Quote:
Originally Posted by Rayne  Well, considering that this forum is predicated on advancing and improving the genre, how do you preserve those ideals with heavy moderation? I know sometimes Ut and others go right off the deep end, but shutting down the voice, as whacked out as it may sometimes be, also tends to shut down the ideal. |
By requiring criticism to contain valid, rational thoughts and be constructive. Staying on topic about the content of the thread (rather than the character of any poster) would help too.
This used to be a great board to come to in order to get an idea of the difficulties and how they might be solved in MMO design. Maybe it's a matter of the change of more singular vision after Furor left; maybe it's just harder to maintain vision in general when you're spanning 10-20 games instead of one or two. But whatever the reason, the S/N ratio here has pretty consistently shrunk to the point where it's not worth trying to tease out any good information or ideas from the fungal carpet that most of the threads have become.
Simple moderation based on: "Does the poster have a point? Does he make it succinctly? Does he avoid extraneous diversions and jabs at people/institutions/games?" would go a huge distance to fix that. It really doesn't even matter who
does the moderation.
If you're worried about, for example, community reps moderating out the negative, all it would take is a few threads started with cogent, well-thought out posts in the unmoderated section saying "I posted this in the moderated threads, but for whatever reason they didn't think it was a valid enough thought to be allowed through." to pretty glaringly highlight any type of systematic disinformation campaign or spin doctoring.
Not to start a cross-forum flamewar, but one of the things I value most about EJ's forums is the fact that if someone is being a fuckwit it's pointed out, they're told to stop it, and there's apparently enough respect/fear that they do. Actually having people do the same thing here could nearly singlehandedly snap this place back into a forum that had discussions that were interesting and pertinent.
