It is time for a change in the way things are moderated

And this is precisely where I feel that the situation is failing most.

CFC isn't just a forum about a game series where people come, share about the game, ask advice, and leave again until the next problem comes up. If it was, it would be a far smaller and less successful place.

Instead, CFC is a community. And it would probably be even fairer to say that it is a group of communities, or "neighborhoods" within a broader community. Many of the OT community don't venture much into the games area, and vice versa. World History is neighborhood partially separate from OT, and so is Sports Talk.

Now a lot has been made about the fact that OT is the "bad neighborhood". Fair enough. But it's still a community. It still brings in 100 odd people a day to the overall community. And it still does a lot to keep people involved in CFC who will only on occasions become involved in the games areas.

And it's a community that has been sadly reduced reduced recently.

Yeah, people have been saying OT has been going downhill as long as there has been an OT. We keep hearing that as the excuse for OT not really being worse. But is it true?

Well look at the exodus of people from OT recently.

What makes OT a special community despite being a bad neighborhood is the people there. The ugliness quotient may be fairly high. But the brainpower involved is, quite honestly, amazing.

Or at least it was.

Now, not so much.

If the goal is civil discussion, the methods haven't accomplished that. There is a disconnect. And if extreme leniency is a policy which has served CFC well in accomplishing that in other neighborhoods of the community, it hasn't done so in OT.

I started the Ideas are like Stars..... social group a year and a half ago in large part because of a frustration with OT. It was meant to be a supplement and refuge from OT, not a replacement for it. A sub-community within the overall OT neighborhood. Now I got well over 200 people to sigh up for and it did pretty well for a while. But the format there isn't attractive to people and it had its run, which is past now. Where I am leading with this is that most of the people invited there were active enough in OT that they came to my attention.

Where are those people now? They didn't just leave IALS, they left CFC. Of that over 200 people invited to IALS just 1 1/2 years ago, more than 100 are no longer active in CFC at all.

Clearly there are problems or concerns that have not been addressed.

CFC is a hobby and a community that people engage in voluntarily. Why do so? Because it is enjoyable. Why do people leave? Because they no longer enjoy it.

What would make it enjoyable again?

 

Then we perceive the situation different.
If I deal with a n00b, then the warning/infraction message is often not less than 3 sentences explaining the issue, which is often enough, even for persons with bad English.

And it's not so that the newbies are really a problem here.
Says the person who moderates the area with most of the new users.

And there are idiots (some).
And you can't satisfy everyone.
Saying that there are posters who hate the staff is not really anything unexpected.

 

I agree with what BJ says above.

I'd also like to see some of the OT moderation more steering than punishing. I mean, discussion wuality can't be enforced, but sometimes a mod could tell someone to answer a question he continuously ignores and is relevant for the discussion etc. Sometimes it wouldn't be a bad idea that a poster was told to stay off from a specific thread, and I think that has been tried before.

 

I'm not sure if this is the appropriate thread for this, but I do want to ask. Where did my thread go? I was busy for the weekend, and didn't get a chance to read it before it was deleted. I'm just curious what happened. I'm not complaining or anything. Is there any place I can go to read it? I prefer threads be locked instead of deleted. I really was curious about the discussion on my How important is sex to you thread. I suspect some people were perhaps too graphic describing some things, maybe that's why it was deleted? I was hoping people could use more common sense, oh well. I still would like to read it, however. I didn't get a chance to participate because of my schedule.

 

...which you should do via a PM to one of the moderators who's responsible for that area .

 

I agree with Getafix.

I got told to stay off posting badly translated French rude phrases in the let's talk French thread, that worked

Maybe you should get rid of the troll moderator though... You know who it is. (It's not one of the new wave of mods, btw, in case you get paranoid).

 

As someone who uses aspects of the site other than OT and also posts to OT, I have to say I think the CFF mods should be expected to spend most of their time on Civilization forum issues, versus Colosseum ones. If OT is taking up an inordinate amount of time for the mods then they should rearrange their rules so that less time is taken up on OT. Maybe that means harsher and simpler modding, simply less modding of OT, or just cutting OT out all together. As it currently stands, the actual Civilization forum aspects of CFC effectively underwrite additional modding in OT, a condition that is unfair to people who come to this site for its stated purpose.

In short: the site's name is civfanatics, not offtopicfanatics. I would expect the use of mods' time to reflect this.

 

If moderating OT is so much trouble, and if you're not willing to get rid of it, the mods could just abandon OT to its fate and only moderate the rest of the site.

 

Pardon my mistake, BJ, Cami.
Not moderating OT seems highly unlikely.

 

Then perhaps it should be cut loose; if not the whole of OT, then perhaps the most troublesome aspects of it. OT as it stands consists of 10% miscellaneous threads and 90% political threads. Ban the latter, problem solved. It's not like there's quality debate left in those threads anyway.

In repeated discussions over the years the mods had made it clear that, even if the OT community thinks otherwise, the official line is that OT is not an integral part of the site and will never be. As things stand, any attempt to "fix" OT will fail because the OT regulars and the management are speaking different languages.

From the management's perspective the only practical reason for keeping such a troublesome section of the site is ad-revenue, but then I doubt that if political and religious discussions (which generate the most trouble in OT) are banned, the forum will become such a significantly smaller place overall. Sure, the non-civ-playing, political-hardcore OT regulars will leave, but how many are they, compared to the rest of the people who visit the site.

 

I would suggest that since the first survey and the RDG resulted in no noticeable change, people simply couldn't be bothered a second time. We shout until we are horse, and then give up an leave. As Cutlass said IALS members have dropped like flys, the reason is OT Moderation.

OT should not be viewed or managed like any other part of CFC. It has its own dynamic and should be treated as such. Even though I know it never would happen, I honestly think the moderators stepping away and looking after the rest of the forum would be beneficial.

 

I seriously doubt the moderation has such a big effect on the forum as some here suggest. Back in the older days the moderation was a LOT more inconsistent and more often than not, stricter than it is now. Moderators would openly hold grudges and target specific posters while favoring others. Almost everything people complain about now was much worse in the "golden" days of OT.

I think the problem is a lack of good threads on more day-to-day news, trivia, events and fun stuff rather than every thread having to be some ideological hot-button issue battleground or huge world events. There is IMO a single reason for this, the splitting of OT. What made OT good was the mix of topics about politics, the arts, forum games, science/tech, general fun stuff and whatever comes to your head at the time. The problem isn't as such that these topics now require a few extra clicks to access, though it has undeniably lowered some of their traffic. The problem is that Off Topic threads are now percieved to have to be a certain way, rather than actually being off topic, everything else. In addition to this it seems the posters here when faced with a topic that does not conform to the now standard OT type thread will intentionally run the thread into the ground because they expect it to be closed anyway thereby making it a self-fulfilling prophecy, when in actuality the moderators would have kept it open if they simply acted normally in it.

The way people talk about the moderation around here makes me wonder if there is a seperate OT I don't know about where infractions are given every other post, because in reality the moderation is more tolerant, flexible yet well thought out than it ever was. I think if we are to blame any persons it would be the community and posters themselves. We could use some fresh blood and new thoughts around here.

Haven't read most of the topic so tell me if I'm way off base here.

 

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