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On April 04 2011 11:42 ScarletKnight wrote:
When I first came here back in August this site was a bit of a revelation to me during the beta. It was the most informed, mannered, best web forum/site that I had ever been to, mainly due to the community that it associated with.
Since the release of SC2 however, it seems like the site has been degrading in quality posts day by day. Nowhere is this more apparent than LR threads, and the Strat forum. That seems to be where most of the trolls/bad posters seem to congregate and where bans a plenty are handed out. But it looks to be bleeding into other areas of the site now and even in General and the Brood War sections are starting to feel the hurt. A lot of poor quality posts come from people who have not been here too long (not unlike myself, I'm relatively new around here compared with some people).
I myself though have never been banned or even received a warning for anything I have ever posted on this site. I feel like it's pretty easy to be okay here and not get yourself warned/banned. It's almost puzzling to me to see how many bad posters/trolls inhabit here and I wonder whether they act out of sheer ignorance or potential malice.
The most disheartening thing is to see posters like this get away with what they're doing, and there's little to nothing I can do about it. That being said I have a few suggestions as to what can be done:
1. More Moderators.
- This one is a bit self-explanitory, but I'll extrapolate anyway. More mods = More eyes watching the forum. It seems like with the explosion in the popularity of TL that the amount of mods has not really been increased as well. It's a simple supply demand sort of thing, where as the greater amount of posters should be adequately attended to by the implementation of more mods. A lot of times I see people saying "Well the mods can't be everywhere at once, there's only so many" etc, well then why not increase your numbers?
Find select members here that are willing to receive the responsibility and add them to the mod list. A literal larger physical presence in mod staff could help out immensely as you will have more eyes and more ban hammers.
Perhaps more mods are needed, but then again, everyone who is contributory to the site and/or have been with TL for a year get a report button, this reduces the need for moderators when a lot of respected members have the report button and are active with it. While I don't disagree with the idea of more moderators, I am indicating what to take into account. No matter how many mods there are, you'll never have enough to watch all posts anyways
2. Harsher bans.
- This is my own personal opinion, but 2 day bans don't seem to curtail poor posting. Make bans longer (1 week minimum maybe?) and I think people will be more wary of what they post.
Possibly implement a 3 strike rule of some sort. 3 warns = 1 Week ban. Post 1st ban, each ban gets considerably longer, make the 3rd ban a perm. Zero tolerance.
This may seem a bit harsh, but possibly necessary.
The ban times are subjective, so it's difficult to take your suggestion into account.
3. Zero tolerance.
Speaking of zero tolerance, zatic I believe got this ball rolling in the strat forum. Something like this could be implemented throughout the SC2 section and possibly site-wide.
All of these things seem harsh, but sometimes you gotta slam down that iron fist and say enough is enough.
I added in italics my views of your suggestions. While I think they are thought of in the right direction, they're a bit shortcoming in terms of overall changes. Harsher bans, intolerance and more authority or enforcement might drive more people away than keep down an arbitrary detail of how deterred the quality of these forums are. Additionally, after awhile, those very tactics become more and more irrelevant as people become either desensitized of the punitive actions or simply receive a harsh penalty for what they weren't aware of and thus feel less compelled to ever come back to the site more so than adapt and understand how this website works.
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MURICA15980 Posts
From the staff perspective:
1) It's hard to find the right people. We at TL have some incredibly high standards in regards to staff. We not only require competence, but passion, dedication, and loyalty. Of course, we have "opened the floodgates" to many very awesome staff members recently as the site's features are really exploding, but it seems our numbers are quickly outpaced by the growth of the industry. This is both a good and bad thing in that regards. But in general, finding more moderators is something we are always on the look for but it is a much more difficult job than you would think to magically find 20+ more that would actually let TL be the all-seeing-eye.
2) We usually warn, then temp ban, then keep extending ban lengths for repeat offenders. So we already do what you suggest. The only thing is that so many of our members are new that the problem is usually not the repeat offenders but the large amounts of people who have never been warned or banned.
3) Zero-tolerance is much easier said than done.
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On April 04 2011 10:52 Probulous wrote:+ Show Spoiler +On April 01 2011 05:25 elmizzt wrote:Show nested quote +On March 31 2011 14:48 zab329 wrote:
I find myself reading the OP and ignoring the 50 comments that follow, even if there are valid responses amongst the mass of uselessness, this is not a healthy forum. This is the culprit behind the problem. Personally, I read every post in every thread I respond to, whether I'm the first responder or the thread is 80 pages long. Personally I would love the ability to agree with something some wrote in a thread without having to quote them. I know the up/down thing has been raised many times and I am aware of the opportunity for abuse. I'm not sure how to support an argurment/point without quoting or simply parroting what has been said. Thoughts on a solution: Perhaps instead of up/down, have an agree check box that you can only be accessed once per post. For example Person A says he is awesome, I agree so I click it, but I can only agree once. It removes the opportunity for negative feedback by asking forum members to promote positive posting. I know this may lead to cliques etc but I'm not sure what else to suggest. Oh well thanks for reading 
Ok I know I am quoting myself but I figured it would be better to stay in the same thread rather than starting a new one. My question is simply how would the mods like us to show our support for a particular post?
For example, here is a big thread in SC2 General about blizzards reasons for 1.3 patch
http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewmessage.php?topic_id=209023
On the first page the following quotes state almost the same thing
+ Show Spoiler +On April 05 2011 01:43 Mommas Boy wrote:
It definatley sounds like a Collosi nerf is on the way.
"2.We felt late game protoss splash damage was slightly overpowered. This applies both to high templars and colossi."
+ Show Spoiler +On April 05 2011 01:45 Heraklitus wrote:
Yea, the hint at a possible future collossus nerf is the big news there.
+ Show Spoiler +On April 05 2011 01:47 hunts wrote:
Nice to see they have actual reasoning behind their changes. Wonder what the bunker build time will be in 1.4
yeah it does kinda sound like they're hinting at a collosus nerf.
+ Show Spoiler +On April 05 2011 01:48 BGrael wrote:
The report seems well thought out. Looking forward to the next balance change, maybe it will do something about the colossus. However, just nerfing it won't do the trick I think.
I understand that these posts don't just parrot what has been conjectured but they are all essentially stating the same thing. This is four posts out of 20, just taking up space. That particular thread is now 12 pages long and it would be my guess that a lot of it is about a possible collusus nerf.
My point is that there is no way currently to support a particular post without creating one yourself, which just spams the forums. This is spam from people who actually want to contribute something positive. My example is not the best, it was just the first thread on SC2 General at the time.
I guess exanding on their point would be one way but then I still feel like I am spamming trying to think up something that may not actually be of value.
It would be great to get some advice on what mods think I should do to show my support for someone's point?
Cheers 
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Zero tolerance would be terrible. I have gotten banned 4 or so times and I think except for those few instances I am one of the better posters on this site. If you look where I post mostly it's tech support and the mafia forum where my posts are pretty detailed. If I got perm'd on my third it would of been pretty retarded. As a general rule maybe under a certain number of posts/time on the website and 3 bans you could perm them, but sometimes bans reasons can be so trivial it boarders on how can you leave it at just 3 strikes? Can I make 2 threads and insane posts being an ignorant racist fuck and not get perm banned, but double post a few times and get perm'd? It's a really blurry line and I think the staff does it best on a case by case basis.
Zero tolerance has WAY too many faults on a forum. Too many first time offenses might deserve a perm, and too many people with third offenses might not deserve it at all.
I liked the highlighting/thumbing up posts. I wouldn't just leave it up to staff though. It would be awesome to have a button we can push to get "cliff notes" of the thread so to speak, which filters out all the junk and leaves only the important shit.
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I like the idea of having some sort of way to register agreement. The problem is that there are lots of threads that essentially become debates. Usually one or two people on each side make most of the arguments very quickly. However, it often becomes clear from the following comments that most people agree with one side or the other. I think that's valuable, and given that it exists, of course everyone wants to add their comment to influence the balance of the thread. (Even if readers aren't reading the whole thing, they can glance at it and see which way it's leaning.) The obvious best way around that is to use polls, but people don't think so far ahead as to put yes/no polls in the OP for every controversy that could come up. (I should say that I don't advocate hiding posts without many agreements or anything like that - just something that allows people to get an idea of what the community thinks without reading a little statement from everyone in the community. Maybe a lot of agreements on your post gets you a little icon or something.) Obviously this wouldn't solve the problem, but I think it'd help a little.
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5003 Posts
k, I'm going to speak from the 3 years I've spent moderating a god damn Pokemon forum.
First, you have the recognize the more people that use a forum, the more noise there will be. The increase in amount of noise is enough to stifle intelligent discussion even if you just look at it probabilistically since we all have preferences on how much posts and content we want to see on a page and we naturally judge based on that. Thus any problem regarding the quality of the forum should be addressing this noise issue -- after all, quality forums I think can be measured by a the noise/signal ratio and the more noise there is the harder it is for any legit posts to go through. Keep that in mind if you're looking to tackle this issue.
Rekul
How about if mods can highlight posts? And users can flag posts so that mods can highlight them. Add a filter button to toggle to show only them. Only needed if the thread gets past 5+ pages or something. Would be very useful in threads like LR and the NASL ones.
This is a very good idea on theory but the thing is that there isn't enough mod staff at the moment. It's hard to find a good moderating staff and still look competent -- as pointed out by Klogon. Yes, it is really hard to find good moderators mostly because overall it's really hard to make the mod team as a whole look consistent and afaik this is already kind of an issue.
Honestly the best way as the site gets larger is to diffuse moderation responsibilities to the public. Even with that though I dislike the reddit system (honestly traditional forums are much better for overall discussion of a topic and I can go into reasons why I think reddit systems aren't productive for discussions), their idea of self moderation is kind of what TL needs. Of course TL can implement them in a more traditional, organizational way. While Klogon is likely correct in that TL is probably doing a much better job looking out for potential new mods and such but at least for me and the site that i worked for most staff members had their arms full with whatever they were doing and didn't really have that kind of chance to look for new good posters/forumers actively.
Given that we can't implement an upvote/downvote system to determine if a post should be highlighted or not (i'm sure that requires a lot more coding), my suggestion would be to take Rekul's idea a bit further and give the highlighted posters in SC2 forums the ability to highlight posts. If they do a good job then bam, you have a good banling and you know who to look at in order to recruit new mods. I'm not too sure how often these users read and post in the SC2 forums but if they post/read enough them giving them such an ability would make it easier to determine things in the long run too -- if you're looking for new highlighted posters then just look at the number of highlighted posts users have gotten.
Kill two birds in one stone.
Perhaps more mods are needed, but then again, everyone who is contributory to the site and/or have been with TL for a year get a report button, this reduces the need for moderators when a lot of respected members have the report button and are active with it. While I don't disagree with the idea of more moderators, I am indicating what to take into account. No matter how many mods there are, you'll never have enough to watch all posts anyways
Report buttons aren't an end all solution -- report buttons are great if people are breaking rules but report buttons are terrible if you're looking to up the quality of a forum because it takes context out of everything and usually the iffier posts are quite harmless and their only crime is that they are noise not that they break any explicit TL rules.
Harsher Bans and Zero Tolerance
The thing about these policies is that you have to be really well defined on what you ban and what you do not ban. A lot of "bad" posts don't break any rules and they're quite harmless in nature -- they are simply just noise that clutters up the forum and the noise happens to have a lot of negative externalities when they reach a critical mass (I think i've mentioned that already). Once you start hammering those posts -- what are you going to do? You can't really ban for them, warning them seems harsh. One solution is to just silently delete the posts (and you can even count how many posts are deleted to see how often people are just noise and ban them if they're just mostly noise), but TL seems to have a policy against post deletion since they don't even delete the posts of people who get banned, so I'm sure that's out of the bag.
Furthermore this also just increases the workload of the moderators since being zero tolerance just means you're reading through the posts a lot closer and given the size of TL it's lots and lots and lots of work. I've run these kinds of policies before where I even warned for people being ignorant or wrong (something I'm sure TL is quite against) and I spent like 5+ hours a day moderating at that point. It's a lot more work than you think it is because people will also complain and you have to just explain to them, etc.
It's not a good long run policy since it's very abrasive. This is the reason why I prefer Rekul's suggestion (after you add onto it, of course) because it works a lot more subtly and it isn't abrasive at all. Reward positive behavior and filter out negative behavior -- just make it clear that bad posts get ignored and people won't even see it and we should all be fine.
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On April 06 2011 07:58 Milkis wrote:+ Show Spoiler +k, I'm going to speak from the 3 years I've spent moderating a god damn Pokemon forum. First, you have the recognize the more people that use a forum, the more noise there will be. The increase in amount of noise is enough to stifle intelligent discussion even if you just look at it probabilistically since we all have preferences on how much posts and content we want to see on a page and we naturally judge based on that. Thus any problem regarding the quality of the forum should be addressing this noise issue -- after all, quality forums I think can be measured by a the noise/signal ratio and the more noise there is the harder it is for any legit posts to go through. Keep that in mind if you're looking to tackle this issue. Rekul
How about if mods can highlight posts? And users can flag posts so that mods can highlight them. Add a filter button to toggle to show only them. Only needed if the thread gets past 5+ pages or something. Would be very useful in threads like LR and the NASL ones. This is a very good idea on theory but the thing is that there isn't enough mod staff at the moment. It's hard to find a good moderating staff and still look competent -- as pointed out by Klogon. Yes, it is really hard to find good moderators mostly because overall it's really hard to make the mod team as a whole look consistent and afaik this is already kind of an issue. Honestly the best way as the site gets larger is to diffuse moderation responsibilities to the public. Even with that though I dislike the reddit system (honestly traditional forums are much better for overall discussion of a topic and I can go into reasons why I think reddit systems aren't productive for discussions), their idea of self moderation is kind of what TL needs. Of course TL can implement them in a more traditional, organizational way. While Klogon is likely correct in that TL is probably doing a much better job looking out for potential new mods and such but at least for me and the site that i worked for most staff members had their arms full with whatever they were doing and didn't really have that kind of chance to look for new good posters/forumers actively. Given that we can't implement an upvote/downvote system to determine if a post should be highlighted or not (i'm sure that requires a lot more coding), my suggestion would be to take Rekul's idea a bit further and give the highlighted posters in SC2 forums the ability to highlight posts. If they do a good job then bam, you have a good banling and you know who to look at in order to recruit new mods. I'm not too sure how often these users read and post in the SC2 forums but if they post/read enough them giving them such an ability would make it easier to determine things in the long run too -- if you're looking for new highlighted posters then just look at the number of highlighted posts users have gotten. Kill two birds in one stone. Perhaps more mods are needed, but then again, everyone who is contributory to the site and/or have been with TL for a year get a report button, this reduces the need for moderators when a lot of respected members have the report button and are active with it. While I don't disagree with the idea of more moderators, I am indicating what to take into account. No matter how many mods there are, you'll never have enough to watch all posts anyways Report buttons aren't an end all solution -- report buttons are great if people are breaking rules but report buttons are terrible if you're looking to up the quality of a forum because it takes context out of everything and usually the iffier posts are quite harmless and their only crime is that they are noise not that they break any explicit TL rules. Harsher Bans and Zero Tolerance The thing about these policies is that you have to be really well defined on what you ban and what you do not ban. A lot of "bad" posts don't break any rules and they're quite harmless in nature -- they are simply just noise that clutters up the forum and the noise happens to have a lot of negative externalities when they reach a critical mass (I think i've mentioned that already). Once you start hammering those posts -- what are you going to do? You can't really ban for them, warning them seems harsh. One solution is to just silently delete the posts (and you can even count how many posts are deleted to see how often people are just noise and ban them if they're just mostly noise), but TL seems to have a policy against post deletion since they don't even delete the posts of people who get banned, so I'm sure that's out of the bag. Furthermore this also just increases the workload of the moderators since being zero tolerance just means you're reading through the posts a lot closer and given the size of TL it's lots and lots and lots of work. I've run these kinds of policies before where I even warned for people being ignorant or wrong (something I'm sure TL is quite against) and I spent like 5+ hours a day moderating at that point. It's a lot more work than you think it is because people will also complain and you have to just explain to them, etc. It's not a good long run policy since it's very abrasive. This is the reason why I prefer Rekul's suggestion (after you add onto it, of course) because it works a lot more subtly and it isn't abrasive at all. Reward positive behavior and filter out negative behavior -- just make it clear that bad posts get ignored and people won't even see it and we should all be fine.
Thanks Milkis, this is why I would appreciate some way of expressing my support for a post.
I don't want to be noise. As you say it clutters up the forum and adds work for the mods. I guess I will just not post unless I have something new to add and hope that people can recognise the valid points in the threads. I like Rekul's idea as well, at least the higlighted posters have shown some level of maturity, passion and responsibility so they look like a good place to start. They also have something to lose.
Once again thanks for the post and expressing exactly the general frustration with noise.
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Haha guess my ideas got shut down pretty quickly. D:
Just trying to help. Everyone makes valid points, and I do like the highlighted posts idea.
Zero tolerance was a bit of a loopy suggestion but maybe build off of that idea into a more formal "this is what goes, this is what doesn't" sort of list the mods could potentially follow? There is a lot of grey area when decided what to warn/ban/leave be so something like that could be incredibly tricky, but experienced mods who have been here for a long time would/should know that sort of situation. As every type of thread is different, maybe forego standardized rules and have different sets for different thread types.
For example, I frequent the HF Boards (Hockey) and they indeed have strict rules there and good moderation (for the most part). But they have thread designations as to what is okay and what is not per thread.
Like a thread can be about stuff only designated for that thread. A thread about music can only be about music and nothing else, if someone tried to de-rail the topic they would get moderated.
Maybe TL could implement some sort of thread standardization? Like for LR threads there's already unwritten rules of no balance whining and no going OT. Why not spread that to the rest of the site? And have different rules per type of thread.
I dunno, I'm rambling now. I just want to see TL be the best site there is.
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United States13896 Posts
In general we already have a lot of those things you mentioned. Aside from LR thread rules there are numerous other forums/thread that have clearly stated rules. The SFW Funny pictures thread/Youtube Thread/Fan Club Threads/Strategy Forum Guidelines come to mind as areas that have designated rules. I'm sure there are more but those are the ones that come to mind immediately. There are numerous topics that are auto-close to boot that guide moderation.
The problem comes with many of the forums (and a vast majority of the threads) you can't lump every thread into a specific category where you can set further parameters beyond our usual guidelines for posting on the forum. And moderators don't have time to set new rules in notes for every single thread, its just not practical.
We have many general guidelines for moderating that go for the entire site, such as discouraging and punishing the posting of image macros, identifying spam-posting of 1 line comments with no content, etc. If you could see the default warning messages we have they outline many of these things, and there are numerous other things that aren't included with those that are well known. I feel like most effective moderation is in the consistent and effective use of these general guidelines, rather than trying to pigeon-hole every thread into more standardization.
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Hyrule19087 Posts
Strict per-thread rules are counter intuitive anyway. At least I think so. When having a conversation with your friends you don't set a topic and then punch anyone in the face who says something off topic, do you? Conversations should flow naturally. If it gets wayyyy off topic for a long time, I've got no problem with a mod coming and saying so.
Personally, I think a tree system of forums works well for this (when people behave). It allows people to continue a discussion in one part of a thread (which sometimes you can collapse, depending on the site) while primary discussion happens elsewhere. Unfortunately, this has other consequences, such as delinearizing a thread and making it more complicated to moderate.
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Tree System
By a tree-like system you mean a http://www.reddit.comReddit like system? I think that works well for short fast-paced comments, but that is the kind of "additions" I think degrade the quality of the posts. Instead longer well thought-out posts that add genuine value to a thread should be encouraged. That's why I very much like the Highlighted post idea.
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There are too many warnings and two day bans and not enough long term bans or permabans. I actually think this causes more work for the already overworked staff.
Letting people accumulate these tiny bans just adds to a history that mods/admins have to go through every time they have to discipline a member. One warning is fine but it needs to be followed up with like a week ban at least on a second offense. Take the offenders out of the system for a while.
I mean one guy recently got his last 25 posts listed and they were all like less than 3 words replies, and he gets a two day? He was terrible. He needs way more time to think, and way more time away from the forums so mods/admins can move on to other things.
To Mods/Admins: GO WITH YOUR INSTINCTS
I guarantee you can spot a terrible poster immediately. You guys are too smart and too experienced to not notice a bad poster when you see one. Why play this game of warning, warning, 2day, 30day, permaban? Just boot the guy out already. You already let people remake under new names. You are just making more work for yourselves.
in conclusion, punishments should be swifter and harsher and mods/admins should go with their experience/instinct/judgement and boot those people they know are bad. You guys are being too lenient in regards to the truly awful.
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I'm not sure why you guys think harsher bans equates to faster reform of one's actions or posting abilities. In most cases, the time-out just either deters the person from ever coming back.
I'm all for leniency actually. I do think the forums are getting a bit scuffed up, but not immensely and taking people out of the equation doesn't do much, weeds just grow back.
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On Harsher Bans and Zatic's response
It looks like Zatic has taken some of what has been said here(and other places and his own observations I'm sure) to heart. Just in case you didn't see it, he posted this on April 3rd.
Related: counter comments on harsher bans pooled from replies
1. Will limit discussion, and limit relevant branches
2. Longer/harsher bans result in people not returning
3. When one goes, another returns, or returns with a new ID
4. Unfair bans
5. Increased workload on already limited mods
I do agree with the above as potential issues, but I feel the positives that will come from it far outweigh the negatives. I am of the shared opinion of Zatic: "This is an experimental purge that will hopefully bring back some usefulness to this forum. Right now it has become so bad with all the spam that I feel really sorry for the poor people who come here with good intentions seeking advice. "
Conclusion
I think this is a good place to start as it doesn't require any further implementation just hard work from a mod, thanks Zatic! This will quickly reveal how true the problems above are and if this is a viable solution to fix the "flood". However, I think this needs to be a 1 of many steps, I strongly encourage staff to implement a highlight like system.
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I used to be a moderator both in game on on a forum for a small private server for an MMORPG a while ago. The primary problem with forums as they get larger and larger is as stated above, the noise post. From the discussion I had there with both the admins and other mods, besides having an absurd amount of moderators, there were a few options that actually worked pretty well.
1. Personalized hide posts from user X. If you as a person believe that one or two people are spamming up a thread with noise, you can choose to hide all posts from that person. This solution works best against a few people who love to post, but never constructively or off topic enough that you can ban them. This can be both a thread specific and a forum specific feature (I was never part of the implementation so I have absolutely no idea how it's done) The only catch was that OP was always visible in his own threads regardless of whatever state you set.
2. Similar to youtube, the uprate/downrate and enough downrates = hidden post. This works pretty well in conjunction with flagging posts for moderation but the problem is that this doesn't quite remove the majority of noise.
3. A lifetime posting quality rating. Similar to the uprate/downrate system but far more detailed. Every post you have can be up/downed and that's added to your lifetime score. If it goes too far negative, you get autobanned for a few hours to a few days (This is community based, however, does have the potential to be abused). On the other hand if you consistently post quality, you get benefits(we never did figure out how to do this part)
4. Steam forums style repping. The serious problem with this is the flood of people who love to quote the OP or someone with a long post followed by "+rep 10char" or something similar, a seriously annoying thing to bring the hammer down for. The only thing we would've changed was that all posts would have a maximum amount of rep accruable so that one insane OP wouldn't net the person 500 rep for one post. This does result in some people increasing their effort to post well but winds up with the problem of some people posting less to keep their "Rep to post ratio" nice and high which is the exact opposite of what most forums want from quality posters
5. Shading of posts. Similar to the system in the strategy forums although possibly conflicts with the admin darker blue. Complemented by uprate/downrate, good posts get more "solid" bars around their name, being darker and more blue while bad posts get closer to grey. This is actually awesome for larger threads and given that some people will take the time to go through and read through everything + rate everything makes it amazingly easy to go through a thread and find the quality posts.
6. Helps a lot in guide threads and such, the OP's name/post is shaded differently than anyone else's. Makes for easy scrolling and less ctrl+f to find replies and such from the OP.
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I would like to be able to filter posts based on the user profile. For example, I want all posts from users who joined TL less than a year ago, users that have less than 100 total posts or users who make more than 10 average posts per day to be spoilered automatically. From my experience, most of the garbage posts come from the new members or members who spam one-liners to increase their post count.
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From the staff perspective:
1) It's hard to find the right people. We at TL have some incredibly high standards in regards to staff. We not only require competence, but passion, dedication, and loyalty. Of course, we have "opened the floodgates" to many very awesome staff members recently as the site's features are really exploding, but it seems our numbers are quickly outpaced by the growth of the industry. This is both a good and bad thing in that regards. But in general, finding more moderators is something we are always on the look for but it is a much more difficult job than you would think to magically find 20+ more that would actually let TL be the all-seeing-eye.
2) We usually warn, then temp ban, then keep extending ban lengths for repeat offenders. So we already do what you suggest. The only thing is that so many of our members are new that the problem is usually not the repeat offenders but the large amounts of people who have never been warned or banned.
3) Zero-tolerance is much easier said than done.
So I think there are already some good posts in this threat..I definitely think some kind of Thumbs up/down system would help quite a lot.
also you are talking about the problem to find moderators and I have to say I never saw any "looking for mods" post anywhere and I can't find a way to do that except the normal "contact us" i guess? maybe add a mod application subject there?
Maybe I just missed it tho ;D
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I agree with you OP and this is one of the reason why I very rarely contribute. I could be a quality poster (4000 Masters Terran with about 8 years of high level RTS play) but it's just so hard to have your posts not been drown in the mass of useless posts. For every single post i'll make in the strategy forums you will have 20+ low level players saying the opposite and telling me I'm "dumb".
So how do we fix this? There have already been suggestion of creating a forum where only XXX Masters players could post, others being allowed to read only. That's a bit elitist and I don't like that idea very much but this could be tested atleast.
One thing to NOT do is allowing every user to give "thumbs up" and "thumbs down". I can tell you from experience that this works extremely badly. On team-aaa.com (french community website) I could post whatever crap I want users will give me thumbs up because i'm known in the french community, that works for every other known player who has a good reputation even if their posting standards aren't good. Sometimes very good posts are hidden because a lot of users down votes them because they suggest nerfing their favorite race. To summarize it : there are more people who have no clue than the opposite so giving them the possibility to highlight posts just by mass voting isn't good.
On the other hand what Rekul is suggesting seems to be a very good compromise. Only mods can highlights posts, users can just suggest posts to highlight and mods will be there to check it's worth it. The filter option would be extremely useful in large threads (i'm sorry I really have no time to read a 900+ pages thread).
In a dream world of course every user would think twice before posting but that is just not happening.
Hope that helps, and sorry for my bad english.
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So I think there are already some good posts in this threat..I definitely think some kind of Thumbs up/down system would help quite a lot.
I have yet to hear 1 good argument besides "it´s good" in favor of a thumps up or down system.
Most people upvote stupid things (youtube comments).
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EPT
