Although our forum consistently hosts interesting and diverse discussions, and has for years, there has been a recent trend towards antagonizing the mod team, which is really unfair given all the work they put in to keep the site free of cheaters (trust me it is not an easy job).

I frequently get e-mails asking why this or that account was banned, and have always been impressed when I go to the mod team and ask for the justification. Although moderation always has grey areas there is always an impartial, well-reasoned process behind every decision.


The tireless efforts to keep the server free of multi-accounters, and manage the stream of moderation requests from a server with hundreds of active users (and occasionally across more than one server) is something we should all be thankful for. Developers like myself will occasionally put a big burst of effort into adding functionality, and donors will make generous donations to help us keep up with the servers biannual payments when necessary, but the mod team is there every single day keeping the server playable.

A small minority clearly take that completely for granted, and that's a real shame. Of course we try to have a self-moderation policy where possible, where we make it very easy to ignore. I think this deprives the trolls (which emerge in all communities) of the attention they crave, and keeps things civil and dynamic, but apparently a small minority think self-moderation means the forum is a free for all, baiting the mod team is a sport, and a forum policy is there to be tested.


The mod team and me have discussed and asked around and decided some minor changes will be made to the Forum. I'd like to welcome back and thank abgemacht for taking the lead in helping with this Forum transition. Hopefully the upcoming changes will ease the pressure on the game team, and make sure there's no anti-mod sentiment from multi-accounters leaching over into the forum

I think most people know when the line is crossed without explicit guidelines / policy, and forum moderation is going to be based more on trusting users to have common sense than spelling it out. If something is borderline and you're genuinely not sure if it's okay to post write the mod team about it ([email protected]) . If you think the mod team has made a mistake write me about it ([email protected])


While I'm writing let me say apologies for not getting more changes out. I know the last change was about a year ago, and although it was a major change to add translation support that's pretty useless to the official site and we need group / real-life-friend support. Early next year I have some mandatory leave and I'm hoping to put some time towards webDip 1.4.