Who Moderates the Moderators?

[mansa]

Do we have our new moderator team? Who's on the list?

Was there a vote process that I missed, or were they simply appointed? If so, by who?

I see a couple of people with the title, but I didn't see any kind of news about it, other than a post in ATS, which didn't really give any kind of details on time frame or how it was going to be processed.

Ath made an introductory post here:
https://gdb.armageddon.org/index.php/topic,59147.0.html

More details are still being worked on by the new Moderator team, but the decision was to implement the new moderators immediately, and let the staff stop moderating.   One could wrongfully call it "working agile".

[LindseyBalboa]

I think we should all just take a breath and give everyone some time. We have returning staff, we have new staff. We have a new moderation team. There's going to be some growing pains as everyone tries to pick up the pieces. It's a process. Drink some tea, take a walk, breathe some fresh air, and wait for things to settle.

Even as spicy as I have been feeling, I agree 100% with this. Take a deep breath and give things a chance to shake out and work through the bumps. It has literally only been a few days. You don't fix decades of mess in that short of a time frame. For better or worse we all love(d) this game so the instinct to meddle is high, but at this point, a lot has been said.

Now let's just give them a chance to take action without nitpicking every single step. Do I have reservations? Plenty. Do I have hope? Yeah, that stubborn bastard won't go away.

But if we breathe down their neck every step of the way (positive or negative) it's not going to help at all.

+1. I realize a lot of people have been playing a lot longer than I have, and everyone has their own way of feeling about recent changes. In my experience it's much more efficient to outline a task, and then wait until it's reached benchmarks of completion - testing it at varied points along the way of the process. That isn't to say feedback isn't important at all, it's incredibly important and a transparent community is an optimal gaming community; but now that things have started to change there's a need for building (growing/evolving processes) as well as testing and feedback.

[wizturbo]

More details are still being worked on by the new Moderator team, but the decision was to implement the new moderators immediately, and let the staff stop moderating.   One could wrongfully call it "working agile".

I think this is fantastic move.  The staff should be developing things for the game, not dealing with community issues.  This separation is essential.

[DesertT]

I think we should all just take a breath and give everyone some time. We have returning staff, we have new staff. We have a new moderation team. There's going to be some growing pains as everyone tries to pick up the pieces. It's a process. Drink some tea, take a walk, breathe some fresh air, and wait for things to settle.

Even as spicy as I have been feeling, I agree 100% with this. Take a deep breath and give things a chance to shake out and work through the bumps. It has literally only been a few days. You don't fix decades of mess in that short of a time frame. For better or worse we all love(d) this game so the instinct to meddle is high, but at this point, a lot has been said.

Now let's just give them a chance to take action without nitpicking every single step. Do I have reservations? Plenty. Do I have hope? Yeah, that stubborn bastard won't go away.

But if we breathe down their neck every step of the way (positive or negative) it's not going to help at all.

+1. I realize a lot of people have been playing a lot longer than I have, and everyone has their own way of feeling about recent changes. In my experience it's much more efficient to outline a task, and then wait until it's reached benchmarks of completion - testing it at varied points along the way of the process. That isn't to say feedback isn't important at all, it's incredibly important and a transparent community is an optimal gaming community; but now that things have started to change there's a need for building (growing/evolving processes) as well as testing and feedback.

+2

Good Stuff!!

[Seeker]

I think we should all just take a breath and give everyone some time. We have returning staff, we have new staff. We have a new moderation team. There's going to be some growing pains as everyone tries to pick up the pieces. It's a process. Drink some tea, take a walk, breathe some fresh air, and wait for things to settle.

Even as spicy as I have been feeling, I agree 100% with this. Take a deep breath and give things a chance to shake out and work through the bumps. It has literally only been a few days. You don't fix decades of mess in that short of a time frame. For better or worse we all love(d) this game so the instinct to meddle is high, but at this point, a lot has been said.

Now let's just give them a chance to take action without nitpicking every single step. Do I have reservations? Plenty. Do I have hope? Yeah, that stubborn bastard won't go away.

But if we breathe down their neck every step of the way (positive or negative) it's not going to help at all.

+1. I realize a lot of people have been playing a lot longer than I have, and everyone has their own way of feeling about recent changes. In my experience it's much more efficient to outline a task, and then wait until it's reached benchmarks of completion - testing it at varied points along the way of the process. That isn't to say feedback isn't important at all, it's incredibly important and a transparent community is an optimal gaming community; but now that things have started to change there's a need for building (growing/evolving processes) as well as testing and feedback.

+2

Good Stuff!!

Yes.  We should be willing to expect and forgive missteps in the process and to allow the possibility that something that doesn't work well at first might be real solution after it works through it's growing pains.

[Vwest]

Do we have our new moderator team? Who's on the list?

Was there a vote process that I missed, or were they simply appointed? If so, by who?

I see a couple of people with the title, but I didn't see any kind of news about it, other than a post in ATS, which didn't really give any kind of details on time frame or how it was going to be processed.

Ath made an introductory post here:
https://gdb.armageddon.org/index.php/topic,59147.0.html

More details are still being worked on by the new Moderator team, but the decision was to implement the new moderators immediately, and let the staff stop moderating.   One could wrongfully call it "working agile".

First, why was my thread thrown into this one? I kept it separate for the specific reason of not wanting it to be associated with the out-the-gate flippant negativity of the OP in this thread and because I wanted very specific information that would be available for everyone to see at a glance, because as of that time there was no information made available if you aren't hanging around in the Discord. There was no reason to moderate that thread in any way, but here we are. I'm really curious about the who / why my thread was moved, given there was no name associated with the moderation, or reason given.

Second, based on the information in that thread posted by Ath (https://gdb.armageddon.org/index.php/topic,59147.0.html), you were chosen (by staff) to work with Ath (the staff in charge of this -- sorry, "liaison"), to hand pick the people you two want to be on the moderation team, without input from players at large. Staff can volunteer to join the moderation team and are, of course, to be interviewed and decided upon by you (chosen by staff) and Ath (staff "liaison"), possibly with the input of the other people you two hand picked to join the moderation team.

From what I can see, players will be unable to see these interviews or weigh in on them at all, nor do players, save for those specifically chosen by you and Ath, have any real voice in who they would be comfortable having the power to take their voice away, on a whim, no less. There is no preview of transparency and everything surrounding moderation lies behind closed doors, in the hands of staff and those chosen by staff, without real input from the general player base.

Moderators and Staff:
1. Community members may be timed out, or banned, temporarily or permanently, for breaking the rules.
2. Bans are usually the result of escalated, repeat, or egregious offenses.
3. Do not discuss the specifics of another person's ban or moderation in the
general channel. Provide any feedback about moderation using the modmail feature.  (NOTE: this is a Discord feature, we're investigating how to report for GDB concerns.)
4. Moderators have the authority and responsibility to make judgment calls on issues that arise.
5. Please do not repost or quote any comments that violate our guidelines. Doing this encourages continued violations. Instead of engaging, please ping @Community Moderator or send a message through @ModMail  (NOTE:  Once again Discord features, please utilize the report feature in the GDB to report posts you feel break the rules, and please reference the rule(s) you feel are broken.)
6. Do not @Staff, @Armageddon Producer, @Armageddon Admin, @Armageddon Storyteller unless it is a game-breaking situation. Please respect their time, they are people too.

Literally nothing has changed, except now staff can blame players for the heavy handed moderation. After all, this is the player moderation team, Ath is just the liaison, right?

The goal is to allow for players to self moderate the community with staff empowering them as best we can.

I'm going to be completely honest with you, Mansa. This entire setup is identical to what we had before, with a new coat of paint and a change in language.

Staff are still dictating who can be moderators, staff are still moderating the forums like they always were, with the entire process is kept behind closed doors (no logs of interviews, no player input on who is/isn't on the team, no disclosure on actions taken, etc) and based entirely on the whims and interpretations of those with the power to take away peoples voice. We have threads being moderated without name/reason behind the moderation actions (literally see my first point)... I can go on, but I feel like that would unnecessary, given what I've got is already more than enough to make my point.

You're playing a part in perpetuating the problem that lead the community here in the first place, Mansa. You're either being duped, or you're happily going along with it because now you have the authority to make executive decisions on other players and their opinions on things. I'd love to say I'm surprised by this entire thing, but we're just repeating history again.

We've been here before. Aren't you all tried of the same old song and dance?

[Jimpka_Moss]

Guys, you don't go to the Employer, and ask for a Union. I thought we, the players, were all in a general understanding that we should form our /own/ set of representatives. What was that quote, you can't dismantle the Master's house using the Master's tools? I also don't see a shred of 'our responsibility to players' listed there. What is even happening back there, behind that screen? ::peek veil::

[Narf]

We've been here before. Aren't you all tried of the same old song and dance?

Not really.

It may look the same, but the most important part is different. The incentive structure. Player moderators chosen in this particular fashion wouldn't be as strongly motivated to protect staff from accusations of abuse as moderators in the old structure. Not to say there's /no/ incentive, just that it's much weaker than it was before.

The whole hyper-democracy system you're proposing would probably break down from lack of interest after a few months. It's got too many moving parts, and people are only really jazzed about thread moderation enough to keep it going right now.

The above isn't meant as an ideological statement about how things SHOULD be. It's more of a "This is the way it's going to work because this is the way humans work, for better or worse".

[Maziel]

We've been here before. Aren't you all tried of the same old song and dance?

Not really.

It may look the same, but the most important part is different. The incentive structure. Player moderators chosen in this particular fashion wouldn't be as strongly motivated to protect staff from accusations of abuse as moderators in the old structure. Not to say there's /no/ incentive, just that it's much weaker than it was before.

It is better, but also ...

wouldn't be as strongly motivated to protect staff from accusations of abuse as moderators in the old structure

I heard Mansa was in voice with Halaster for awhile, and then next thing he's disrespectfully derailing my thread. Baselessly asserting authority without attempting or being able to justify it to achieve your goal (derailing my thread because you don't like it or me) isn't new. It's not supportive of an open discussion of the topic, which is all I ever really want.

There's definitely a possibility of turning it around, but I've gone from initial optimism to disappointment pretty fast so far.

[Doublepalli]

I think we should all just take a breath and give everyone some time. We have returning staff, we have new staff. We have a new moderation team. There's going to be some growing pains as everyone tries to pick up the pieces. It's a process. Drink some tea, take a walk, breathe some fresh air, and wait for things to settle.

Even as spicy as I have been feeling, I agree 100% with this. Take a deep breath and give things a chance to shake out and work through the bumps. It has literally only been a few days. You don't fix decades of mess in that short of a time frame. For better or worse we all love(d) this game so the instinct to meddle is high, but at this point, a lot has been said.

Now let's just give them a chance to take action without nitpicking every single step. Do I have reservations? Plenty. Do I have hope? Yeah, that stubborn bastard won't go away.

But if we breathe down their neck every step of the way (positive or negative) it's not going to help at all.

Sounds like you want to return just don't have the stomach for it yet

[Narf]

We've been here before. Aren't you all tried of the same old song and dance?

Not really.

It may look the same, but the most important part is different. The incentive structure. Player moderators chosen in this particular fashion wouldn't be as strongly motivated to protect staff from accusations of abuse as moderators in the old structure. Not to say there's /no/ incentive, just that it's much weaker than it was before.

It is better, but also ...

wouldn't be as strongly motivated to protect staff from accusations of abuse as moderators in the old structure

I heard Mansa was in voice with Halaster for awhile, and then next thing he's disrespectfully derailing my thread. Baselessly asserting authority without attempting or being able to justify it to achieve your goal (derailing my thread because you don't like it or me) isn't new. It's not supportive of an open discussion of the topic, which is all I ever really want.

There's definitely a possibility of turning it around, but I've gone from initial optimism to disappointment pretty fast so far.

All right.

My instincts are telling me that your issues are going to have a higher likelihood of being addressed by having a private chat with the person that moderated you than they will be by tinkering too much with an untested system. 

Reason I say this is that good moderation is a skill as much as anything else. You can tinker with the system as much as you want, but if you boot people before they develop the skills to be decent at it no system is going to work. If, on the other hand, you provide feedback that they can use to increase their skill set, your moderators will get better over time.

[Delirium]

Sounds like you want to return just don't have the stomach for it yet

Nah. I want the game to course-correct for future players.

I posted what I posted this morning and after perusing recent updates I'm back at that .001% shred of optimism.

Ah well.

[Maziel]

My instincts are telling me that your issues are going to have a higher likelihood of being addressed by having a private chat with the person that moderated you

Yeah, we'll see. That's currently part of my reasoning behind my earlier message - I messaged him over 12 hours ago with no response or changes despite other activity since then, but it's hard to read that. He could just really not be sure how to handle it. I am pretty sure I'm on the spectrum (amongst other things) and have really bad situational awareness. Open communication is much easier to navigate. I don't think they should be 'booted' necessarily, but I do think there are legitimate concerns.

Like that he should have messaged me instead of derailing my thread, assuming he had the best of intentions.

[mansa]

With the enablement of ignore lists, you should be able to remove and block certain users on the General Discuss Board.
This will also block private messages from those specific users.


Please make use this new feature!

[Maziel]

With the enablement of ignore lists, you should be able to remove and block certain users on the General Discuss Board.
This will also block private messages from those specific users.


Please make use this new feature!

I think Jcarter's board has had this since 2013.

It's good to have. But also. Anytime I think of communities segmenting themselves, I think of this.

https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/meta-2

[Seeker]

OoooooOOOOOooooo...

I like it already!

[Patuk]

Hi. Please remove the rule that bans talking about.. Bans.

We have a community that got shook up because of long-standing abuse that was covered up, with the people pointing this out getting banned. Staff is open about this, staff agrees that this was an issue, steps are taken to address this - but now I'm violating the rules because I mentioned someone's ban.

Just take it down. By the time someone's banned, all the mods and members of the staff team can already see it. This is the eyes of some twenty-odd people, and history teaches us that secrets are kept poorly. Nobody's dignity is saved here. No peace is kept here. It just keeps people who aren't all OOCly connected from knowing what goes on while the rest of the playerbase gets to eat the proverbial popcorn.

[Malken]

I'm also wondering about this...

Part of the Community Rules is to not discuss the bans of other players.  (https://gdb.armageddon.org/index.php/topic,59147.0.html)
The community rules are something that the staff and moderators, as well as the players, have agreed to. 

Like... Who are these players that agreed to this?

[MarshallDFX]

I can see that one might want to prevent endless toxic arguing *about* bans that have been handed out, or calling for X to be banned constantly, and if you imagine it not being a reasonable request that could get very tedious.

I suspect this is mostly asking staff for a ban list with player name, length of time, and reason.  Which is separate.

But then I suppose if a particular name did not appear, we'd want to argue about it.  But I think in *general* the rule is okay, because surely people could see that being ugly.

I think one needs to bear in mind that the people that post the most might not be representative of 100+ players.  Modding is hard.

[Tailong]

Ah, yes. Lets allow people to continue to talk about an abuser to the abused. I think that's a great idea, and I saw how 'non-toxic'
 that behavior is in the most recent edition of Psychology Weekly *insert sarcasm*

[Halcyon]

Deleted.

[Brisket]

Hi. Please remove the rule that bans talking about.. Bans.

We have a community that got shook up because of long-standing abuse that was covered up, with the people pointing this out getting banned. Staff is open about this, staff agrees that this was an issue, steps are taken to address this - but now I'm violating the rules because I mentioned someone's ban.

Just take it down. By the time someone's banned, all the mods and members of the staff team can already see it. This is the eyes of some twenty-odd people, and history teaches us that secrets are kept poorly. Nobody's dignity is saved here. No peace is kept here. It just keeps people who aren't all OOCly connected from knowing what goes on while the rest of the playerbase gets to eat the proverbial popcorn.

Thirding (Fourthing?) this.  Attacking someone about a ban is bad and should be looked upon poorly.  However, discussing bans and being able to expose things is a positive thing for the community as a whole.  The secrecy only breeds an environment where abuses are able to occur.  The player moderation team has made several errors, mostly because they're acting similarly to how staff used to act - declaring rules they came up with, sans input, and then leaning on the rules they just made up to protect against valid criticism.  One obviously bad actor mod has been removed or quit, thank goodness, and the mod team has done positive thing too, but being able to speak truth to power (and to point at potential problems, like improper or overly punitive bans) needs to be preserved or we'll just slip back into the old way.

In the spirit of Halaster's Moving Forward post, let's move forward as a community, rather than a divided hierarchy of Staff, Mods, and Players.

We're all just nerds writing stories.

[Usiku]

Hi. Please remove the rule that bans talking about.. Bans.

We have a community that got shook up because of long-standing abuse that was covered up, with the people pointing this out getting banned. Staff is open about this, staff agrees that this was an issue, steps are taken to address this - but now I'm violating the rules because I mentioned someone's ban.

Just take it down. By the time someone's banned, all the mods and members of the staff team can already see it. This is the eyes of some twenty-odd people, and history teaches us that secrets are kept poorly. Nobody's dignity is saved here. No peace is kept here. It just keeps people who aren't all OOCly connected from knowing what goes on while the rest of the playerbase gets to eat the proverbial popcorn.

Thirding (Fourthing?) this.  Attacking someone about a ban is bad and should be looked upon poorly.  However, discussing bans and being able to expose things is a positive thing for the community as a whole.  The secrecy only breeds an environment where abuses are able to occur.  The player moderation team has made several errors, mostly because they're acting similarly to how staff used to act - declaring rules they came up with, sans input, and then leaning on the rules they just made up to protect against valid criticism.  One obviously bad actor mod has been removed or quit, thank goodness, and the mod team has done positive thing too, but being able to speak truth to power (and to point at potential problems, like improper or overly punitive bans) needs to be preserved or we'll just slip back into the old way.

In the spirit of Halaster's Moving Forward post, let's move forward as a community, rather than a divided hierarchy of Staff, Mods, and Players.

We're all just nerds writing stories.

Please see here: https://gdb.armageddon.org/index.php/topic,59232.msg1090468.html#new

[Brisket]

That was not posted when I wrote that, and doesn't address the fact that being able to discuss bans should be allowed.  It is a good thing that a committee is being formed though, assuming people with a variety of views are being chosen - for example, I'd very much like it if Patuk submitted a request and was selected.  The PC  should be a bit skeptical of staff, especially early on, in order to help build trust with the player base.

[Windstorm]

That was not posted when I wrote that, and doesn't address the fact that being able to discuss bans should be allowed.  It is a good thing that a committee is being formed though, assuming people with a variety of views are being chosen - for example, I'd very much like it if Patuk submitted a request and was selected.  The PC  should be a bit skeptical of staff, especially early on, in order to help build trust with the player base.

I agree with this.

Player committee members should, at this stage, be people who are pointedly not players who compulsively agree and nod along with anything the staff says.

That's not to say they should be combative, but player advocacy starts with people who advocate for players.