Fourth Quarter 2022 D&D Feedback.

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Debate & Discussion > Fourth Quarter 2022 D&D Feedback.

Fister Roboto: Feb 21, 2008

Discendo Vox posted:

1. It is very frustrating to see someone violate the rules, and instead of applying them, the mods proceed to ask the user questions and give them control of the thread for several pages. Every single time this happens, the only effect is to draw out the harm to discussion that the rule is supposed to prevent, and the original violator either a) gets probated anyway or b) they don't, and all people looking to poo poo up discussion get an object lesson in forms of discussion-making GBS threads that the mods will facilitate. When you do this, you are making moderation harder for yourselves in the future, and making the subforum less useable for everyone else.

2. It is not helpful to have an enumerated set of rules if mod actions then don't align with those rules. When non-joke probes or other actions don't make clear what rules they're violating it provides justification for the users complaining that moderation is inconsistent.
2a. Similarly, when it arises that mod action is needed that doesn't fall under the enumerated rules, the reason should say that this is the case, and the mods should explicitly confer (not necessarily publicly) about whether and how the rules can be revised to address that situation.
2b. Moderation policies and their rationale should be stated publicly in one place, and should not be announced ad hoc in the middle of arguments with users, in D&D or elsewhere. This also contributes to both the perception and the reality of inconsistent moderation.

You should not use the number of reports as a metric of quality; Campbell's law applies. There are reasons for the report number to decline that don't have to do with things getting better. Users leaving, activity shrinking, and users being taught that reports will do nothing, will also cause the number of reports to drop. You need to start with what you believe the forum is supposed to be, and directly tie it to your evaluation of "quality," preferably with more explicit terms, and with prior identification of carveouts.

For example, if you believe that the subforum should be educational, then people asking more factual questions that get answered can be a sign of healthy discourse, and that standard can be explicitly exclusive of people asking rhetorical questions intended to derail discussion. I could give a big rant about functional form here, but unless you think that "quality of the subforum" is inherently a number, you should treat numeric measures with skepticism- you'll tend to overvalue them.

My feedback is that nobody should ever listen to this twerp. Everything they post is this kind of pseudo-intellectual verborrheic nonsense. Every time they get in an argument with someone, they immediately attack the other person as "making GBS threads up the discussion" (I'm fairly certain that this is against the rules that DV wants to be strictly enforced). It's clear that they only want debate and discussion to occur within the narrow constraints that they deem acceptable. It's exhausting to try discussing anything with them, and it usually ends with a probation for the other person. If the mods really want D&D to be better and more open to discussion, then efforts should be made to get DV to stop domineering the conversation like this.

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# ¿ May 21, 2024 02:14

Fister Roboto: Feb 21, 2008

A Buttery Pastry posted:

Yeah. I'm not sure how persistently claiming this isn't flaunting rule 1B.

Yeah if I had to name my number 1 pet peeve about d&d right now it's this. It's incredibly frustrating to post my genuine opinion about something, and it gets met with sideways accusations of being a cspam troll or a Russian propagandist. It's a way of avoiding having to actually debate the point, and it shouldn't be tolerated.

I thought there was supposed to be an assumption of good faith here, but that often seems to go one way.

# ¿ Oct 31, 2022 01:47

Fister Roboto: Feb 21, 2008

Koos Group posted:

Please report such accusations as they are indeed against the rules.

I reported multiple cases of them just the other day and as far as I know nothing came of those reports.

# ¿ Oct 31, 2022 01:50

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