- Primum Agmen
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- Fabled Mythic Member
"I hope nothing, I fear nothing, I am free"
"A person needs a little madness, or else they never dare cut the rope and be free." - Nikos Kazantzakis
"The ink of the scholar is more holy than the blood of martyrs" - Hasan al-Basri
Black Chapter, for all religious and political debate that doesn't fit in the Flood.
So, seven years. I'm still here, if only just. I think most of the laundry list of issues still exists and hasn't really changed much in the past 3 or so years, so I suppose I'll start by restating elmicker's points.
Maybe it's just a factor of age, but the further I get outside of the 14-17 bracket, the more these points seem to be true.
1. The forums are less fun. Scroll back to 2009 or just about any point before 'Play Nice' and political and intellectual discussions did happen more often. Perhaps we just had a better class of member back then, or perhaps it was the moderation team being fairly relaxed towards threads of an intellectual nature so long as there was no flaming involved.
I'll put my hand up straight away and say that I haven't been a regular in a game forum since New Mombasa. The Halo 3 Forum killed any enjoyment I had of them by simply moving so damn fast and I struggle to hold an in depth conversation about video games lately. That was true in 2007, it's still true now.
2. Member retention sucks. I started the job of going through uIDs to calculate how many members stick around bungie.net, then gave up and asked ApocalypeX of Bungie.me for some help. He bashed out a bit of code and has had it running for several months now and hopes to have the statistics available in Dec/Jan when the new version of Bungie.me goes online. I might edit them in to this once they're available, but good work by ApocalpyeX anyway as he really didn't have to oblige me. :)
3. Titles still suck and they're still a join date in disguise. Unless we want to throw in the ability for, say, mods to vote for an upshift in trust rating to provide fluidity to the system, it's fairly pointless. I have a blue bar and a fair ban history. Does this mean I'm a member people should look up to, or that I set a good example? Of course not, and why the hell should it? Should I know better because I've been here for far, far too long? (1/3 of my life spent here, ohdear) There's no real place for actual interaction between new and old members nowadays. I got to know most old members through groups (members that make me look young, for instance), and without realising it also sat and chatted to half the moderation team in the Black Chapter as they all seemed to be mods or admins in there in 2006. I got to know them, they got to know me (to a point), and discussion and good manners all around were had. Where does one go nowadays to spend time with older members? Well, besides #moap or #bungienet, but even then new members never join them.
4. Groups are still dead. Until this year I could at least say that discussion groups like the Black Chapter were still active, so quibbled this point. Not so much now, the members it used to have are either gone or have gotten so used to the same faces that nothing new ever really happens. With no intellectual topics in the Flood from which to do targetted recruiting (something I did for quite a few years), no reference to discussion groups in the rules (something that was true for many years) and a classifieds system that's absolutely bloody useless, this isn't too surprising.
So, groups are dead and good groups are few and far between, and being able to find groups you might want to join is incredibly difficult, never mind trying to find new members for existing groups.
If you have a group of people talking, topics are going to come up that skirt the rules or outright break them. It used to be the case that mods let us have these discussions on all manner of things so long as we could be civil. Admittedly, being civil on religion is an incredibly hard thing to ask of most people, but it can occasionally happen. For those very few occasions, a watchful eye works. (and we are talking incredibly infrequently. An absolute ban on religious discussion is hardly the worst thing in the world) Banning all thoughtful discussion doesn't make people more civil, it makes people boring. Learning to be civil to people who disagree with you on just about everything is part of growing up.
This leads into..
5. The Flood should have posting and thread creation restricted. The idea of three months of activity to post, six to create a thread and any bans or warnings in the past two weeks prevent posting in the Flood works for me. Creates barriers to entry, allows a different standard of moderation and allows for a more relaxed standard as far as the rules are concerned. This allows relatively new posters to actually have a forum that's intelligible and promote a better standard of discussion. Break a rule, get warned, take two weeks off from the Flood while being able to post elsewhere still.
Again with the titles I'd also like the mods to be able to fast track a member they see as a good poster as a form of reward. So, if a new member catches the eye of a mod the mod can recommend them as a form of reward. I don't expect this to ever see much use, however. Same as the mods up-voting people for titles. I'd love to be wrong though.
Now that recap of elmicker is over (though he'll complain I've butchered his points, but you can always (re-)read his threads to get a better idea of how he would put things. <3), on to my points.
6. Transparency and clarity still suck. Unless there's been a wholesale change recently, members still cannot see what they were banned for (if anyone says they can search their posts, you'll realise there is a character limit to what you can see. For instance, I wouldn't be able to see anything much of this post.), and mods cannot highlight specifically what they took offence to. There are specific things which shouldn't be viewable by other members, but these are pretty much all perma-ban offences (shock sites, etc.) so a quick note like 'this member was permanently banned for posting a shock site' in replacement for all of that users posts would drive home the point better, surely?
Likewise, just because a user is banned, the content of all their posts may not have all been objectionable. Why not just highlight the specific post and what in it resulted in a ban, then add the ban message from the mod in to the post on top of that. By all means, collapse the posts people were banned for, but letting people view what was deemed unacceptable lets them know where the line is. If a user has been an active participant in a good discussion and is then banned, their content is hidden until the ban is up. Why? It may well be useful for the discussion to reference it, and if someone hasn't quoted it that isn't possible.
Being able to see what you were banned for is really quite useful. If it's a long post, you probably can't see it, and it's more than possible for a moderator to misinterpret something you've said (in jokes do happen) or for you not to realise that what you're saying could be interpreted as flaming by someone else. A quick PM to the moderator in question usually resolves this, but I've waited a few days for a reply when I've not been near a computer and then the mod who banned me was busy and other mods weren't really sure what I'd been banned for. Mods have lives and they'll interpret things differently, so a record of what specifically they took action over that doesn't rely on them being at their computer to respond would be nice.
7. Moderators should post more as members. Aside from Recon's (let's face it) spam posts, moderators aren't really all that active as members. TU got appointed mod and pretty much stopped coming to #bungienet and his posting has seriously died. Admittedly he got hit by an attack of life not long after, but I'm totally blaming being a mod for his lack of posting (<3). It's nice that evilcam drops into threads to point out people's rose tinted glasses, but if we can create an environment that the mods actually want to post in as members, we've probably created an environment where people actually want to stick around.
This is, admittedly, an ancient complaint. We've been saying for years that the best moderation is moderators being present. If they actually enjoy posting and being in the forums, they don't hate this place as much and you improve moderation without racking up more bans. Feeds back into point five, of course.
I think that's about it for me. Nothing new here, admittedly, just a collection of complaints and suggestions from the past few years. I'm sure there are plenty more I'm forgetting, so feel free to chip in/tell me I'm wrong/tell me I'm an inbred, six fingered Manxman/so forth. <3