hidden”.

I don’t think how a moderator hides a post is important. I do think its important that people that have read the post before the moderator hides it, get some sort of signal that says something required action. The way these boards are structured, I think that requires a post from the moderator at the time the action is taken.

>>If they have to provide individual lessons to every poster, thats an awful lot more work for the moderator than if they make it public when they are taking action

I agree with most of this – especially the ‘more work’ part as processes are presently set up. That would need to change, yes.

I don’t think it would be anywhere close to 99(%) people who see it, and come to appreciate because it was hidden that it probably is a lesson to draw from. And I supplement that by the belief that very, very few active (any level of activity) customers go back and check threads for continuity – with even fewer looking for deleted / hidden posts.

>>I do think its important that people that have read the post before the moderator hides it, get some sort of signal that says something required action. The way these boards are structured, I think that requires a post from the moderator at the time the action is taken.

This makes me think we’re pretty close in our understanding of the impact of just hiding / notifying a post. I too think some signal would help. I just don’t think the message will ‘reach’ as many. And I suspect the reason, to date, is the processes still attempt to address the issue in a 1:1 fashion – even with a general note. Still, an improvement, agreed.

Doug

>I don’t think it would be anywhere close to 99(%) people who see it,

I don’t know how many people read the boards, so I don’t have a good basis for generalising the huge number of abusive posts I’ve read into the numbers of people that read any particular abusive post. 10-100 lurkers per regular poster, 1-10 regular posters reading the abusive messages before a moderator, and thats how I get my order of magnitude estimate

However, for private exchange between moderator and poster to be effective at disseminating standards, it would have to be the norm that the moderator read every abusive post before anyone else did, and I don’t think it gets anywhere near that either, because I’ve read an awful lot of abusive posts since moderation went private.