Who would make for good moderators in the D&D forum?

How active is the "Report" button? I have reported what I believed to be offensive posts and received feedback pretty quickly. Is it not being used by others?

 

They are strict, but they really had to be. The forum was being promoted by a local news station's sports department, so it had to be moderately civil. After awhile, civility was restored. People will do what you allow them to do. But like I said, that was what worked for me.

 

more i think about it, the more tinman seems like the logical choice.

1) he doesnt post that much here (if at all) so he would be seen as more unbiased than most of the regular posters.
2) he is a 99'er and clearly cares a lot about clutchfans - he would not allow posters to act in a way that would bring dishonor to the site.
3) it would be funny as hell.

i think a cap on posts per day would be good too...certain people ruin this forum, not necessarily by the content of what they say, but the sheer volume of posts. it would make threads much more readable if certain people were not accounting for half the posts in them.

as far as this whole bobbygate thing...this is the worst ive ever seen in my 16 years here. saying they are going to contact the rockets and file a complaint. people attacking clutch and even mocking his religion. make fun of him for being from utah, but not for being mormon! im not saying people dont have a right to be unhappy about bobby being allowed back in, but tread lightly...if things are pushed too far we could see the D&D shut down and all political talk banned from the hangout. the D&D is not what it used to be as far as the namecalling - you used to get suspended for even non curse-word insults...the vitriol has definitely increased...a certain poster calls people "a**holes" all the time and gets away with it...no way that would have been tolerated back in the day.

when i first came here in 2002 i had only been on a couple other message boards and the things said there were absolutely vile...so i had that attitude when i first started posting and got checked pretty quickly. it didnt take me long to recognize that clutchcity was different, in a good way. its still not as bad as most, but its definitely degraded over the years and thats probably on all of us.

im far from innocent as far as being an occasional jackass, but reading all this stuff over the last week or so has made me want to change how i post on here. im going to make an honest attempt to be better and try to talk to people like i would in real life. im going to make an honest effort to be more respectful towards others, even when i think they are total idiots.

maybe if there is some good to come out of bobbygate it is that we have collectively recognized how ugly it has gotten and can start to take the message-boards back to how they used to be. i dont remember the D&D being heavily moderated back then either...posters were pretty good about self-policing. perhaps we can all make a conscious effort to be better at that and we wont need to have a full-time babysitter???

i grew up in houston and moved to austin in '95. followed the rockets for as long as i can remember and shared in the euphoria of the championships. but over the course of the last 5 years or so my interest in sports has decreased every year to the point where i couldnt even tell you the rockets starting four or current record (but i do know they are winless since BTG returned). i dont even read the rockets forum anymore, but i still love this site because its one of my connections to h-town. when im arguing politics or talking music, its with fellow rockets fans and probably someone who, like me, grew up in houston...

anyway, this ended up way longer than i thought...

all i really wanted to say was TINMAN 4 MOD!!!

 

B-Bob, FranchiseBlade, Deckard, JuanValdez, Ottomaton, DonnyMost, Nook, plutoblue11, finalsbound if she's still around.

I might suggest some kind of recusal rule where they can't moderate a thread they've posted in or vice versa, so you may want multiple part-time mods. Separately the best qualification may be actual moderator experience in multiple completely unrelated message boards, or some kind of writing/editing experience.

 

I lurk a lot in the D&D, I think most poo flinging is okay, but what I don't like reading is posters holding grudges and bringing it from one thread to the next. Essentially you will see people going to threads just to attack specific people, and it just escalates and escalates into more threads.

 

I'm in the minority here, but I think the D&D has always worked better without a dedicated mod. The slope will get slippery quickly when people get deleted or banned because a mod simply disagrees with their views. The self-policing structure works. If you go too far (which is pretty rare even if you strongly disagree with certain users' beliefs), the board usually reacts appropriately. @Clutch and the other site mods get the final decision and have acted rightly to warn or ban users who act inappropriately. I think a certain level of "nastiness" comes with the territory of difficult discussions, and I'd rather have the discussions openly because I want to hear dissenting views. I'd draw the line at vicious personal attacks (serious personal threat, not trolling), blatant racism meant as harassment, and the like.

Edit: Added some clarification

 

It’s kinda fun that you think your opinion belongs in a who-should-moderate conversation when you’re the reason there needs to be a moderator now right?

 

I'm fine with you thinking that it doesn't belong, but I disagree. Also, I know it's easy to say, but I'm not really the reason there needs to be a moderator, the D&D was a cesspool long before I had anything to do with it. If an incident that I was involved with is what leads to turning things around then that would be a good thing, wouldn't it?

Also given that there's never been a CF member who has had more personal attacks that cross the line hurled at them, to the point where some even consider it acceptable, I stand to benefit more from a moderator cutting that stuff out than anyone on this site. So yeah, my opinion is every bit as valid as anyone else's.

 

We could bottle this post as an excellent example of your tone deafness and inability for retrospection. Now your proposition is that insulting someone's disabled child could prove to be a good thing for yourself.

 

What I was saying is that if the incident is the final thing that causes widespread change in the D&D and elsewhere on the site, then that would be a positive thing to come from an obviously negative situation. It would be similar to the last goalie to have their face broken in hockey before they started to wear masks or the last person killed in an automobile accident before they started to require a new safety feature that saved others. None of those things are positive, but it doesn't mean that positive things can't happen as a result of a terrible thing.

The fact that the D&D becoming less toxic would benefit me disproportionately as someone who has to deal with it more so than anyone else shouldn't take away from the fact that it would be a positive for everyone. Positive change is always a good thing.

 

Maybe it's just been our interactions in the past that have escalated.

 

I just wanted to throw my two cents in on it... and say please pick someone who isn't a regular poster on D&D, or you are going to see an internal bias weigh in. Maybe even make it transparent as to who is banned and who is modding. That way the mod has an incentive to not use the ban hammer for obvious personal beliefs.

Also how about we have a left and right leaning poster work together on it. If they agree a post is bad, then go for it. But what is the reason for needing a mod? I didn't see what prompted this.

 

Or how about Whoopi and call it The View?

 

Several years ago, when @Clutch took the politics, religion, and general chaos connected to discussions normal people don't have in polite society out of Hangout and dumped it in here, I complained, as did many others. People tend to object to changes to things they are used to. It turned out that I was wrong. All of us were. D&D was a great idea and, more to the point, vastly improved Hangout, which is used by far more members than even think about posting down here, just as far more people lurk in D&D than would ever think about posting here.

When I figured out that Clutch was right, I said so. I think he's right that D&D needs some tinkering in order to improve the experience. For a very long time, I was as polite as a mouse here. I posted, "Keep D&D Civil!" at the bottom of at least a couple of thousand posts, and freaked out when it looked like the forum was going to be done away with, which nearly happened more than once, in my opinion, when @Clutch became disgusted with how things were going. He can correct me if I'm wrong. D&D is the only place online where I have conversations about all those topics people usually avoid around polite company, so I was, and still am, very eager to keep it around.

We need to clean up our act? Fine. I certainly can and have in the past, and if some moderation is needed, then as long as it's with a light touch, bring it on. What I wonder about is how do you handle the trolls that are more subtle than the heavy handed ones? They know who they are, and they can be very clever about it.

A few I could name, and won't, deliberately goad others into an angry response, over and over again, and when they get the angry response they were looking for, they immediately uncork a post like, "You are too emotional! " and other comments along those lines, and that makes them feel like they've "won," which I find bizarre, but that's what they do. The same members will often make a post they hope will get a response they can play with.

Sure enough, and I've been sucked into this before, a member responds with 2 or 3 paragraphs, often created after taking the time to do a bit of research, and what does the troll come back with? A one line post saying, "You're too emotional." Something of that nature. What is the new moderator or moderators supposed to do in that instance, which is often repeated numerous times by the troll, often multiple times in a day. Just ignore it? Ignore a disease? Because that's what it is, a disease that spreads among others and pumps up the anger we see here much too often.

They are like fuel for what screws this place up. They post nothing of substance and are only interested in getting a rise out of other members, and can be very clever about doing so. Most of us have a genuine interest in whatever topic is being discussed, but the kind of members I mentioned aren't the least bit interested in that. They only care about playing their little games. I would be handing timeouts out to those trolls on a daily basis until they stopped their behavior, so for that reason alone, I would make a "poor" moderator. These trolls have their fans, and they would complain. I thought I should mention what I consider a significant, if more subtle, part of the problems D&D has today. So now I have. Hope everyone enjoyed it, especially those guilty of this behavior.

I thought I should add that whoever, singular or plural, takes on this thankless task needs a sense of humor.

 

The D&D forum was always about filtering out the bickering into its own forum. I can only think of a very few people in the D&D who have been civil and tried to have meaningful discussions. The vast majority of others subtly post just to troll. This leads to obvious trolling which then leads to name calling and insults.

Its when people start doxxing and using hateful speech is when the line should be drawn.

The best solution is to have a forum monitor or two who can message clutch if there is an issue. let him decide when to step in.

 

I've used it on occasion and I don't think I've ever gotten feedback.

If you're not posting in a thread, you're probably not reading it either. That's the conundrum of the moderator proposal -- anyone who has the stomach to read the threads is already conflicted. I think obviously it would be inappropriate for a mod who is in a fight to use his moderation powers on the counterparty. You obviously need a recusal for that. But if you're just in a thread where two twits are going at each other, I don't think you're necessarily compromised. (Hell, if a state official who is responsible for running an election can also run in the election, we are actually being hyper-vigilant about corruption in comparison!)

 

No.

 

This all makes perfect sense, and I know you are not referring to posters that simply have different views. I am also not questioning your judgment on when you have been trolled.

But how does one tell reliably when someone is trolling versus posting something that one not only disagrees with but thinks is so off or ignorant that it seems to the first person it must be trolling but in actuality is just a such a different viewpoint that the first person can't wrap his/her head around it? (I get the emotional gambit, so I am not asking about that.) I worry that one person's trolling on a sensitive issue might be another person's strongly held, even if ill informed factually, belief.

 

I support B-Bob, Juan Valdez, and O's Trigonum as Mods. All seem level headed and rarely if ever get personal. O's has a sense of humor and that can only be a good thing for this role. My .02 cents FWIW.