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

[Cutlass]

Making the forum work socially?

This.

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 Of that over 200 people invited to IALS just 1 1/2 years ago, more than 100 are no longer active in CFC at all.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?

 

[The_J]

Not all.

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.

No, you weren't "pretty clearly" saying that. Some posters do hate some staff; that's true on about 99.99999999% of forums

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.

 

[Birdjaguar]

This was very well said and pretty much spot on.

I went through the thread and came up with seven different things of varying importance to talk about, whether they be suggestions or complaints. They are, in summary:

1. Perceived misdirection of infractions.
2. Moderator inconsistency.
3. Favouritism or systematic bias against certain posters or groups of posters.
4. The usefulness of discussing things with moderators in private/transparency of the staff decision making process.
5. General angst at the PDMA rules.
6. An argument for limited PDMA.
7. The attitude of staff towards OT in particular.

Spoiler :

That seems to me a fairly exhaustive list of the general complaints made in the thread, and I'll go into each of them in more detail. My response to the complaints should not be taken as the final word on the matter, because, as I said, the main reason I was doing this was to bring points to the staff discussion(s) we are currently undertaking. Just because I disagree with points doesn't mean we won't discuss them in staff (and likewise, just because we discuss points in staff doesn't mean we'll agree with them).

1. Perceived misdirection of infractions. Specifically, there were complaints comparing the treatment of spam to the treatment of trolling, and complaints comparing the treatment of relatively innocuous trolling to the treatment of obnoxious thread-wrecking trolling.
   
   With regards to the first point of the treatment of spam as compared to trolling, the general argument made was that spam seems to be treated more harshly than trolling in a lot of cases (though some may be making a veiled complaint about poster-specific rules). I suppose this is a reasonable complaint in that trolling is more damaging than spam, but then look at the following graphic:
   
   Spoiler :

   
   
   That would be 944 trolling or (minor) trolling infractions as compared to 268 spam or (minor) spam infractions. It does not fit with my experience that spam is targeted more than trolling. A specific complaint was that sometimes spam is seen to be infracted, when a trollish post is let go, but this is assuming that no action on the trollish post indicates a conscious decision to not take any action, and also assumes that the we should not infract rule-breaking spam, simply because there are other rule-breaking posts out there that are worse. If the intention was to make a more coherent argument than this, it was not successfully achieved.
   
   With regards to the difference between relatively innocuous trolling and the more obnoxious trolling that ruins threads, that's not necessarily an area of disagreement with moderators. One of the problems is something that taillesskangaru alluded to; that we can't crack down on this more obnoxious type of trolling without being at risk of opening ourselves up to accusations of bias (which is an accusation that is apparently levelled anyway). We have made a massive step to try and eliminate this to the extent we can, through the implementation of Red Diamond threads. However, no-one seems to use them. We've given you the tools to help solve this problem, but those tools aren't used. There isn't much we can do about that.
   
2. Moderator inconsistency. There were a few general complaints about moderator inconsistency, but it's worth noting that these feel into two distinct categories. One argument is that moderators are inconsistent in their interpretation of the rules. The other argument is that moderators do not apply whatever their interpretation is in a consistent manner. The former would be inconsistency with one moderator reading the rules as meaning X, and another as reading the rules as meaning Y. The latter would be inconsistency with both moderators reading the rules as meaning X, but one applying them to give 1 point, whilst the other gives 2, or alternatively, one rule-breaking post being infracted whilst another has no action taken on it. Again, worth noting that these are actually separate objections.
   
   With regards to the first objection, it is felt within staff that this is the more serious type of inconsistency. If moderators are applying completely different sets of rules, that's a bigger problem than if one is harsher than the other in their application of those rules. However, it is also felt that this type of inconsistency is not a serious problem at the moment, and indeed, most complaints were talking about the other type of inconsistency. Why this is not a serious problem is largely to do with how staff comes to their decisions. We work on consensus. KD has stated that there are often different opinions on posts, but that what we then do is actually discuss the issue or post and reach some sort of compromise. So even if one moderator were to have a different opinion on an issue to another, staff discussion of these issues means that we don't end up applying outlying interpretations.
   
   There is also a system of peer review, in two senses. The first sense is that any moderator is free to tell another moderator that they think they were wrong with a particular issue or infraction. If I think another moderator has doing something incorrectly, there is no reason why I wouldn't, behind closed doors in the staff forum, raise that with them. It does not reflect well on the moderating team if appear to be inconsistent, so there is a clear incentive there for us to actively review what others are doing. Secondly, there is the official review process. This is not often used, which is very surprising (and will tie into the fourth point of this post, I guess). I don't think people realise that this is quite a fair system! If someone wants to challenge an infraction of mine, it is no longer a decision in my hands. I can argue my position to the supermod review panel, just as the infracted person can, but they are just as restricted from the supermod forum where these reviews take place as I am. I do not see reviews of my moderator actions. I just get a decision in the end. People should exercise their reviewing rights more often.
   
   Now, the key point raised with the second type of inconsistency was that sometimes that of two posts that equally break the rules, only one is acted upon. The tried and tested lines in response to this are that if we don't see it, we can't act upon it. Reporting a post drastically increases the chances that we will see it (though, because of OT moderator inactivity lately, we haven't been getting to all reports, so sorry about that). We try to be consistent in this regard, but staff doesn't view it as being a travesty if some posts get missed. Moderation is not all about 'punishment' (and I'll expand upon what this actually means in the next paragraph). It's also about deterrence. If a couple of posts are not infracted where they perhaps should've been, most people are still going to know what is and what isn't acceptable. If we let it go too often, then the standard will get confused, certainly, but it's not really a big deal to miss one here or there. That doesn't mean we miss them on purpose, or that we don't want to not miss them. But we don't consider the issue paramount.
   
   One supplementary issue raised was that people are often 'punished' for small infringements (and perhaps this fits best under the first point of this post, but meh). But are infractions and warnings really punishment at all? We do often refer to them as punishments, but this is probably a misuse of the word, in such a way that the complaint doesn't really make as much sense. An infraction does not in any way impede your use of the forum. It does not change your accesses, permissions or privileges. To analogise (and I use the a parent-child example simply because it's good for illustrating punishment), if a mum said to her child, "don't do that again or I'll send you to your room," we would not consider that punishment. It would only become punishment if the child were actually sent to their room. But that's effectively what an infraction is (although in a lot of cases, it's, "don't do that again 7 more times within the next 10 days or I'll ban you for 7 days"). If you are banned, then that is a punishment (although only one that is preventing you from posting on an internet forum for a shortish period of time), but before that it's not actually impeding you in your use of the forum at all.
   
3. Favouritism or systematic bias against certain posters or groups of posters. There was no real agreement in the posts on this issue. The only common thread between them was, "there is a bias against me" (with perhaps one exception). Apparently we are systematically biased against those on the right, those on the left, longstanding members, and anyone other than longstanding members. To be honest, this is not an issue that is going to be entertained much, because we have satisfied ourselves that there is no systematic bias, and think the accusation is rather absurd. If people want to engage in conspiracy theory, that's up to them. That is not to say that all complaints are entirely unreasonable; some would say that there is an unintentional bias. But given the diversity of moderators and their opinions, we find this extremely unlikely. The report and infraction statistics posted for 2011 (as linked to in a previous post) do not statistically prove that there is no systematic bias by particular moderators against particular posters, but they do strongly indicate that. They don't show whether we've unfairly targeted a particular poster, but seeing as we have no reason to, and seeing as infractions are given out by multiple moderators to those people who may feel they are being targeted, there aren't really strong enough grounds to waste our time looking into it in more depth, when there are more pressing issues on the table.
   
4. The usefulness of discussing things with moderators in private/transparency of the staff decision making process. The first point here regards privately communicating with moderators. Moderators are required to reply with 24 hours, and if yo are unhappy with the response, you can take it to a super moderator. But we do actually try to reply and be helpful, believe or not. People should try it before they knock it.
   
   Some people may be jaded by their experiences coming out of exchanges following infractions. This may be because when you ask about an infraction, we give you the reason for that infraction. This often means simply pointing you to the rules. We don't go into a deep and meaningful about the reason for the rules, because we don't think it's necessary to reduce those sorts of conversations to first principles. The assumption is in you posting at this site that you will abide by the rules whether you like them or not. By giving you an infraction, we are telling you that you are not abiding by the rules in some manner. Asking why the rules exist is a different question to asking why you received an infraction. You should only really contest an infraction if you disagree that what you posted was not against the rules. If your issue is with the rule itself, that's irrelevant to the discussion of the infraction. So if you are approaching us about an infraction, we're not as inclined to discuss why the rules are as they are. People may find it better to approach a moderator when they are not directly complaining about a moderator action, if they wish to extend the discussion to why a rule exists.
   
   The other point was transparency of the staff decision making process. This doesn't purport to being transparent. If you aren't convinced that your points are being taken into account in staff discussion, there's not much we can do about that. We can't prevent you from having wrong ideas about staff. We have made attempts to make the process more transparent over the last year (such as by announcing the permanent point scheme and discussing the Red Diamond scheme, which are two rather unprecedented moves), but that doesn't mean it's likely that we're going to completely open it up. Staff discussions are obviously going to remain in staff.
   
5. General angst at the PDMA rules. Not much to say about this, other than there is zero possibility that we are going to completely get rid of all PDMA rules.
   
6. An argument for limited PDMA. This is where the argument against PDMA gets more reasonable, because it acknowledges that we can't just get rid of all PDMA rules. Should note that only one person is actually arguing this point (and one other is kinda supporting it). Let's not labour under the assumption that this has been a widespread sentiment expressed in the thread. There is a suggestion to allow some limited PDMA, and a list of advantages to go with that suggestion. However, the disadvantages are drastically understated, and those advantages overstated (although not all completely wrong; some would certainly be advantages).
   
   Let's start with some of the stated advantages. It was said that posting 10 separate examples allows for an underlying trend to be identified. It doesn't. It allows 10 separate examples to be identified. Underlying trends are bigger than 10 separate examples. It was stated that that was an arbitrary number, but I'm not saying there's anything significant about the number '10' itself that makes it bad for identifying underlying trends. It would take far more for any reasonably cogent argument to be made, with posters only having the outward signs of infractions to rely on (it's not like private infractions or infractions on deleted posts could even be used but by the poster who received them, and then there is no public record for others to look at some of the context themselves).
   
   It was said that public discussion would allow for others to add additional suggestions or 'nuance ones already stated'. It was also said that public discussion occurs anyway, just offsite. If that's the case, what's to prevent people from building their argument through offsite discussion before submitting it privately to the moderators? There is no specific advantage in allowing this process to occur onsite.
   
   It was said that limited PDMA would allow the mods to actually take the pulse of the community, rather than work based off of scattered PMs. This only holds if you assume that a limited number of limited PDMA complaints amount to the pulse of the community. In this thread, we can see, what, max. 10 people complaining? How is that representative of the OT community anymore than our daily interaction via PMs with posters is?
   
   It was said that limited PDMA would give the forum the impression that we actually care. I'm not sure how that argument follows at all. Us disagreeing with people is often taken as us not actually caring, so I don't see why it'd be different in this case.
   
   It was said that limited PDMA would allow frustrated posters the knowledge that their problems are, in fact, being addressed. Yet it remains that limited PDMA would not provide them with this, as issues would not be able to be fully explored, and conclusions would never be satisfactory. If people wish to labour under the false impression that the review system doesn't work, that's not our problem.
   
   It was said that limited PDMA would give people a precedent for the future, but this is not really the case with the suggestion, which is meant to be dealing with underlying trends, and not specific cases. There is also far too much variation in contexts for precedents to be anything other than misleading (well, I guess they could be helpful in some limited circumstances). Staff has rejected previously the idea of publishing examples as precedent.
   
   It was said that limited PDMA would foster a friendlier community atmosphere between moderators and forum-goers. This is an absurd proposition. The opposite is the logical conclusion. Allowing limited PDMA is establishing an official system of public us vs. them. Forum-goers complain, and moderators have to respond to the complaints. Unless the moderators decide to agree (in which case they shouldn't have issued infractions in the first place), or the forum-goers conceded their point, the thread would foster a friendlier atmosphere no more than this thread does. This is a particularly odd point to make when we are talking about OT, a place where the vast vast majority of antipathy comes from people arguing against each other.
   
   It is highly likely that, given enough combined effort, users would be able to identify errors of the moderating staff. What does this tell us though? That the moderating staff is fallible? That they are not professionally trained? That there is not 100% consistency? The only actual findings that could be made that would make any sort of difference to anything would be if you were able to expose completely outrageous moderator behaviour, which simply doesn't exist. Otherwise it's just fairly nitpicky quibbling. But nitpicky quibbling that is a waste of time and drastically decreases the effectiveness of the volunteer moderating staff.
   
   Any sort of PDMA means that moderators must do more work to defend their decisions. These decisions are usually quite trivial, and one of the biggest problems staff is facing at the moment is that of moderator workload, so allowing limited PDMA would certainly not help in this regard!
   
   Any sort of PDMA would politicise the role of moderators, but making them reluctant to make unpopular decisions, even if they are correct decisions.
   
   No moderator is going to want to moderate if they have to face a public inquisition about their actions.
   
   Public discussion of moderator actions, as opposed to the current method, restricts the freedom of moderators to have their own opinions. If I am discussing an infraction in staff, I can strongly disagree with another moderator. If I am discussing it out in the open, I cannot do that, nor would I want to.
   
   Understanding a moderator action often involves knowing context and history that only moderators and the poster involved can understand. Bringing a discussion of this to a public forum means that that context and history must be fully explained to provide an adequate explanation. That is not feasible, and would rely on private information that an observer would not be able to verify one way or the other anyway. Say you wanted to point out what you thought was bias against poster X, because you could see a pattern of their posts getting more points that similar posts by other users. Explaining this would involve explaining the entire history. If infraction histories and all staff discussions were public, then an observer might be able to verify this to a greater extent, but that is not the case, nor is it going to be. Also, in this discussion of poster X would inevitably be questions of why specific posts were infracted, which may involve looking at the specific context of the post in relation to the user's history. This would also require in depth explanation, and would no longer be limited PDMA. This follows into the next point...
   
   I can't think of a way to allow limited PDMA without opening the floodgates for more-than-very-limited PDMA. This would carry all the disadvantages that just getting rid of the PDMA rules as a whole would.
   
   There are probably other disadvantages, but that's what I've got off the top of my head.
   
   Perhaps one of the biggest points of all, no argument has been entered as to why perceived OT issues should be the basis for a CFC rule change, or how this change would be beneficial to CFC as a whole. Any major rule change such as this should be driven by the necessities of CFC, not OT. In what way do the arguments apply to the rest of CFC?
   
   So all of these disadvantages, and yet the option of using specific examples remains. Just through private communication.
   
7. The attitude of staff towards OT in particular. It may seem at times that moderators are rather curt in dealing with OT problems. This may be, a lot of the time, because OT is on the periphery of where staff's attention should be, but always in the centre of where staff's attention actually is. OT issues necessarily detract from the focus we give to other issues, and so OT complaints necessarily impact on our work at CFC as a whole. Just as a example of that, I've spent about three hours reading this thread and writing a response. That three hours (minus server interruptions) could've been spent doing a lot of other things for the Civ5 section of the site. This applies to a lot of the non-OT mods who are dragged into this sort of thing. OT is important to CFC from a business perspective, but from the perspective of what us as staff are meant to be doing, OT is near the bottom of the list. So we may get a little indignant when yet more OT issues pop up. We have to consider how those issues impact on the rest of the site.

That took a while to write, so my focus may have been a little all over the place, and I might have missed some points. Sorry if any of it is unclear.

 

[Birdjaguar]

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?

OT is a community of smart people who are often less concerned about rules and more interested in participating under their own terms. You ask a difficult question. I would suggest the following as an answer:

Less moderation
More freedom to "chat"
Fewer constraints on language
More spam
More humor
Fewer concerns that irreverent posts will get you banned
More opportunities to demonstrate who you are and not run afoul of the rules

 

[Atticus]

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.

 

[Disgustipated]

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.

 

[The_J]

I'm not sure if this is the appropriate thread for this, but I do want to ask.

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

 

[ParadigmShifter]

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 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).

 

[BvBPL]

BJ Said:
The attitude of staff towards OT in particular. It may seem at times that moderators are rather curt in dealing with OT problems. This may be, a lot of the time, because OT is on the periphery of where staff's attention should be, but always in the centre of where staff's attention actually is. OT issues necessarily detract from the focus we give to other issues, and so OT complaints necessarily impact on our work at CFC as a whole.

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.

 

[Birdjaguar]

BJ Said:
The attitude of staff towards OT in particular. It may seem at times that moderators are rather curt in dealing with OT problems. This may be, a lot of the time, because OT is on the periphery of where staff's attention should be, but always in the centre of where staff's attention actually is. OT issues necessarily detract from the focus we give to other issues, and so OT complaints necessarily impact on our work at CFC as a whole.

Did I really say that?

 

[Camikaze]

Actually, that was me.

 

[Tee Kay]

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.

 

[BvBPL]

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

 

[Tee Kay]

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.

 

[Lefty Scaevola]

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

The OT tail wagging the Apolyton dog seems to have been a significant factor in Apolyton's decline, depending on which schismatics you speak with.

 

[Birdjaguar]

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.

Every problem has a best solution; give me a few minutes with my ouiji board and I'll have it for you.

 

[Camikaze]

As much as I am very much of the opinion that OT is not an integral part of the Civfanatics business (community is another question, but even then, OT is the estranged distant cousin of the core CFC community), I would hate to see it go. I started off in OT and worked my way to the Civ forums from there. I pretty much still consider OT my 'home' forum at CFC. There's a difference between wanting to look at ways to minimise the amount of attention staff has to give to moderation issues (and not being particularly excited about more of those moderation issues cropping up), and wanting to get rid of it entirely (and that probably wouldn't be a good business decision either).

 

[Boundless]

North King, a lot of what you suggest is what SF is for. It's perfectly fine to discuss rule changes, or discuss rules in general. The only thing we disallow is specific PDMA.

As for taking the pulse of the community, we've had in the past couple of years, 2 OT surveys - the first one had a bunch of responses, the second one, hardly anyone responded. We also have a rules discussion group - both of those - the surveys and the rules discussion - HAVE helped moderators get the pulse of the community and changes were made because of those things. We also make changes due to suggestions in posted right here in SF.

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.

 

[trader/warrior]

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.

 

[Joecoolyo]

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.

[Like]

^Pretend that I clicked that