NiroZ
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It seems that there is dissatisfaction brewing. For several months, discussions have shown a disturbing trend to turn ugly. Whether it be straight out insults, personal accusations or flaming, it can't be denied that this forum is not as golden as it used to be.

The most recent hotspot in this sad trend has been over the persistent downmodding of format over content, in particular, downmodding every instance of the :Blowup smile, and triple quotes. After Maurog announced that he was leaving, the Admins annouced why they refused to co-operate. This was then criticised , and the thread unwound into a discussion over the quality of this forum as compared to others.

So rather than continue to hijack other threads with these complains, and other complains that base around problems moderating the forums, please keep all discussion here. The pressing question, as it see it, is "should changes be made to better moderate the forum?" "If yes, should these changes be restricted to the modpoint system?"

In this discussion, please do not go as low as personal accusations of individual forum members (with the exception of Maurogs downmod campaign, which is unavoidable). In order to keep things understandable, it might be a good idea to restate points that you agree/disagree with in your own words, thus making it a lot easier to see when a misunderstanding occurs. Although I have my views on these matters, I'm trying to keep this post neutral to avoid tainting this thread with a discussion over my opinions. I'll post them in a bit.

zex20913
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I think the current system does well, and that people are getting fussy over trivial things. It might be El Nino or something in the air, or global warming, or whatever.

The only issue I have is when a mod goes overboard, for good or bad. Giving a post a +100 is just as bad as giving one a -15, if you're a mod. Unless it's for a contest, or something of the sort. Or if Stefan posts something that knocks all bugs out of DROD, or halyavin proves that P=NP.

At the same time, moderators should be less critical of posts they give positive mods to. They are the only ones who add to the system--everybody else who gives a mod takes at least one point out, and sometimes 3. To maintain an economy of mod points, mods must give at least 50% of all mod points.

Regular forumites should be able to use modpoints and posts however they want, whether it's a blowup crusade, or random mods.

Also, mods should not get fussy, and "reset" a score. If somebody wants to mod a post to -10, there is a reason for it. Resetting that post back to zero means that the original modder wasted mod points that they earned. I don't know exactly where, and I won't name names, but I saw it somewhere. And it made me sort of angry, like we were being run by moral communists. Not all posts are created equal.

In short: Moderators, be less strict in your modding criteria, try to keep it below...+15 sounds good, and don't get morally offended at downmodding.

Finally, it's on topic!

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RoboBob3000
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My favorite thing about the forum is everybody's ability and willingness to recognize issues as non-issues, and dismiss them without a hint of drama.

http://forum.caravelgames.com/viewtopic.php?TopicID=13156&page=0#153354

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Jatopian
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Everyone should click the link in RoboBob3000's post. There's too much damn meta-discussion & drama, and Erik has the right of it.

Now that I've said that,
I think it is one good purpose for moderators to reverse downmod crusades & reset posts. There's one problem with the modpoint mechanics which I once detailed here (albeit with some joking terminology), and the mods help offset that. They could hand out more +1s, but it's hardly critical and given the ways we've treated modpoints recently I couldn't blame them for stinginess.

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NiroZ
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zex20913 wrote:
The only issue I have is when a mod goes overboard, for good or bad. Giving a post a +100 is just as bad as giving one a -15, if you're a mod.

You are assuming, of course, that its a mod who does those things, well, with the exception of 1 moderator who has a tendency to rest negative mods. Bear in mind that there are plenty of people who, for one reason or another, are given large amounts of mod points.

At the same time, moderators should be less critical of posts they give positive mods to. They are the only ones who add to the system--everybody else who gives a mod takes at least one point out, and sometimes 3. To maintain an economy of mod points, mods must give at least 50% of all mod points.

AFAIK, I think that that is what the Admins do. Unfortunately, it comes in waves, making it a bit confusing as to when a post is deserving of a mod.

Regular forumites should be able to use modpoints and posts however they want, whether it's a blowup crusade, or random mods.

And what about when it becomes malicious, like when someone was constantly downmodding Coppro?

Jatopian wrote:
Everyone should click the link in RoboBob3000's post. There's too much damn meta-discussion & drama, and Erik has the right of it.

Now that I've said that,
I think it is one good purpose for moderators to reverse downmod crusades & reset posts. There's one problem with the modpoint mechanics which I once detailed here (albeit with some joking terminology), and the mods help offset that. They could hand out more +1s, but it's hardly critical and given the ways we've treated modpoints recently I couldn't blame them for stinginess.

I agree, but then people who have large amounts of mod points are given even more power, as there are less likely that someone will dispute their mods.

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[Last edited by NiroZ at 06-04-2007 03:51 AM]

schep
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Bah, degradation. Things change as this place grows larger, but I haven't seen much evidence things are getting worse. The DROD forum is not the awesome community it was when I joined; now it's a differently awesome community.

I doubt there's a very serious problem with the modding system. But if the modding system ever gets in the way of anything important, like talking about DROD, the problem can be easily fixed by just disabling the whole post modding thing.

eytanz
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I'm with Schep. Sure, there are occasional annoyances, and occasional flareups, but that's a result of the fact that the forum is growing, and is no longer a group of 30 people who all know each other but rather much larger.

I'm starting to feel that the modding system has outlived its usefulness. At least, I'm open to the experiment of disabling it for a trial period and seeing what happens. But I'm not going to push for this, I'll just support it if Schik decides to do it.

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NiroZ
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eytanz wrote:
I'm starting to feel that the modding system has outlived its usefulness. At least, I'm open to the experiment of disabling it for a trial period and seeing what happens. But I'm not going to push for this, I'll just support it if Schik decides to do it.

And what do you propose we should replace it with? Post count?

eytanz
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No. That was what was there first, and that certainly didn't work, people were posting random posts just to inflate the count, and the situation was a lot more annoying than it is now.

I'd just replace it with nothing. Why do we need a way to rank people relative to each other?

Edit: Alternatively, and maybe even better, how about allowing only upmods?

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[Last edited by eytanz at 06-04-2007 04:50 AM]

Tahnan
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NiroZ wrote:
For several months, discussions have shown a disturbing trend to turn ugly. Whether it be straight out insults, personal accusations or flaming, it can't be denied that this forum is not as golden as it used to be.

I'd rephrase that as "some discussions". And to be honest, I'd deny that this forum has passed some sort of Golden Age and that Everything Has Gone Downhill. Yeah, there've been some problems lately. Of course, a casual search of the forum suggests that things like this--downmods, insults, etc.--have happened in the past: here; here; here...

Also, it's still my feeling that while some of the discussions did indeed get out of hand, there was no underlying problem. Maurog downmodded a bunch of blowup-smilie posts; so what? Someone else was downmodding at random (possibly Maurog, but possibly, or even probably, not him); but really, so what?

NiroZ
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eytanz wrote:
I'd just replace it with nothing. Why do we need a way to rank people relative to each other?

so why has every forum I've been to had some sort of counter? Surly it achieves something?

Edit: Alternatively, and maybe even better, how about allowing only upmods?

As suggested here? I can't say I like the idea.

NiroZ
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Tahnan wrote:

NiroZ wrote:
For several months, discussions have shown a disturbing trend to turn ugly. Whether it be straight out insults, personal accusations or flaming, it can't be denied that this forum is not as golden as it used to be.

I'd rephrase that as "some discussions". And to be honest, I'd deny that this forum has passed some sort of Golden Age and that Everything Has Gone Downhill. Yeah, there've been some problems lately. Of course, a casual search of the forum suggests that things like this--downmods, insults, etc.--have happened in the past: here; here; here...

Ok, my mistake. I've only noticed the problems when people overreacted to Larrymurk preannoucing 'Don't shoot the messenger'(at least, that's what I remember). Considering I had been on the forum for quite a while before that, I assumed that before that, those things just didn't happen.

eytanz
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NiroZ wrote:

eytanz wrote:
I'd just replace it with nothing. Why do we need a way to rank people relative to each other?

so why has every forum I've been to had some sort of counter? Surly it achieves something?

Well, post counts encourage activity, which can be good or bad, and post moderation encourages popular posts, which tends to be good but can be abused. The question is - what happens to a community like ours without such reward systems? I don't know, which is why I suggested disabling it temporarily as an experiment.

Edit: Alternatively, and maybe even better, how about allowing only upmods?

As suggested here? I can't say I like the idea.

Yeah, as suggested there. Like above, though, I personally can't really evaluate these systems in theory. I'd rather have the system changed on a temporary basis and see how people feel about it after a few weeks.

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[Last edited by eytanz at 06-04-2007 05:04 AM]

Tahnan
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eytanz wrote:
I'd rather have the system changed on a temporary basis and see how people feel about it after a few weeks.

Kind of the way the demo-downloading system changed to see how people felt about it? :-)

I still can't help feeling that if it ain't broke, don't fix it, and it ain't broke.

eytanz
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Fair enough. As I'm saying above, I'm not actually advocating changing it, I'm just approving of the idea in theory.

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Jatopian
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I've been part of forums where only upmodding was allowed.
Every one of them sucked, because there was no way to undo the upmods, so most posts were rewarded just for existing, so the system's purpose was defeated.

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silver
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I've been thinking about this for a while, and here's my useless thought:

it's one thing to say, "mod points don't mean anything, ignore them", but that's not the impression someone visiting or new to the forum is going to get: the first thing they are going to see is that posts have little +/- numbers next to them. the natural assumption is that the +s are things the community wants to encourage, and -s are the things the community wants to discourage. people have to actually hang around for a while to be told "oh, those are useless numbers, ignore them."

...in fact, I don't think they were originally meant to be useless numbers. they used to actually represent what we as a community wanted... but the more often we hand huge random mod point rewards and then tell people "do whatever, they're your points" the less that's what they came to represent. the more often we use them as rewards for forum games, the less they come to represent community in the non-forum-games boards.

and so we give a false impression of our community to visitors and new members. and we don't teach new members to use their mod points to encourage helpfulness and discourage jackfoolery -- we teach them to use their mod points to be antisocial idgits: to use their points to harass people, or to mod for format, or to encourage other idgits by modding them up when they brag about their ill deeds.

then, when mod points are actually used to discourage evil, the admins come along and reverse them. it's like the admins WANT the system to reflect randomness...

...which would be fine if they were labeled "random points" instead of "moderation points". if they didn't show up next to posts as if trying to represent whether the post is helpful or hurtful.


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[Last edited by silver at 06-04-2007 05:59 AM]

NiroZ
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silver wrote:
then, when mod points are actually used to discourage evil, the admins come along and reverse them. it's like the admins WANT the system to reflect randomness...

When did that happen?

silver
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Niro, I based that comment on this:

zex20913 wrote:
Also, mods should not get fussy, and "reset" a score. If somebody wants to mod a post to -10, there is a reason for it. Resetting that post back to zero means that the original modder wasted mod points that they earned. I don't know exactly where, and I won't name names, but I saw it somewhere. And it made me sort of angry, like we were being run by moral communists. Not all posts are created equal.

and it reminded me of some vague memories of my own.

--

I can vaguely remember one time I severely downmodded a post because someone told a bunch of people to go f themselves (paraphrased) when they were trying to be helpful. it all got reversed. because apparently be mean to helpful people is encouraged... ...or, rather, neither encouraged or discouraged, because they're "random points" not "moderation points"... ...except it looks like it's encouraged because of the placement of the +/- next to the post.


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[Last edited by silver at 06-04-2007 06:12 AM]

eytanz
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Wait, I don't get it. Why would people bother upmodding posts that don't have any other virtue? I mean, if upmodding was free or very cheap I can see this happening, but if you price upmods like they are in this forum - so you can upmod once per two upmods you receive - then this is less of an issue, no?

Now that I think of it, I think one of the problems in this forum - perhaps the only one - is that there are a lot of people other than mods who have a lot of mod points they got for doing things that have nothing to do with quality of their posts, such as clicking the bar. That basically devalues the whole mod system, as it shifts the decisions away from productive members onto people who have a lot of spare time but not necessarily much else to contribute. Not sure what can be done about that, but if I were an admin, I'd avoid handing out mod points in the future as a reward for anything but good posts.


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eytanz
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Ok, I've seen several references to moderators undoing downmods. Can anyone please be a bit more concrete as to who they are talking about - the actual admins (Schik, Mike, Erik, and Onieromancer)? Other people with unlimited mod points (Me, Adam, a few others I forget)? When did this actually happen?

I'll state for the record that I never reset negative mods except A - if I think the content of the post was such that I would have upmodded it anyway, regardless of the downmod, and B - In one special case, the "anonymous downmodder targetting Coppro" case, where there clearly was no relation between the content of the posts and the downmods. As far as I know, no-one else among the people with unlimited mod point pools has systematically reversed downmods either. So either I've missed something, or there's some confusion here.

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silver
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fortunately, my post reads just as well without the 6th paragraph. feel free to ignore that


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trick
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I think zex is referring to me. I undid a -10 once. I thought I made it very clear afterwards exactly why and that it was a special case; I do NOT have a habit of undoing mods. Oh, and I probably would have done the same thing if I didn't have unlimited mod points. Mods are people too, you know, though we obviously have to be a bit more responsible since we've got unlimited mod points.

So yeah, I try to be responsible. Sometimes if I disagree completely with a mod, I'll mod it one point in the opposite direction. I can't remember the last time I downmodded a post, upmods on the other hand are much more frequent (within reason, and again, I don't mod up negatively modded posts unless I feel strongly about it, and even then no more than one point. Didn't have anything to do with that whole +/-100 business).

Anyways, I can't help but feel that that one demod planted seeds of distrust against me. Would people feel better if I stepped down as a mod? People have to trust the moderators to do whatever they think is best for the forum as a whole, nothing good will come of it if they don't. I won't be a mod if people don't trust me.

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[Last edited by trick at 06-04-2007 06:42 AM]

Mattcrampy
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Was that -10 when Trick reversed a post I made where I joked that you can easily put something in the space made by blowup smilies, and put a whole bunch of blowup smilies there? I certainly hope that no-one took that one seriously, as Trick was pretty quick to point out it was just for jokes and that I'd take it in the spirit it was intended.

I did mod down Maurog considerably in an attempt to startle him into doing something constructive instead of running what appeared to be a vendetta (I did try to be clear that I'd reverse it as soon as constructive things happened). That turned out to be a miscalculation, as it opened the floodgates for others; so from my experience I'd say that it's not downmodding per se that's the problem, but the responsible usage of said power. That's been the chief problem with most karma systems, and the reason why rank points have worked as well as they have is that, for the most part, there's been a correlation between responsibility and having rank points.

So, yeah, opening myself up for being witchhunted here, but if it comes to that, what can ya do?

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NiroZ
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I think this might be of interest.

Alneyan
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NiroZ wrote:
So why has every forum I've been to had some sort of counter? Surly it achieves something?

Odd that we don't use any such system in spoken conversations.

I know a few forums that don't have any working counter; some of them are pretty good, others are awful. There are even places out there that require full anonymity so that only your *message* matters. On the internets, mailing lists, Usenet and instant messaging seem to be doing pretty well without any sort of counter. Some of those are pretty good, others are awful.

Somehow, I have the feeling most individuals do not write helpful content because it will raise their post tally by one, or on the 37.4% chance of being modded up. If not, Slashdot is a paragon of friendliness and constructive exchanges, a unique place in a world where you cannot have one real conversation. Erh.

Tahnan
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Alneyan wrote:

NiroZ wrote:
So why has every forum I've been to had some sort of counter? Surly it achieves something?

Odd that we don't use any such system in spoken conversations.

We do. Smiling, nodding, frowning, crossing one's arms, a wide variety of other signals that indicate how we feel about what the other person just said. Lacking that sort of thing online, a +/- modding system is at least a partial substitute.

Alneyan
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I'd have gone with smileys as an equivalent of these smileys; both can be hard to read, their use may vary, they may not have any actual mmeaning in a context, and so on. But point taken, I shouldn't have walked in "reasoning by analogy" land.

Banjooie
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The only problem with removing the mod point system is that as it stands it's a method of anonymously registering your disapproval of a post, and a lot of people here don't know how to get all up in the 'what the hell are you doing you doof' without things going sour.

Other than that, I approve of it thoroughly.

MeckMeck GRE
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I don't think that this communtiy is degrading. It's changing. At first the new users tend to be very young. 3 years ago, I might have been one of the youngest with 17 years. Today, we have many users who are 9-13 years old. Another thing is the tendence that threads get derailed and off-topic by people who post slightly silly things... (like huge bunches of smilies or claiming that a thread is used for party now). That's maybe degradation, maybe not.

Professionalisation is also a tendency. When I joined the forum, Caravel was just a bunch of talented developers. You had complete freedom to do what you like. You could use Drod screenshots without restrictions, submit holds without controls, mod posts without being critizised, test Beta-Holds without restrictions. Now there are copyrights on almost everything (including holds, mods, comics), most of the services (e.g. Private Beta-Holds and direct H&S)here are commercial and so only available to CaravelNet owners, the highscore system made it impossible to flexibly change holds after they were uploaded. I can't even look at a room in H&S if I haven't visited it; even if I want to. Caravel is a semi-professional company now. What a progress, but what a loss of freedom.

Fatalism, Paranoia, Unkindness. The maybe most dangerous tendencies. People get upset quite fast, tend to be cynical or provocating. People belive the forum/the world goes under when they loose 2 rank points. People are mocking a 9 year old child (Anson). The community lost it's coolness it had 2 years ago.

Despite these tendencies, I think drod.net is still a very good and friendly community compared to other internet communites. There a lot positive things which happend during the last years, valuable new members joined, SubTerra and Wonderquest were integrated, a lot of members produced awesome things for Drod and not for Drod. Clearly we're not going to degrade.. we're just changing and we have to take care for our community and it's members in order to control this change!

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[Last edited by MeckMeck GRE at 06-04-2007 10:55 AM]