Moderators: do we need more?

[nathanmallard]

OK, yup, this is going to be controversial.
This forum, right now, is a mess. Not any one person's fault I must add, more a case of everyone getting on top of themselves. I also feel that the few mods left on this forum are overworked, and are making mistakes as a result. Yes, I know about Point 19 of the CoC:

"Interfering with, criticising and / or publicly commenting about moderation decisions. Messages commenting on or criticizing forum administrative actions will be removed without warning. Any complaints or disagreements regarding forum or chat room moderation should be made by contacting Helpdesk."

Basically, I propose that general forum users (perhaps Trainz Veterans only) be able to submit themselves to a shortlist of potential moderators, and a public vote will be held to pick four, to become the moderators of the forum. The next year, a new vote would be held, and the previous ones would be replaced with a new set.
Yup, I say we go democratic!
Perhaps a trial period, with the current moderators still in place to maintain order, would be required but I am sure with the right guidance by the right people this can become a true community-run forum for all. I know I sound preachy but we do need more, and what's more, the general forum population needs to have a say in this. The only problem with is that the forum could get overly politicized during the voting period, but that's no bad thing really, as long as it's in some sort of relevant "Moderator Voting" section of the forum.

 

[shaneturner12]

I cannot see your idea happening I'm afraid - only N3V can appoint moderators and it's probably their decision on who gets appointed.

Shane

 

[rickf77]

No person should ever be put through that! It's not any fun. If a person WANTS to be a mod, that is not the right person for the job. It's a thankless, totally unpaid, crappy job. You don't look just in here to see what's wrong. You have cry babies pm-ing you all the time. Then ya got those whose farts don't stink demanding justice be done on their behalf. Oh, think hard before you volunteer for a job like this. You can also wind up with some jerk mod who wants to be a God. Be thankful for the mods you have..... guys who are fair and impartial.

Thanks is not nearly enough, mods ..... thanks very, very much anyway!

Cheers ...rick

 

[ianwoodmore]

I gave up the moderator job because of the stress involved.
I also wanted to concentrate on TANE development and automated Asset Repair capability.
I found the constant bickering to be quite foreign to my way of thinking and the respect for others my parents and grandparents taught me.
I was a commanding officer in the Royal New Zealand Air Force and administered the Manual of Air Force Law for my unit. Abide by the rules and all is sweet. Break them and suffer the consequences.

Moderator's job would be a lot easier if we adopted a three strikes and you are out for persistent offenders.

Our current penalties are too light.

The other side of the coin is the persistent offenders should engage brain before mouth or keyboard.
There are so many petty squabbles that moderators get flooded with trivia.

Bottom line. Don't feed the trolls and flamers. They thrive on contention.

If you want to use these forums then abide by the Code of Conduct.

 

[nicky9499]

Moderator's job would be a lot easier if we adopted a three strikes and you are out for persistent offenders.
Our current penalties are too light.

Why not just implement and enforce this, this being N3V's own forum and all. Too many times a troll or troublemaker was set to sit on the naughty step but once the ban was lifted it becomes business as usual yet again.

 

[wholbr]

Hi everybody.
I do not feel that the forum problems are in anyway due to the moderators or lack of them. I believe they carry out a very good job especially considering the attitude of some members of this forum. The problems we have lie in the very construction of the forum in its present form.

To take the above argument forward think of a person who has seen the advertising for T:ane and is thinking of buying the software. That person may well visit this forum to ascertain the quality of support they could expect to receive on purchase and the general level of friendliness and debate within the forums sections.

With the above in mind, what would that person find. A forum divided into three (in the main) two of which are marked as private which our prospective buyer could not access. In the section our prospective new member can access they would find stupid threads, flamewars and no off topic debate that can (and once did) make these forums so interesting after a few hours of route or content creation.

In the forgoing, would anyone who is thinking of purchasing T:ane actually do so after visiting this forum, almost certainly not in my view. T:ane will be competing with many other simulation games and the slowing sales of PCs. Along with the forgoing this forum is certainly no advertisement for purchasing Trainz new era and may well be costing N3V sales even now.

Bill

 

[Enzo1]

I actually like Nathan's idea. I really think that if we did something like this, we might be able to shuffle some serious offenders off the forums. I personally think that every 6 months we should elect new ones, not every new year, because if we get a bad one, one year becomes an eternity, but so does 6 months, but 6 months is more manageable than 1 year. In the situation we get a bad one, we should go back and look at other potential candidates, and impeach the offending moderator and replace him with one of those, or just call a re-election on all of them in the case that they were all bad. I also think that these mods will also need to be in charge of improving the forums (NOT THE GAME, just the forums).

And as always,
Have fun!
Chris/Enzo1

 

[generalman]

I believe this would be a good plan, up to a certain point. I agree with the yearly-voting concept, but I believe the people of the forum should nominate who they think would make a good moderator. For example: a Trainz Veteran, who is respected by majority of the people in the forum, has a positive attitude in the community, and would be trusted by other members to do the job right. If all of these were a factor in the process, I would be in favor of it.

 

[Enzo1]

I believe this would be a good plan, up to a certain point. I agree with the yearly-voting concept, but I believe the people of the forum should nominate who they think would make a good moderator. For example: a Trainz Veteran, who is respected by majority of the people in the forum, has a positive attitude in the community, and would be trusted by other members to do the job right. If all of these were a factor in the process, I would be in favor of it.

That is a good forgotten point. This point completely slipped my mind. I personally agree with this statement as well, because then, everybody will most likely agree with the decision to elect one common moderator that everybody knows, and know will do a good job

 

[ZecMurphy]

Good Morning All
First up, we're happy to let this thread continue, so long as it remains constructive (which it has so far ). I'm not posting here to restrict this, just posting to give a response on our current stance regarding moderators.

At this stage, we select moderators who we believe to be able to remain relatively impartial (whilst still remaining members of the Trainz community; we don't restrict this) and who are in different locations/time-zones so as to have them around as much as possible. We are looking to bring in further moderators into our team, however we do take our time with this to ensure we select the right people to do this.

We have previously looked at taking on a method like the one Nathan has proposed, however we do not currently feel this would be suitable for the official Trainz forum. Mostly as a result of previous threads bringing up this idea, or various similar ones, which did not end well.

Regards

 

[Enzo1]

Maybe we should consider moving this thread to General Trainz? See if we can get some more people's input?

 

[rjhowie]

Well, I am completely happy with NV3 deciding on the Mods and how many are required. After all even allowing for over the top stuff such items are not in some tidal wave situation.

 

[PerRock]

I don't know what the current rules are for moderators to follow when administrating punishments here. I do agree then seem to be fairly lacking. My one infringement was given to me & I didn't even know it had been until I happened upon the right page in the UCP to see (that's now changed & it's more obvious). But it seems you can do a fair bit of rule breaking around here before you actually have your privileges removed. Over on AMTZ I laid out a "Moderator Line of Attack" set of rules to follow & they have worked great, mind you AMTZ is a much smaller & quieter community then this one. But anyways here it is:

Level 1 = Offence 1 & 2; warning level increase, PM/public warning (depending on the offense)
Level 2 = Offence 2 & 3; 2nd warning level increase & PM warning (last warning), Announcement on the Mod chat
Level 3 = Offence 4; short time ban and/or post moderation
Level 4 = Offence 5; perm-ban

Some offenses have a different system.
Gimmie-pigs (while I do hate them) get Level 1, then Level 3, followed by Level 4.
Spammers (completely off topic stuff, usually bots) get Level 4.
Warez get Level 4.
Off topic posts get a public warning; then on continuation get deleted.
Wrong topic threads get moved with a message saying so.
Large images get changed to links, and a message saying so. All over-sized images are automatically resized when posted.*

*AMTZ implements a script that automatically resizes images, but there was a time before I had the script running. So I left the old rule there, just striked thru.
AMTZ moderators also have a forum where we log our actions for each offender. So if you break a rule you'll get a thread in this closed area, so that other mods know what level the guy is on, and usually some comments about their actions.

Not included is what to do with too large signatures. For that you get a warning & we have a 'you broke the rules' signature image that replaces their signature. Otherwise it's the same.

Anyways that's what I do.

peter

 

[clam1952]

Likewise, I'm quite happy to leave the choice of moderators to N3V.

 

[LWVRR]

My prospective is somewhat different on this topic. I believe that the mods should go and be replace with professionals or N3V staff. It’s because of the mods that I rarely post here anymore. It’s because of the mods and N3V unwillingness to control them that my newer content will never show up on the DLStation. N3V didn’t want to deal with me when I had some issues, so now I don’t deal with N3V. The nice chuck of money I gave to N3V will be the last money they will ever see from me again.

 

[Enzo1]

My prospective is somewhat different on this topic. I believe that the mods should go and be replace with professionals or N3V staff. It’s because of the mods that I rarely post here anymore. It’s because of the mods and N3V unwillingness to control them that my newer content will never show up on the DLStation. N3V didn’t want to deal with me when I had some issues, so now I don’t deal with N3V. The nice chuck of money I gave to N3V will be the last money they will ever see from me again.

I thought the mods were already staff of N3V. I say it's bit harsh to take that stance, especially with TANE coming out very soon. I would heavily reconsider your decision and hatred of the mods. I go as far to say as perhaps they are not all to blame for the trouble in the community. Most of the blame for that has to on the community's members themselves. There's no better moderation than when the community moderates itself and veers away from troublesome topics and people. I'd say that if that would happen a lot more around here, the mods would have a great big simile on their faces and say "Man I love this community!".

I actually like Nathan's idea. I really think that if we did something like this, we might be able to shuffle some serious offenders off the forums. I personally think that every 6 months we should elect new ones, not every new year, because if we get a bad one, one year becomes an eternity, but so does 6 months, but 6 months is more manageable than 1 year. In the situation we get a bad one, we should go back and look at other potential candidates, and impeach the offending moderator and replace him with one of those, or just call a re-election on all of them in the case that they were all bad. I also think that these mods will also need to be in charge of improving the forums (NOT THE GAME, just the forums).

That's my stance and I am sticking by it. I think that Nathan's idea would really be a great help for the community. It would allow us to see who the truly helpful trainzers are. Once we can do that, we can being to build from there, the brand new community that is much needed right now. Right now, this community turns more people away from trainz than it brings in. I think that with the new mods being helpful trainzers, we can get rid of those of whom who give the community a black-eye and get some newer prospects to come in and give us a few hands.

 

[rjhowie]

I still don't see any need for a change at all and the number of disputes is really relatively tiny to shut a thread down. To date after years with Trainz, I have seen no campaign for what this thread is mooting so it is with respect (even allowing for the right of opinion), ehhrm (cough), pointless.

 

[Enzo1]

I still don't see any need for a change at all and the number of disputes is really relatively tiny to shut a thread down. To date after years with Trainz, I have seen no campaign for what this thread is mooting so it is with respect (even allowing for the right of opinion), ehhrm (cough), pointless.

I would say you need to visit the forums more often to see what all is going on around here. I think if you did that, your stance might change on that. I'm not saying the moderators that we have now are not good enough, because they do a fine job, but with a few more of them around, the increasing number of squabbles that have been going on around here will be lessened. We have to understand that they too are like the rest of us trainzers and probably have a job in real life as well, so they cannot moderate the forums 24/7 no matter how hard they try. With a couple more, it will be easier to get conflicts resolved because they would be more frequent due to the fact they would all be in I'm sure different time zones, so each one would be moderating at different times of the day. When there is more moderator presence, then chances are, people will think before posting, making pointless threads to fuel rants, making inflammatory posts, and making pointless posts with a mission of causing fights. Once we stop that, the community will be able to move forward. Until then, we're likely going to have 1-2 conflicts a day and be a crappy community until somebody takes it over, and tells us to clean our acts up.

 

[BuilderBob]

I would say you need to visit the forums more often to see what all is going on around here. I think if you did that, your stance might change on that.

People see as much of the bad behaviour as they choose to see. I think the reason that many do not see any proplems with the current arrangement is that the bad behaviour does not usually intrude into the worthwhile discussions. If you simply ignore the threads with the carping and bitching then you aren't missing anything much. And ignoring them is the best policy anyway, because troublemakers depend on the responses they get to keep the argument rolling.

More moderators trying to impose tighter rules only provides fodder for those who want to make trouble. Ignore them and they fade away, because politeness and courtesy aren't interesting to them.

 

[Enzo1]

Ignore them and they fade away, because politeness and courtesy aren't interesting to them.

That's actually a pretty good idea. It also relates back to the time when I stated this:

Most of the blame for that has to on the community's members themselves. There's no better moderation than when the community moderates itself and veers away from troublesome topics and people. I'd say that if that would happen a lot more around here, the mods would have a great big simile on their faces and say "Man I love this community!".

I think we should try to do that more often.