Just read through this thread...

I will say, I appreciate the moderators caring enough to contribute to this discussion.

I'd also wish there was a simple voting mechanism, so people could vote comments up/down. Perhaps that would be a good way to give posters feedback as to the value of their comments. And if I could sort my view that way, I'd automatically get to the interesting content. I'm not here every day, so perhaps I'm not typical, but I think it would make my usage of the forum more pleasant.

So I think we have the multi-post thing solved, based on the lack of overall comment. So I'll go ahead and assume that everybody involved either agrees or is willing to put aside their disagreement and work with the stuff I outlined as a guide. So let's move on to what looks to me to be the other major topic in this: quantity vs quality posting. So let's dive in...

I talked a bit before about personal experience on how a poor posting reputation can make even helpful posts appear in a bad light. And about how difficult it is to shake free from the bad rep as well. Been there, done that, decided not to get the commemorative t-shirt. Summary: it's easy to earn a reputation as a "bad" poster, and it's hard to dig out from under that rep no matter how helpful you become.

But... we don't have any specific rules on quality vs quantity. I mean, ideally we'd be a site chock full of poeple posting a lot of high-quality posts. Give me both quality and quantity? Yeah, sure - as a community builder, I don't think I could ask for anything else.



But within a community as a whole, some posters are simply going to be more active than others. So while in theory I would love to see everybody post 20-30 awesome posts per day, that's just not how it works. Some people post 1 awesome post a week and lurk the rest of the time; some make 4-5 great posts a day and a similar number of spammy posts; some are prolific and get high post counts with the great majority being great stuff. That's just how forums work. Frankly, we want all those people to feel comfortable here to post. Yes, even the low quality poster.

Because, again, your reputation is yours to control, not ours. If a poster regularly gives bad answers to rules questions, the community quickly learns that and knows they need to jump in and correct answers regularly, lest some newer player head off with bad information. Similarly, if a poster regularly makes posts that are, essentially, contentless the community quickly learns to just skip over what that poster has written. (And this was my personal bugaboo I talked about earlier.)

That's just how communities work, and it's how ours will work too. What we - the staff - find unacceptable, though, is comments such as, "Poster X, your comments are horrible. Go away!" Or even, "Gods, why do you even bother? Everything you post is meaningless dribble." The first example is flaming. It's not severe - I could certainly write something way more scathing, with little effort. But it is flaming, and it is something we're simply not going to allow. The second, ironically given what it's intended to reply to, is spam. It's contentless, it offers no discussion, no help, no facts. Again, it's something we don't want (though there's give and take with some off-topic spaminess since it's just the nature of forums).

And those sorts of things are what I'm seeing here in relation to mjack. (And in fact, they've appeared in this thread just since I've started typing this post, based on what I'm seeing during preview.) Mjack and everybody else is going to develop their own reputation, for good or ill. I can't control the reputation that grows from posting habits. I can however control replies to the reputation when those replies cross the line of the Code of Conduct. (And, to be complete, when the reputation-building posts also cross the line, I can control those too.)

And so we're back around to talking about the tools to resolve the problems. And they're the same basic tools as what we talked about with double posts: ignore and reporting to the mods.

Ignore is a great feature on forums, for those who find certain posters beyond reason for whatever reason. You can remove Poster X's posts from general view, but still see the content by clicking what is essentially a spoiler button. Yes, it doesn't remove the content when somebody else quotes it; the software isn't sophisticated enough for that (doing so would be difficult, given the technical structure of the forum both from the database side and the front end screens). As is, though, it removes the worst of it. Everybody should have enough self control to handle the little bit of Poster X's comments they see in quotes.

The rest of it - the spam, the flames, etc - is something for the staff. I know ORCs gave moderators as a whole a bad reputation with this group. I understand why, too. But we're not ORCs. And in fact, a lot of our moderation theory can be summed up as: what would an ORC do? OK, let's do the opposite. We want to have open discussions; we want to take time to explain a warning; we want to avoid giving warnings and bans; we want to build the community and be in the community rather than just sitting above it. Hopefully we've shown that here. For all the content I've removed from this thread so far, nobody has received an official warning, even though some things crossed the line. We'd rather cajole and nudge and explain rather than make like Catholic school nuns and get out the ruler to smack across your knuckles.

We know that, unfortunately, we're judged based on the reputation the ORCs earned. Hopefully, we've been able to move past that. And if so, please let us help your community by reporting problems instead of responding to them. I really wish I would've been made aware of mjack's posts and the replies to them weeks ago. Instead of having some pretty easy issues to deal with, we now have a situation where I'm writing mini novels, except they're nowhere near as entertaining as a novel. What maybe could've been fixed with a couple PMs and maybe a few mod-voice posts instead has resulted in a situation where we have a multi-page thread that was all but necessary as a means to do nothing more than press the proverbial reset button.

So, again, I've typed more than enough words. I still want this to be a discussion and not a lecture, so I'll stop hear and open things up to you folks to respond. I will remind everybody that this is not an open invitation to criticize mjack, and that I do recognize the line between discussion in general and mjack is blurrier than usual here. So let's try and talk about the behavior - posting a lot with perceived low-quality - without making it specific about mjack as much as possible. Much like with double/triple/etc posts, I want to hear your thoughts based on what I have here, and we'll work out solutions from there. Tell me why ignore+report won't work, or whatever else we need to go over here. Again, open discussions are good so let's have that.

Quickly before I grab my lunch...



Great suggestion! There's a thread on the metaboard specifically for suggested improvements to the site. Would you mind taking this idea over to that thread so our site admin can see it and respond to the feasability of it?



This has come up, and we decided not to implement it because we didn't want "down voting" on posts. Too often, based on experience, a down vote isn't based on post contents but the poster's name instead. And so while there are consequences to the actions associated with being perceived as a bad poster, we didn't want that to be one of them.

All posts, however, do have a "like" button - essentially anonymous "up voting" on the post. We felt that was a fair compromise, since it does allow a community to recognize espeically good posts whether they be answers to questions, guides and FAQ type posts, something really funny, etc.

OK - off to get lunch. I'll respond to questions and comments later; I want you folks to have your say before I jump in again.

Actually Car, Stevo let me know that might be considered a personal attack to I took it down a few minutes after I posted it.
This is the first time it's really seen the light of day.

Voting up/down comments like Reddit is The Worst Idea Ever.

Also, I really hate Reddit.

Also, hi, I'm sort of from the old forum. I'm DroneOn's husband. I suspect she'll register at some point. I only lurked the old forum because there was too much noise to signal ratio.

Good to see you.
Ask her to hop on and play tonight. It would be nice to get her into a ffa finally.

Back to being kind of on topic... Welcome.

And the double-posting irony continues!



I sure think so. I think it's clearly stated what the expectations are and, it's both clear what to do as the one making the double-post, and what to do as the poster.


Yeah...a very talkative group over here. More than a few are keeping the post about this place on WotC bumped, and have links in their sigs over there. So, hopefully a few more of our old friends will find their way over at some point.


From what I've seen, I think most people here are already past that. *Didn't expect to see ORC's taken down by Goblins...but there you go*
It's a whole new world over here, and, within this subforum at least, I don't believe I've really seen anyone take exception from anything a mod has done.


Again, I can only speak for myself, but, in the past, I never wanted to report anything; well, very little at least. Mostly due to the ORC's and how they would handle it. Here, I understand that reporting is not going to cause more issues, as it often did over there, but actually fix them, and prevent future ones.


But, it's a quality post (see what I did there) and gave me some good reading during lunch.

We actually sold our PS3 and joined the PC Gaming Master Race.

^^ I would too if it wasn't for japanese video games. And the ability to play Spyro the Dragon. And the fact that I can't play shooters with a mouse to save my life, which is the real deal breaker.


@fire, the mods are better here.

Damn. I'm still having the card art issue on my old rig.
Guess I'll remove Zero from the friends list.
We'll play in March when I get my new PC.

We can certainly agree to disagree on whether up/down voting is a good or bad idea. But it would help your position if you at least would give an opinion for your position that does not revolve around your hatred for another site. Please note that I gave two reasons why I thought it was a good idea from my perspective.

They have already put in the ability to up vote or "like" things.

Yep, that was the compromise that we were comfortable with. It allows for members to recognize the good posts - whether deck lists, FAQs, good answers to tough questions, something funny, whatever - without the potential stigmas that can get attached to dislike/down-vote/etc.

It looks as though the conversation has probably run its course. The thread will remain open, of course, and I'll pop back in if anybody posts any questions or further comments. And as mentioned a few times, I (and the other mods) have an open PM box, so if you ever need to get my attention for whatever just drop me a note.

I'm seeing more reported posts popping up here, so I think that's good. I know a few of them are stuff I asked people to report while having PM conversations, just to make it easier for me to find. But the number of reports is more than what was requested, so I find that encouraging. Hopefully that means we'll be able to avoid the downward spiral things fell into before this conversation.

I'll close out this one by saying a big thank you to everybody here. It's a credit to the DotP community that we were able to have this conversation with no real problems at all, and instead worked through the issues and came to - I hope - a better place. We're happy to host you fine folk here, and we're looking forward to seeing continual growth from your community!

Kheldar I got a question for you while you're on the subject, I've had some problems with my mouse lately, basically the same that mjack had when that discussion was going on. So far I have been able to delete my doubleposts, but I'd like to know how the "soft delete" functions? I can still see my post shaded but can others see it aswell or is it just me and you mods? I guess I just want to know if it makes a difference, I did some reading in the FAQ and it wasn't very clear on that note.

Great question Baxer! That's a nice, new feature that Welder implemented. When you soft delete a post, only you and the mod/admin team can see it. Other users are not able to see it at all. I'll mention it to the team, since the FAQ and such was created before the soft-delete function existed.

As for the double post question. Still not really sure on that. We know that there are functions built in which prevent users from posting twice within a few seconds, however, it's very clear that there's some type of workflow that circumvents that, and causes the double posts. So, while we keep trying to figure that out, just keep doing what you're doing; deleting the double posts when you are able, and reporting them when you are not.

Just so everyone knows, when you post, you are able to delete your own post, but only if you do it before someone else posts on that thread. Once there has been another reply, only a mod/admin is able to delete (which is why you would need to report it).

Thanks

Thank you for that reply! I don't know bout the posting limit but I can see how that would be a fix to my doublepost problem, but I can tell you that from my end there is a problem with the mouse, doubleclicks on singleclicks are obviously common by the research I made on google and there are fixes for that, I just don't want to download homemade apps, I don't trust people on the internet that much, also I can open up my mouse and adjust the spring but I'm not yet sure I want to risk breaking it in the process.

Yes, there's something in place that prevents you from posting (not just on one thread, but globally, throughout the forum) more than once in within a few seconds. But, as we've discovered, faulty (for lack of a better word) hardware gets around it. Hence, the double-post issue. I'm pretty sure Welder recreated it, but we're still not sure how to prevent it.

Thanks!

*runs into the thread late*

Hello there! How are you doing today? I'm just stopping by to say hi and introduce myself to the forum. Meant to do it after Kheldar made that initial post but got distracted. Kheldar is most likely going to remain the more public face in here (at least for the time being) but I will be keeping an eye and an ear out if anyone needs anything.

Just to reiterate a point Kheldar made above me if you do see any content that you believe violates Code of Conduct please free to report it to us; that button is there for a reason. We try to remain vigilant about whats being posted but your reports help us to do our jobs quickly and more efficiently.

Oh and congratulations on becoming, give or take, the largest sub-forum on the site.

I agree with the moderators' conclusions about down-voting, but I like that they have up-voting here, that's something I wanted over at the WotC forum. I do like the idea of being able to sort by votes though.