I'm not in favor of deletion either. How about enabling the ignore feature on the board if the code allows it? Certainly I know of a few cases that would have been handled sensibly by choosing to ignore rather than having to duke it out.
That could even reduce moderation volume, because users can just choose what posts are worthwhile considering and which aren't and hence keep threads alive even if someone goes bonkers.
As an update, we're currently working out how to make forum rules and conduct more visible. These are not actually available anywhere although I suspect the forum transition from the old forums is the cause of this.
Well, being completely honest, until recently the pressing need for a clearly defined code of conduct has not been a issue. Just like for the longest time we didn't need a drama policy.
While everyone has probably read the bad stuff about Arrowmaster by now, I'll like to also point out the things he does in the background for wowace:
- Helps to debug and fix problems in libraries that are shared by popular addons.
- Ensures that all existing and new libraries on wowace has consistent naming.
- Reverts changes of new authors and translators that breaks working addons and libraries, usually within a few minutes of their commits (particularly on the old 1-big-svn with the old wowaceupdater).
- Actively locks access to projects from public commits if required to do so to prevent further damage.
- Actively maintains the Rock and Fubar libraries after ckknight has stopped doing so, and also the Ace2 libraries.
These, and much more, are valuable contributions to which he seldom receives credit for. Now I'm not saying he did not cross a line. He certainly did and it will be dealt with. I'm mainly posting this so that everyone can see the not-so-nasty side of Arrowmaster and what he does for wowace, which has partly contributed to the admins/mods closing an eye.
Very good point. Arrow has done great things and not just the ones you list and may be hidden from the eyes of a lot of us. It doesn't take a lot of forum searching to find many a helpful posts of his. In fact this community is full of people who contribute a lot of time and effort to make cool things happen for all of us and this is something to be very grateful for.
Indeed. Arrowmaster, tekkub, and many of the other members who people complain about have done _a lot_ for this community and for WoW addon development in general.
We often times forget about that, and again to those I want to say thing you.
I'm not in favor of deletion either. How about enabling the ignore feature on the board if the code allows it? Certainly I know of a few cases that would have been handled sensibly by choosing to ignore rather than having to duke it out.
The Ignore feature IS already enabled, though it won't work on forum staff obviously.
The problem with that is, it's wrong to make it up to the individual member to sacrifice potentially hundreds of useful posts just to avoid having to delete a few bad posts, IMO.
Good deeds don't erase bad ones though, nor provide immunity towards future negative behavior. I really don't like the concept of turning a blind eye to someone because they do you a favor. Who knows how many great and productive people that person is turning away from your community by being hostile.
I can understand hostile comments with someone how has proven to be incorrigible, but not to established users who have a history of positive contributions or to new users who have no history at all.
Edit: Ignoring also makes conversation confusing when someone asks a question, receives an answer from someone they ignored, and wonders why they don't receive an answer :P. But if someone whose behavior is accepted by the community bothers you, it's really your only recourse.
When you ignore someone, their post just becomes collapsed ala the official WoW forums, so you would still see that there's replies.
It's really a hairy subject, this, but rest assured that we are working on it and will do our best to pick the lesser evil that hopefully will better the community for all :)
And Tek, you can say welcome to the real world, but come on. It's your jobs as moderators to keep the forums peaceful. This doesn't have to be the elitist jerks site, but there are times around here when comments could have best been just kept to whoever posted them.
People don't have to be sickeningly sweet, but how is being polite really that much to ask?
lol three pages ago, damn you bastards doing shit while I'm asleep. To be frank, I wish we had Dattebayo's ban policy... Piss of a mod, banned. Ask a question that's answered in a sticky, banned. Flood the site with automated requests, banned. Look at someone even slightly funny, banned.
To quote the tanuki in Sholazar Basin, "we just hate stupid"
Per-thread ignore would rock, then I could finally ignore those damn Pitbull threads that sneak their way onto my "New Posts" list.
I second that.
Back on topic, I get used to Tekkub and Nev people being a bit rough sometimes. I have often realized I did/said something stupid and they did not get too far. In contrary, I still cannot get used to Arrowmaster. Some of his posts often make me mad even if I am not involved in the topic. Whatever positive thing he did, it does not allow him to be complete dick.
lol three pages ago, damn you bastards doing shit while I'm asleep. To be frank, I wish we had Dattebayo's ban policy... Piss of a mod, banned. Ask a question that's answered in a sticky, banned. Flood the site with automated requests, banned. Look at someone even slightly funny, banned.
To quote the tanuki in Sholazar Basin, "we just hate stupid"
Per-thread ignore would rock, then I could finally ignore those damn Pitbull threads that sneak their way onto my "New Posts" list.
Posts like these belong in the elitist jerks forums, not at wowace. I like you alot Tek, but why behave like that? New users and people coming here to ask questions don't technically know you like those of us that have been here for a long time.
That is at the core of the issue though. Some people are not very welcoming around here and some of them are on the mod staff.
I do agree with Kaelten that some flaming is OK, but in a specific sense. Flames happen as part of heated debate, that's fine. The drama policy works well for that case, debate escalates, people are warned, and if that doesn't help it's time to put in a stopper. But sometimes around here people get flamed to enforce a culture or to define who is welcome or not. That is not OK. And that's where the drama policy has failed and resulted in actually locking fine topics for the wrong reasons.
But this is the stretch. Extremely accomplished people also look to go for the harsh treatment of others. Problem with this is that just a few harsh folks can define the culture and peck at what they don't like and basically get it if it's not countered or declared unacceptable.
I do think mods need to sort among themselves how to handle this and what environment this ultimately should be. I don't think it's a matter of mod rules, rather one of outlook.
See?... that rant of Tek's was sarcasm. (Granted, not 100% sarcasm... ;) )I know that, others that know him know that. But, not everyone will know that.
its unfortunate that sarcasm often requires a tone to it that written word cant distinguish. i admit than until seerahs post i was about to write an angry reply about not letting this community turn into EJ (where i somehow managed to get an infraction for not having an addon list... in a PM.)
Thanks Elsia for starting this conversation and for trying to keep it tactful, and thanks to the forum/site staff for attempting to discuss the issue openly and constructively.
I think most of the points I'd have made have been brought up already. I guess for now I'll just throw out there that while I feel strongly that we should avoid the (albeit sarcastically mentioned) way over-the-top level of moderation on EJ, maybe things could still be dialed up a notch.
In particular, it's been acknowledged that some prominent members of the community can be rough around the edges or loose cannons or whatever from time to time. I think that there should be some combination of a stronger hierarchy of forum moderators with active, level-headed people at the top who can steer conversations away from trouble without stepping on too many toes. Kaelten and others are awesome at doing this, but often their time is put to better use than scouring every post on the forum.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that maybe WoWAce could use some particularly affable moderators who are primarily here to moderate (as opposed to being moderators out of recognition of technical contributions to the site or whatever).
Failing that, maybe some kind of way to post voting/scoring system would allow the community to police itself by sinking non-constructive posts and elevating useful ones.
That could even reduce moderation volume, because users can just choose what posts are worthwhile considering and which aren't and hence keep threads alive even if someone goes bonkers.
- Helps to debug and fix problems in libraries that are shared by popular addons.
- Ensures that all existing and new libraries on wowace has consistent naming.
- Reverts changes of new authors and translators that breaks working addons and libraries, usually within a few minutes of their commits (particularly on the old 1-big-svn with the old wowaceupdater).
- Actively locks access to projects from public commits if required to do so to prevent further damage.
- Actively maintains the Rock and Fubar libraries after ckknight has stopped doing so, and also the Ace2 libraries.
These, and much more, are valuable contributions to which he seldom receives credit for. Now I'm not saying he did not cross a line. He certainly did and it will be dealt with. I'm mainly posting this so that everyone can see the not-so-nasty side of Arrowmaster and what he does for wowace, which has partly contributed to the admins/mods closing an eye.
We often times forget about that, and again to those I want to say thing you.
The problem with that is, it's wrong to make it up to the individual member to sacrifice potentially hundreds of useful posts just to avoid having to delete a few bad posts, IMO.
I can understand hostile comments with someone how has proven to be incorrigible, but not to established users who have a history of positive contributions or to new users who have no history at all.
Edit: Ignoring also makes conversation confusing when someone asks a question, receives an answer from someone they ignored, and wonders why they don't receive an answer :P. But if someone whose behavior is accepted by the community bothers you, it's really your only recourse.
It's really a hairy subject, this, but rest assured that we are working on it and will do our best to pick the lesser evil that hopefully will better the community for all :)
I know how discouraging it is when you do do good things but people only focus on the bad.
lol three pages ago, damn you bastards doing shit while I'm asleep. To be frank, I wish we had Dattebayo's ban policy... Piss of a mod, banned. Ask a question that's answered in a sticky, banned. Flood the site with automated requests, banned. Look at someone even slightly funny, banned.
To quote the tanuki in Sholazar Basin, "we just hate stupid"
Per-thread ignore would rock, then I could finally ignore those damn Pitbull threads that sneak their way onto my "New Posts" list.
I second that.
Back on topic, I get used to Tekkub and Nev people being a bit rough sometimes. I have often realized I did/said something stupid and they did not get too far. In contrary, I still cannot get used to Arrowmaster. Some of his posts often make me mad even if I am not involved in the topic. Whatever positive thing he did, it does not allow him to be complete dick.
Posts like these belong in the elitist jerks forums, not at wowace. I like you alot Tek, but why behave like that? New users and people coming here to ask questions don't technically know you like those of us that have been here for a long time.
I do agree with Kaelten that some flaming is OK, but in a specific sense. Flames happen as part of heated debate, that's fine. The drama policy works well for that case, debate escalates, people are warned, and if that doesn't help it's time to put in a stopper. But sometimes around here people get flamed to enforce a culture or to define who is welcome or not. That is not OK. And that's where the drama policy has failed and resulted in actually locking fine topics for the wrong reasons.
But this is the stretch. Extremely accomplished people also look to go for the harsh treatment of others. Problem with this is that just a few harsh folks can define the culture and peck at what they don't like and basically get it if it's not countered or declared unacceptable.
I do think mods need to sort among themselves how to handle this and what environment this ultimately should be. I don't think it's a matter of mod rules, rather one of outlook.
I think most of the points I'd have made have been brought up already. I guess for now I'll just throw out there that while I feel strongly that we should avoid the (albeit sarcastically mentioned) way over-the-top level of moderation on EJ, maybe things could still be dialed up a notch.
In particular, it's been acknowledged that some prominent members of the community can be rough around the edges or loose cannons or whatever from time to time. I think that there should be some combination of a stronger hierarchy of forum moderators with active, level-headed people at the top who can steer conversations away from trouble without stepping on too many toes. Kaelten and others are awesome at doing this, but often their time is put to better use than scouring every post on the forum.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that maybe WoWAce could use some particularly affable moderators who are primarily here to moderate (as opposed to being moderators out of recognition of technical contributions to the site or whatever).
Failing that, maybe some kind of way to post voting/scoring system would allow the community to police itself by sinking non-constructive posts and elevating useful ones.