Forum moderation/activity discussion

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Forum moderation/activity discussion

#1 Post by kestasjk » Fri Mar 10, 2023 8:20 am

[As discussed sorry to see you go Zultar, hope you drop by and check on things every so often and you're always welcome. - topic split]


I am hoping to loosen the rules on the forum a bit; the women I asked didn't find the post sexist, and no-one found the other tongue-in-cheek comment objectionable, but that's up to people to decide. I don't think it's as big of a deal as it's being made out.
They did agree that moderators should be extra PC though, I'll give you that..

There have been cases where we were arguing in the forum with someone who had very old fashioned views on something, we were discussing why they were so backwards with him, and then he got banned for his views. I don't like that, I don't think it helps anything.


I'd also like to at least try to get our forum activity back up a bit, and that won't happen if we ban people who disagree with the mods or say anything that anyone finds offensive.
erg.png
This includes myself; if I get roasted for something I say that's fine. I'd rather deal with things that way, if it doesn't work out it doesn't work out.
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#2 Post by Flame » Fri Mar 10, 2023 8:55 am

All men wars are caused by women. From the ancient Trojan War till the modern webDiplomacy moderators conflict. :-D
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Re: My resignation at webDiplomacy

#3 Post by captainmeme » Fri Mar 10, 2023 10:12 am

kestasjk wrote:
Fri Mar 10, 2023 8:20 am
I am hoping to loosen the rules on the forum a bit; the women I asked didn't find the post sexist, and no-one found the other tongue-in-cheek comment objectionable, but that's up to people to decide. I don't think it's as big of a deal as it's being made out.
They did agree that moderators should be extra PC though, I'll give you that..
Speaking as someone who has spent the last 6ish years promoting webdiplomacy, particularly over the pandemic... Please don't do this.

I really love this site, and I've tried to give back on that front. I ran tons of tournaments here, I set up Blitz here as a reinvention of live games, I got to play against Diplodocus and Cicero because of this site and tried to do my part in helping improve them. I'd finally got the vFtF community to start considering moving across to webdip from backstabbr with the new interface, as VDL was considering running webdip games this year.

If webdip's leadership wasn't so anti-hate speech, I would not have promoted the site, or even come back to it at all. The forum was in a very 4chan-like state back when I joined, and it resulted in me bailing to vDip and solely recommending vDip to people at the time. When Zultar, Jmo and others started enforcing rules, that made a webdip a place I could actually recommend to people without worrying about subjecting them to abuse.

I know that your political views don't line up with theirs, particularly on the freedom of speech front. "Let people say whatever they like and let people self-moderate' sounds like a good idea on the face of it; surely the public will condemn people with hateful opinions so it's better to let the hateful opinions be judged, right? But that ignores that:
A) Seeing those views expressed can be painful to some people. "That's life" isn't a good excuse for this, because this isnt life - this is a place people come to to play a game, something a lot of people do to escape life. Most people like this will either mute the forum or leave the site (like I did the first time around).
B) The kind of people who are attracted to that kind of forum, given the 'sanitized' state of most forums now, are the people who want to express hateful views and aren't allowed to in most other places. So over time the voices become heavily tilted towards that as those people join and the people who don't want to see those people's views head off to backstabbr or playdip.

You could see this in the pre-Zultar/Jmo forum. There was a ton of regular hate speech, and the only people who bothered posting responses were the kind of people who enjoyed an excuse to throw abuse back - so the forum was just a back and forth of constant abuse.

If you really want to have a 4chan-like forum, there's nothing stopping you from making one. But please don't use the webdip forum for that. This forum is directly tied to a site a lot of people have put a lot of work into over the years, and turning it into something we'd no longer feel comfortable sharing with friends is just awful.
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Re: My resignation at webDiplomacy

#4 Post by captainmeme » Fri Mar 10, 2023 10:43 am

I know my post probably comes across as 'what a snowflake' to those who aren't affected by what I'm talking about. On the old forum I would never have posted it because the response would 100% be a torrent of abuse. Hell, I dislike posting it even now because I'm an extremely conflict-averse person and I hate arguing with people, but I think I kind of have to given my position.

I know what incident you're referring to with the 'person got banned for having old-fashioned views' - talking about how women should be the property of men - and I think it's important to note that the reason that person was getting laughed out of town is *because* we ban people who make comments like that. It's easy to say 'hey look, the court of public opinion works' when your current example of the court of public opinion are the people who follow the rules. If you don't ban people who say stuff like that, then they'll back one another up and a lot of the voices who would otherwise speak up against them will go 'whats the point of subjecting myself to this' instead of doing so.
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Re: My resignation at webDiplomacy

#5 Post by Jamiet99uk » Fri Mar 10, 2023 11:49 am

I would like to agree with and support what Captainmeem is saying here, although I have personally disagreed with some of the forum moderating positions that have been taken. I agree that an unmoderated free-for-all is a very bad idea and did tend to make the forum a toxic place. I will also say however that on occasion the shutting down of speech went a lot further than driving out genuine "hate speech", and this did more-or-less kill off the politics area of the forum for quite a long time.

Let's not go back to the wild west, but let's have some balance.
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Re: My resignation at webDiplomacy

#6 Post by kestasjk » Fri Mar 10, 2023 12:21 pm

captainmeme wrote:
Fri Mar 10, 2023 10:12 am
kestasjk wrote:
Fri Mar 10, 2023 8:20 am
I am hoping to loosen the rules on the forum a bit; the women I asked didn't find the post sexist, and no-one found the other tongue-in-cheek comment objectionable, but that's up to people to decide. I don't think it's as big of a deal as it's being made out.
They did agree that moderators should be extra PC though, I'll give you that..
Speaking as someone who has spent the last 6ish years promoting webdiplomacy, particularly over the pandemic... Please don't do this.

I really love this site, and I've tried to give back on that front. I ran tons of tournaments here, I set up Blitz here as a reinvention of live games, I got to play against Diplodocus and Cicero because of this site and tried to do my part in helping improve them. I'd finally got the vFtF community to start considering moving across to webdip from backstabbr with the new interface, as VDL was considering running webdip games this year.

If webdip's leadership wasn't so anti-hate speech, I would not have promoted the site, or even come back to it at all. The forum was in a very 4chan-like state back when I joined, and it resulted in me bailing to vDip and solely recommending vDip to people at the time. When Zultar, Jmo and others started enforcing rules, that made a webdip a place I could actually recommend to people without worrying about subjecting them to abuse.

I know that your political views don't line up with theirs, particularly on the freedom of speech front. "Let people say whatever they like and let people self-moderate' sounds like a good idea on the face of it; surely the public will condemn people with hateful opinions so it's better to let the hateful opinions be judged, right? But that ignores that:
A) Seeing those views expressed can be painful to some people. "That's life" isn't a good excuse for this, because this isnt life - this is a place people come to to play a game, something a lot of people do to escape life. Most people like this will either mute the forum or leave the site (like I did the first time around).
B) The kind of people who are attracted to that kind of forum, given the 'sanitized' state of most forums now, are the people who want to express hateful views and aren't allowed to in most other places. So over time the voices become heavily tilted towards that as those people join and the people who don't want to see those people's views head off to backstabbr or playdip.

You could see this in the pre-Zultar/Jmo forum. There was a ton of regular hate speech, and the only people who bothered posting responses were the kind of people who enjoyed an excuse to throw abuse back - so the forum was just a back and forth of constant abuse.

If you really want to have a 4chan-like forum, there's nothing stopping you from making one. But please don't use the webdip forum for that. This forum is directly tied to a site a lot of people have put a lot of work into over the years, and turning it into something we'd no longer feel comfortable sharing with friends is just awful.
Hmm, appreciate the input CM.

I'm not hoping to get more hate-speech or recreate 4chan, but I do have a different recollection of the old forum as having more varied active discussions and being more likely for players to join rather than playing games and otherwise keeping away. I don't remember it being full of hate speech (!), but maybe it was / my threshold for what counts is lower.

It definitely helped the site activity because people wouldn't just come to play but would join discussions etc, and I figured relaxing the rules regarding what people can post might get the same thing happening again.

If vDip was a refuge at the time I wonder why; was it a different player base or did they moderate it?


I did also consider that times have changed since then, and communities typically center around Reddit/Discord, but seems worth a shot changing things around a bit to see if the forum grabs people's attention. These days the forum is just a few long-term threads, some discussions on game issues / feature issues etc. It felt like you couldn't say/do anything without someone dropping in and shutting it down.

Backstabbr doesn't even have a forum, and maybe that's the smarter approach these days.. It'd definitely be less headaches, and but I feel it'd be a shame to give up on it.


I know the Cicero project had to deal with filtering a lot of toxic content out of the game messages, and I've got PMs about people getting nasty content in games.
It's weird that that's not an issue; I've not seen a request in the mod forum/e-mail about it that I can recall, I figured the silence/mute country function was working well.

I'll have a ponder and look into the stats, interesting feedback.


In general I'm not looking to make changes no-one wants.. But there have been other cases of changes were made out of necessity, they were resisted for reasons I didn't understand but it worked out.
It's hard to tell when resistance to change is justified because it's there either way.
Jamiet99uk wrote:
Fri Mar 10, 2023 11:49 am
I would like to agree with and support what Captainmeem is saying here, although I have personally disagreed with some of the forum moderating positions that have been taken. I agree that an unmoderated free-for-all is a very bad idea and did tend to make the forum a toxic place. I will also say however that on occasion the shutting down of speech went a lot further than driving out genuine "hate speech", and this did more-or-less kill off the politics area of the forum for quite a long time.

Let's not go back to the wild west, but let's have some balance.
Yeah I think jamiet is on the same wavelength here; no-one is looking for a free-for-all, but it feels the pendulum did swing a bit far the other way.. I'm interested in any thoughts (not to hijack zultar's thread)

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Re: My resignation at webDiplomacy

#7 Post by JECE » Fri Mar 10, 2023 12:42 pm

I also have a different recollection of the old Forum, although I may be thinking of a different time period than captainmeme. But while I don't think that the old Forum "was just a back and forth of constant abuse", I do agree with every other word that captainmeme wrote. Letting users like krellin back on the Forum will tank what little activity that we do have here, and possibly bring down the rest of the site. That forum activity fell over the years probably has many causes, but I doubt that moderation was one of them. Simply switching to the new Forum probably had a great effect on participation.
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Re: My resignation at webDiplomacy

#8 Post by learnedSloth » Fri Mar 10, 2023 1:17 pm

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Future Forum

#9 Post by dargorygel » Fri Mar 10, 2023 1:26 pm

Rather than continue to distract from Zultar's resignation post, let's move the discussion of what this Forum might look like here.

Memories? Hopes? Frustrations? Wishes? Good prices on getting a passport photo?

kestas mentioned he has intentions of 'softening' the Forum. What might you like that to look like? What do you NOT want that to look like?
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Re: My resignation at webDiplomacy

#10 Post by Jamiet99uk » Fri Mar 10, 2023 1:33 pm

UnHerd is a somewhat problematic website from a journalistic / informative standpoint but, having acknowledged that, the "DiversiKNITTY" thing, which I have heard about, is worth taking note of. Situation got way out of hand.
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Re: My resignation at webDiplomacy

#11 Post by Yonni » Fri Mar 10, 2023 1:36 pm

CaptainMeme really hit the nail on the head there.

I've been here for 12 years and 1 week. I used to be reticent of recommending this site to people because the landing page looked more like Tettleton's Chew and Conservative Man's private, racist blogs than a Diplomacy site. I'm very glad their ilk aren't free to post on the forum. Taking a step back in moderation would be a poor idea.

Discord and other online Diplomacy communities have really taken off lately and where they direct their communities is going to have a big effect on traffic here. Leveraging our new UI, AI bots, *free* access, and strong userbase (I really think we've got fantastic Diplomats here) to bring in Nexus tournaments and the like will do us a world of good. Conflating a strong Diplomacy site with a free-for-all forum would not.

It's important to remember why you made this site, why we're all here, and what we're good at. There are other places that are better designed and suited for unfettered political discourse.
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Re: My resignation at webDiplomacy

#12 Post by Chaqa » Fri Mar 10, 2023 1:49 pm

I remember the old forum fondly.

It was a chaotic hellscape of freedom and vitriol that teenage me loved.

30 year old me would not want it back.
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Re: My resignation at webDiplomacy

#13 Post by Chaqa » Fri Mar 10, 2023 1:49 pm

Chaqa wrote:
Fri Mar 10, 2023 1:49 pm
I remember the old forum fondly.

It was a chaotic hellscape of freedom and vitriol that teenage me loved.

30 year old me would not want it back.
To be clear, the last sentence should probably read "does not want it back"
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Re: My resignation at webDiplomacy

#14 Post by Chaqa » Fri Mar 10, 2023 1:52 pm

I think if anything the front page of the site being redesigned to better showcase the new forum, as well as WebDip actually utilizing Discord and not just having one that exists to exist would be better changes.

Seriously. The WebDip Discord is so fucking boring and useless.
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Re: Future Forum

#15 Post by Chaqa » Fri Mar 10, 2023 1:52 pm

It's gonna be a Facebook group in 5 years

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Re: My resignation at webDiplomacy

#16 Post by kestasjk » Fri Mar 10, 2023 2:06 pm

Didn't spot your follow up
captainmeme wrote:
Fri Mar 10, 2023 10:43 am
I know my post probably comes across as 'what a snowflake' to those who aren't affected by what I'm talking about. On the old forum I would never have posted it because the response would 100% be a torrent of abuse. Hell, I dislike posting it even now because I'm an extremely conflict-averse person and I hate arguing with people, but I think I kind of have to given my position.
Definitely want your position on it: I can see how if someone is very conflict averse and hates arguments how any reduction in moderation is a step backwards, but I hope we can aim for the widest range of people. It could be a more inviting / interesting place by doing so.

e.g. Those who don't like conflict/argument can avoid the politics subforum, rather than trying to make the politics forum conflict/argument free, and if it's too in-your-face we can add something to block it, that way people can set their own threshold. Not sure.

The problem with a forum with no conflict / argument, where no-one gets offended, is it can end up with a group-think and a less diverse group.


Re: the example I gave he made statements that you could give counter-examples to. He'd only have numbers behind him if he's forced to go somewhere where everyone is like minded, and they'll reinforce what he thinks.
It would've been interesting to lay that out and point out contradictions, see how he deals with them. Though I get not everyone enjoys that kind of thing it was a popular thread, and I wouldn't classify it as hate speech

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Re: Future Forum

#17 Post by Fluminator » Fri Mar 10, 2023 2:35 pm

So, internet culture has changed a lot in the past 10 years.
Forums in general are declining, and the free for all chat boards are a thing of the past. Every early online community I was part of has had the forum essentially die with the people who remain remembering the early days whistfully.

The path this site took isn't unique at all either with the "no rules/free for all discussions" to "moderator crackdown" to "apparent slowdown of the forums".

I could pontificate about the collapse of forum culture online based on the changing landscape of society and the internet's role in it, but either way I'm pretty sure the active forum is not coming back (It's a trend I see everywhere).

As of now, I think the thriving "internet" communities are the ones that have a supported discord server and people willing to post on those. If you wish to have a unique community entirely webdip based, you need to improve the discord server. (But there are so many diplomacy discord servers out there the competition might be pretty stiff at this point.)
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Re: My resignation at webDiplomacy

#18 Post by kestasjk » Fri Mar 10, 2023 2:37 pm

Chaqa wrote:
Fri Mar 10, 2023 1:52 pm
I think if anything the front page of the site being redesigned to better showcase the new forum, as well as WebDip actually utilizing Discord and not just having one that exists to exist would be better changes.

Seriously. The WebDip Discord is so fucking boring and useless.
What do other sites use discord for, is it just a modern IRC?

I should split this off from zultar's thread, 1 sec

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Re: Forum moderation/activity discussion

#19 Post by Fluminator » Fri Mar 10, 2023 2:44 pm

Darg started a separate thread about the forum where I gave my 2 cents.
viewtopic.php?f=2&p=332989&sid=e9eb92a7 ... 66#p332989
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Re: Forum moderation/activity discussion

#20 Post by Chaqa » Fri Mar 10, 2023 2:56 pm

Did someone really merge the deliberately separate topic back into this one.

What a doofus

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