Please Add an Ignore Button to the Forums.

It’s true that you can ignore people without a button. But in the case of extreme flaming or obvious trolls it would be nice to have a button that minimizes their posts so that the discussion can be much clearer.

Also, it is much cheaper and easier to let valued forum goers (like myself) to more easily ignore people that maybe don’t have anything to contribute to the discussion.

Enlisting a group of dedicated forum goers with semi-admin like privileges might help fight off future trolls, but that will only last for so long.

The problem stems from population. The higher the population there is the more moderator’s you’ll need to enlist to tame the beast that will be the forums.

By giving each person the ability to ignore someone’s post you also allow for self-moderation, which is much more efficient.

Finally, it would be awesome to have a ‘vote up or down’ option (kind of like a rating system) for either individual posters or individual posts.

It’s much more efficient for a forum to have self-moderation then it is to continuously add moderators.

Maybe an " report " button would be better? for example if 3 people report other player for trolling player gets muted for 3 days? next time he will get muted for longer time.
That would give trolls a lesson

if a troll gets 3 reports in 10 minutes they should get a gold border.


and admin controls

Edit by Chris: Please don't put huge blocks of empty space in your posts...

its possible.
You can tell who's troll just by talking with a person 5 minutes.

Allowing peers to ban each other from the forums isn't a great solution... it can be abused by trolls acting in unison.

Just giving players more self-moderative tools will help a lot.

I really like the voting idea, applying it to individual posts seems fair.

For the most part the forums haven't been too bad. I probably would have shut down the "ethics" thread a little sooner than it was but that's about all.

dude that ethics thread was gold. Loved it.

Well i wouldn't say to actually censor anyone unless its straight spam or profanity.

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Chris wrote:

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Rustychops wrote:

Wut. Why cant a dev just do it.

You didn't moderate any posts on April 1st though?

(Don't worry guys, he just had the orange border, there were no extra buttons).

With regard to forum moderation, what would you guys prefer? We can't really afford to put a staff member on this task, but maybe some members of the community could be chosen? Also, what type of policies are reasonable? So far we haven't deleted any posts unless they're obviously just spam. We don't want to censor opinions. Trolls are people too!

Community based censorship works as has been shown by the wiki project, however it relies on the abilities of a subversion control system, a HUGE amount of info available, and a HUGE population willing to do it. Even then, for short periods of time you get vandalism.

It's possible for groups of people to grief individuals though if anyone has access. It's therefore possible for a small group of people who have represented themselves well to perform such a function... more or less they could hide or show posts whenever perhaps 2 out of the group choose to hide a post.

An alternative that I have seen is the ability for individuals to squelch other individuals. Those systems do not particularly work well, because nobody can usually resist looking :P That causes a lot of flame wars usually and the inability to stop. However such a system is the least intrusive.

Hiding too many threads too late can lead to compounding issues of quoted material that cannot be hidden and conversation threads that no longer make sense. So hiding and editing needs to be done swiftly or it becomes moot. So any system really needs to be able to act very quickly at any time of day.

The most effective absolute method is to have a small trusted group do it whenever 1 feels like a post is contributing to spam or extreme flame wars. The problem is that the tolerance level for one person might be tame profanity, whereas for someone else it might be extreme profanity, where for someone else it might be ad hom attacks, where for someone else it might be a post about going to their live jasmin porn link... a guideline training course would have to be created to get everyone on the same page for where the line is for acceptable or not.

My biggest peeve with forum moderation is when someone makes a thread that gets spammed and then locked because of spam. Then if they try to remake the thread they get shot down for trying to remake a locked thread. I've seen this happen a lot, and it basically results in giving a bunch of spammers/trolls control over the forum.

Don't lock the thread, just ban the people who post off topic spam, and delete their worthless posts.