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I have to agree with PF13 on this point. If someone starts a thread about a *very specific* way of addressing "AP clog", and the next two pages are people discussing that idea *and* putting out other, perhaps better, ideas of how this could be accomplished.... That's not off-topic. That's nothing that should be "modded". That's a CONVERSATION taking shape. Because a thread where no other options or opinions are allowed is *not* a conversation, it's not a discussion... it's pointless. And honestly, with a LOT of Suggestion threads, a rather so-so OP-idea can *lead* to an awesome, much better idea, and if that idea gets fleshed out enough then yeah it might lead to it's own thread. It's happened plenty of times before. But to force people to ONLY look at that ONE option? It would basically boil down to a LOT of "hate it" or "like it" posts, because we wouldn't be allowed to suggest tweaks or similar ideas. And I don't think that's the intention of the Suggestion forum.

Edited by Marie19R

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Not in line with the current train of thought. But could we have collapsible spoiler tags for the forum?

 

I just made a much longer post than I intended, and I would really like to be able to put it beneath a "spoiler" tag. For those that don't know, what "spoiler" does, is that it folds the text in between the tag

 

into a tag that another person can click to have it open in the post so they can read anything placed there, or view images that are put there to not stretch the margins, or keep a post from being TL which results in DR by being a nice spot to dump all their assorted proofs, examples, references links without being a giant paragraph(s) blob on the page.

 

 

BBCode already allows for spoiler tags, and I doubt if any major changes would have to be made to put them into effect.

Edited by Amut un Rama

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Let people be happy and excited in the shimmer breeding topic. It's not a bad thing for a game for people to be enjoying it. Even if that means chatter.

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Let people be happy and excited in the shimmer breeding topic. It's not a bad thing for a game for people to be enjoying it. Even if that means chatter.

Agreed. To me, personally, just talking about breeding possibilities gets very boring quickly. I don't like using IRC, or big general 'any topic goes here' chat threads either....

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I have to agree with PF13 on this point. If someone starts a thread about a *very specific* way of addressing "AP clog", and the next two pages are people discussing that idea *and* putting out other, perhaps better, ideas of how this could be accomplished.... That's not off-topic. That's nothing that should be "modded". That's a CONVERSATION taking shape. Because a thread where no other options or opinions are allowed is *not* a conversation, it's not a discussion... it's pointless. And honestly, with a LOT of Suggestion threads, a rather so-so OP-idea can *lead* to an awesome, much better idea, and if that idea gets fleshed out enough then yeah it might lead to it's own thread. It's happened plenty of times before. But to force people to ONLY look at that ONE option? It would basically boil down to a LOT of "hate it" or "like it" posts, because we wouldn't be allowed to suggest tweaks or similar ideas. And I don't think that's the intention of the Suggestion forum.

actually, in the end those threads dont look like conversations at all, its like 3 people shouting at each other in the woods. Its also not about allowing or disallowing tangents or opinions, its about moderating the discussion.

 

Discussions should have moderators, their purpose is to keep them on track. What's done here usually is "modding", thats true, in the sense that its only partially what a moderator would do. Moderating talks/discussions is hard, and people who can do so well are usually also well-paid and highly sought after in business life.

 

Most of the threads in suggestions go nowhere towards a conclusion, because you'll always have someone who doesnt like an idea and will counter with something entirely else. if you allow to continue the talk on this, like is currently usual done, a topic as such can never be closed/finished.

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Let people be happy and excited in the shimmer breeding topic. It's not a bad thing for a game for people to be enjoying it. Even if that means chatter.

Yes. It makes me really really sad and frustrated to see it closed so quickly just because people meander a little. Warn people if you must or clean it out, but does it always have to be closed so quickly? This is a source of enjoyment and discussion right now and it keeps getting shut down.

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Yes. It makes me really really sad and frustrated to see it closed so quickly just because people meander a little. Warn people if you must or clean it out, but does it always have to be closed so quickly? This is a source of enjoyment and discussion right now and it keeps getting shut down.

Agreed. I don't see why the moderators of this forum have such a problem with so-called 'chat'. Why shouldn't we chat about Shimmers? What harm does it do? The only alternatives offered so far by mods are chatting in the CPA thread (which I hardly ever go in, and if I do is usually full of random weirdness), or the IRC (which I often go in and is always full of random weirdness xd.png). But seriously, neither of these places are suited to chatting/discussing about specific topics, as the chat moves quickly and the subject of discussion changes quickly too.

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Let people be happy and excited in the shimmer breeding topic. It's not a bad thing for a game for people to be enjoying it. Even if that means chatter.

i don't like the shimmer breeding topic all that much because it seems to be rather exclusive to those with shimmers tongue.gif anyone that isn't talking about a specific lineage or something gets nudged and i just feel awkward even talking about since i don't have one. i would much rather have an all-around shimmer topic than ones for just breeding. not to mention it probably should've gone into the breeding section??

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Just in general, why is people chatting deemed such a terrible awful thing on these forums? Especially if they happen to be chatting about the topic of a thread? The Shimmer threads are just the most recent example of this rather odd "how dare you chat on a forum!" attitude I've been seeing recently.

Edited by Amazon_warrior

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Yes. It makes me really really sad and frustrated to see it closed so quickly just because people meander a little.

Again?!

Seriously, a thread dedicated to prizes and all that relates to them would be nice.

I do not understand the reason it needs to focus on one tiny aspect (and seriously, what is there to say about breeding other than 'this looks good with that') and then get closed down whenever it veers from that one narrow focus.

 

IRC should not be the only place to chat about a general topic. Many people are not comfortable with the IRC. Not to mention the threads to tend to stay towards that one topic in general, and not wander all over the place to discussions about your mom's cat or the best place to buy pizza in NYC.

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Most of the threads in suggestions go nowhere towards a conclusion, because you'll always have someone who doesnt like an idea and will counter with something entirely else. if you allow to continue the talk on this, like is currently usual done, a topic as such can never be closed/finished.

Why does it matter so much if a topic is "closed/finished"? There are PLENTY of good, solid, fleshed-out Suggestion topics, and we know that TJ glances at them every so often, so... SO WHAT if a few people are counter-arguing things? So what if there is a disagreement on the idea, or if a few people want to flesh out very similar ideas to the OP in hopes of making the OP realize why that would be a better way? TJ looks, regardless. What TJ wants to implement, he will implement, regardless of a topic not being "finished".

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Again?!

Seriously, a thread dedicated to prizes and all that relates to them would be nice.

I do not understand the reason it needs to focus on one tiny aspect (and seriously, what is there to say about breeding other than 'this looks good with that') and then get closed down whenever it veers from that one narrow focus.

 

IRC should not be the only place to chat about a general topic. Many people are not comfortable with the IRC. Not to mention the threads to tend to stay towards that one topic in general, and not wander all over the place to discussions about your mom's cat or the best place to buy pizza in NYC.

I really agree with this. sad.gif I love the IRC, obviously, since I mod there... But I recognise that not all people like the format or even want to go on there.

 

I just feel like people are being turned off of discussions or trying to engage on the forums because as soon as the topic changes even the smallest bit, it gets shut. Especially with the warning of 'whether to leave it closed' which would be even worse.

 

I don't understand why the more general topic was closed, to be honest. I know that some stuff can go in the 'Congratulations' thread but it was much more centralised in the Sbimmer topic.

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Yes. It makes me really really sad and frustrated to see it closed so quickly just because people meander a little. Warn people if you must or clean it out, but does it always have to be closed so quickly? This is a source of enjoyment and discussion right now and it keeps getting shut down.

From what we've been told in the past, at least part of the reason is because threads with chatting included (and we've had some with more leeway before) tend to move super-fast and are really difficult to moderate.

 

Having said that, I looked at the Shimmer thread and kind of thought it could have been poked back on track instead of closed. And I did think that the general Shimmer thread addressed some valid issues like hatching times and strategies and the like.

 

Having said that, I do want to add that I think it's a bit unfair that whenever we discuss keeping various threads open there's always support for "warn, don't close". But then, when the subject of warns comes up, people talk about them in terms from very upsetting to nearly traumatic. So it's kind of rock and hard placing the matter to say "just warn us" on the one hand and "OMG I got a warn!" on the other.

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I'd support warning rather than closing the whole thread because closing it a) shuts down discussion and cool.gif punishes all people who might want to post in the thread, even if they weren't online when the off-topicness happened.

 

Even just posting in the thread to let us know that it was going off topic would have been good, or editing people's posts.

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I'd support warning rather than closing the whole thread because closing it a) shuts down discussion and cool.gif punishes all people who might want to post in the thread, even if they weren't online when the off-topicness happened.

 

Even just posting in the thread to let us know that it was going off topic would have been good, or editing people's posts.

I think the problem with just posting in the thread is that they move so quickly that people leave and come back and then never see the mod note.

 

Honestly, I support the warnings instead of thread closure, too. In a forum this size and with this much traffic, the warn system is a very fast, efficient way to give a user a nudge and ask them not to do X anymore.

 

The problem is that because warns are a huge deal on so many other forums, people have difficulty adjusting to the idea that they're not necessarily pointing you out as someone who does something terrible or a step away from the banhammer here. Sure, no one wants to get them, and the accumulation of them is possibly telling and problematic, but you can actually apply to be a moderator here with a current warn level. It's just a different standard here.

 

I kind of wish that would be pointedly noted in the section we have on warnings here and then a link to it could be included it the warns so that people would get that they need to not do whatever they just did, but also that they don't have to panic about the matter.

 

Because, frankly, I think there's be a much stronger argument to be made for more leeway in threads if the mods could use the warn system, not have to PM people in conjunction with it, and users could view that within the scope of the warning system that DC uses instead of applying the weight of the systems that other forums use.

 

But if you flip back through this thread, you'll find quite a lot of very passionate feedback about how awful warns are to receive. And I want to be clear that I believe those are very genuine sentiments and I totally respect that people were sincerely upset to have gotten warnings, especially in light of the fact that they didn't consider the matters involved to be of the severity of receiving what the viewed as a major punishment. And it's because I really could see how distressed some people were over it that I think that the rather workable plan of using warns to nudge people back on track is less workable when it's not a "nudge" for some, but more of a beat down.

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There is a reason I never post in site discussion anymore. That particular forum is likely the most rigid of the entire forum, and it isn't much fun to go there. You really aren't allowed to "discuss" much, from what I have seen, 90% of the threads are threads you leave a single post on and never return, except to make another, similar post.

 

In other words, I find the whole thing rather offputting, at least the other parts of the forums aren't quite as rigid. If a thread moving too fast is really that much of an issue, then it is a clear sign that more mods are needed. I realize that applications were recently put in, but we haven't seen anything from them yet. I really don't think threads should be closed because they are popular and harder to mod.

Edited by Nectaris

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I agree with everyone who says let's chill about warns. I CANNOT see why people mind so much. I am usually running at 10% for something. I am not dead yet. (as far as I know...)

 

And I bet it would help keep threads open. Otherwise people come back to a fast moving thread, don't see that a mod has posted stoppit, and do whatever it was again....

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Barging back in here just to say that the current discussion, of how posts are being actioned for the meandering nature of conversation, ties back to the recent discussion of how many users feel that warns are being handed out far too readily. This is a forum, forums are for discussion, and conversations naturally drift off on related tangents and (because of the nature of a forum thread) eventually come back to the original topic. But right now people keep going "NO STOP CHATTING BAD" the moment that natural drift starts happening, and that's a big part of why we feel like mods are being really trigger happy.

 

My thoughts on the subject in a nutshell: mods seen as trigger happy -> users get so many warns they lose all meaning -> users begin to misbehave on purpose because they know they'll get warned anyway no matter how they say what they say but who cares because warns stopped meaning anything -> "lol here come the warns /trollfaec" becomes a Thing -> unsolveable problem because warning people less or only for very severe infractions is seen as "lol mods are used to me now" at that point

 

*prances back into the shadows*

Edited by Lythiaren

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Barging back in here just to say that the current discussion, of how posts are being actioned for the meandering nature of conversation, ties back to the recent discussion of how many users feel that warns are being handed out far too readily. This is a forum, forums are for discussion, and conversations naturally drift off on related tangents and (because of the nature of a forum thread) eventually come back to the original topic. But right now people keep going "NO STOP CHATTING BAD" the moment that natural drift starts happening, and that's a big part of why we feel like mods are being really trigger happy.

 

My thoughts on the subject in a nutshell: mods seen as trigger happy -> users get so many warns they lose all meaning -> users begin to misbehave on purpose because they know they'll get warned anyway no matter how they say what they say but who cares because warns stopped meaning anything -> "lol here come the warns /trollfaec" becomes a Thing -> unsolveable problem because warning people less or only for very severe infractions is seen as "lol mods are used to me now" at that point

 

*prances back into the shadows*

Just want to say that while I definitely believe your point has to be given due consideration because it certainly is a possibility, the argument that people around here are pretty much potentially three steps away from acting like immature seven year olds probably isn't the most persuasive against strict moderation.

 

The issue seems, to me, that the warns are seen as ZOMG by folks, and so I can see why you're saying that lots of warnings will dull their impact. However, if people were perhaps to view them less as dire punishment and more as a quick message from the mods letting them know that X rule was broken so that it would hopefully not occur again (at least for a while), then there wouldn't be anything to which people would become desensitized.

 

I really think that a real part of this problem is an almost refusal to see that perhaps this is simply a more moderate warn system than other forums. And, because of that, what could be a really useful tool in moderating fast moving, chattier threads, becomes utterly useless because of the potential for the behavior you pointed out, which is based on the idea that a warn is is a massive punishment in the moderation system this forum has.

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The issue seems, to me, that the warns are seen as ZOMG by folks, and so I can see why you're saying that lots of warnings will dull their impact. However, if people were perhaps to view them less as dire punishment and more as a quick message from the mods letting them know that X rule was broken so that it would hopefully not occur again (at least for a while), then there wouldn't be anything to which people would become desensitized.

 

I really think that a real part of this problem is an almost refusal to see that perhaps this is simply a more moderate warn system than other forums. And, because of that, what could be a really useful tool in moderating fast moving, chattier threads, becomes utterly useless because of the potential for the behavior you pointed out, which is based on the idea that a warn is is a massive punishment in the moderation system this forum has.

Yes, exactly. I get warned. I stop whatever. It was usually something gently disruptive.... Mod is nice about it, end of. Where IS the problem ?

 

Maybe they need to be called "please don't do that"s ??? xd.png

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Yes, exactly. I get warned. I stop whatever. It was usually something gently disruptive.... Mod is nice about it, end of. Where IS the problem ?

 

Maybe they need to be called "please don't do that"s ??? xd.png

Yep, I'm with you, I don't see them as a big deal unless they start piling up. It's just a reminder that you should have done something a little differently, but I guess a lot of people don't see it that way.

 

I'm still of the opinion the fact they are called warns is about half the problem. Such a negative word.

Call them something, anything, more benign, and I swear people wouldn't get nearly as upset over getting them.

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I'm still of the opinion the fact they are called warns is about half the problem. Such a negative word.

Call them something, anything, more benign, and I swear people wouldn't get nearly as upset over getting them.

I think this would actually go a long way to helping, too. They could still have official warns, but save them for big things. Perhaps "Rule Reminders" or "Mod notes" or something and the little metter can keep track of those.

 

It's odd because, on the one hand I totally get where people coming from about strict moderation, since things do get nipped in the bud with light speed (for good or bad, however one sees it). However, on the other hand, this forum - when it comes to consequences - is on the the most lenient I've ever been on.

 

Yeah, the warns get issued a lot, but you have to really accumulate them to receive the kind of disciplinary action that other forums I've been on deliver after far, far less interaction. Look at Fuzz. She's basically "I'm a mild wild child, keeping a slow burn warn level" and yet she says the mods are pleasant when the contact her and she's clearly still here and posting. Like I said earlier, you can apply to be a mod with a current warn level. I can't think of another forum I'm on where that happens.

 

So I would support the name change if that would help shift perception. If for no other reason than I really do feel for the folks who get so distressed at being warned.

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Thing is, as demonstrated in previous discussion in this thread, a lot of people have had extremely negative experiences while discussing warns with mods. I myself was blown off and given a slew of non-answers and question-dodging last time I disputed a warning, and by the time I gave up in disgust all I'd squeezed out was an "analysis" that consisted of "because I said so". Not only is that completely unprofessional and condescending, but it's a waste of time and resources. I'd be more productive pounding nails into my head. When a very large chunk of active users maintain a warn level, no matter how low, it means something is very wrong with the system. And it's probably safe to say that nagging people for drifting even the slightest bit tangentways is a thing that is wrong. There's a difference between strict and excessive.

 

You can look at the extremely trimmed-down model in my post and see quite clearly that the events leading up to the users going "screw it I'm getting warned anyway I'll say what I want how I want to" consist entirely of (ironically) excessive moderator action. Like the sound of footsteps in an empty hallway, the first few warns are jarring but after a while of continuous exposure we stop noticing.

 

But now I'm just repeating myself. Disappearing for real now.

Edited by Lythiaren

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Thing is, as demonstrated in previous discussion in this thread, a lot of people have had extremely negative experiences while discussing warns with mods. I myself was blown off and given a slew of non-answers and question-dodging last time I disputed a warning, and by the time I gave up in disgust all I'd squeezed out was an "analysis" that consisted of "because I said so". Not only is that completely unprofessional and condescending, but it's a waste of time and resources. I'd be more productive pounding nails into my head. When a very large chunk of active users maintain a warn level, no matter how low, it means something is very wrong with the system. And it's probably safe to say that nagging people for drifting even the slightest bit tangentways is a thing that is wrong. There's a difference between strict and excessive.

 

You can look at the extremely trimmed-down model in my post and see quite clearly that the events leading up to the users going "screw it I'm getting warned anyway I'll say what I want how I want to" consist entirely of (ironically) excessive moderator action. Like the sound of footsteps in an empty hallway, the first few warns are jarring but after a while of continuous exposure we stop noticing.

 

But now I'm just repeating myself. Disappearing for real now.

Suppose we had two things here then - "warn" - for something that actually is - well, WARNABLE xd.png and "rules reminder" for - the kind of thing that usually happens to me. ninja.gif

 

Looking back, I think I score a LOT of "rules reminders" and one warn !

 

Love from the mild wild child smile.gif

Edited by fuzzbucket

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