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Sedisp posted:Almost no suggestions in this thread or the QCS one are how to bring back debates. It's all let my posting pals post or stop my posting enemies from posting. Yeah I'm increasingly convinced that this is the actual big problem facing D&D. Quite a few posters seem to view probations as an official marker of losing a debate; the larger the punishment, the worse the loss. As such, people try to play the refs, and lure the people they're debating into posting something punishable, then yelling bloody murder about it at the mods (frequently when the infraction is minor at worst). Alternatively, if they can't get that to work, they gather up their posting posse in a discord or whatever and pile into a thread in the hopes that the mods will refrain from punishing their shitposting and cheerleading because they don't want to toss out a dozen probations at once. This isn't specifically a "cspam invaders" issue either, it's an issue with people who have decided that they're only interested in discussions if they can win them, and mod intervention is the most common win condition when there isn't an overwhelming consensus of thread regulars to run them out on a rail. Every new rule just gives people a new angle from which to play this stupid little game. Being wrong isn't a reason for being punished in D&D. Your debate opponent being probated is not an indication that you are correct. Ultimately most debates and discussions aren't going to have a neat, satisfactory ending in this subforum. It's an asynchronous, open medium; a single thread can have a half little mini-debates spanning hours or days, and people run out of time or energy to keep participating. The hope is that a productive dialogue develops, and that even if the poster you're arguing with doesn't come around to your viewpoint, the people reading the debate have come away learning something and refining their own knowledge and worldview. I don't know. I'm tired and feeling poor because of my vaccine booster so my thoughts are a bit jumbled.
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Oct 24, 2021 02:23
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Since none of you fuckwits can apparently abide by the "don't debate each other in this thread" rules, I'm putting down the red hammer: you will be probated for a week if you quote/subtweet a non-mod in this thread, or if you try to cutely circumvent this rule. This rule will go into effect 5 minutes after this is posted. If you're in this thread to wage ideological war with other posters, leave and don't return. If you're here because you love to join every bit of drama that appears on this entire website, autoban yourself and don't return.
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Oct 26, 2021 20:37
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Main Paineframe posted:if you're gonna go this far, just close the thread and post a link to some kind of private feedback form instead Because I'm stupid enough to keep believing that people can discuss changes like reasonable adults instead of overgrown children screaming and throwing fruit in the produce isle and challenging the shift manager to a fight.
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Oct 26, 2021 20:47
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silicone thrills posted:Honestly I am kind of shocked the mods have never tried something like a google form for feedback. Its easy to spin up an account for privacy and build a form with some ratings to shoot into an excel format to parse. We've discussed this before, in QCS, and the response was "why do the coward mods want to hide the feedback??" so here we are I guess.
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Oct 26, 2021 20:48
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Gumball Gumption posted:Yeah I'll just say it again the most exhausting thing about D&D is the constant rules about good faith while assuming any criticism or disagreement is coming from an insincere place. Yeah I agree that this is a major problem. The problem is there's a consistent tension between posters who feel that it's unfair when people do not assume good faith on their part, and posters who feel that they shouldn't have to humor people who they have determined to be posting in bad faith. Sometimes these are the same posters. I earnestly don't know how best to deal with this.
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Oct 26, 2021 20:51
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BRAKE FOR MOOSE posted:I don't think being a D&D mod is easy, but I think Fool of Sound is generally on point with his front-facing moderation and I have nothing bad to say. I don't know what goes on behind the scenes, though. It might just be that CommieGIR and Ralph to hand out so many random, capricious punishments that he is generally able to escape the spotlight. I'll be real, I probably give out less probations because I've transitioned away from dealing with reports towards regularly reading the threads I'm interested in and moderating them directly. Moderating via reports sucks and is difficult, time consuming, and frustrating because they're lacking any context and when there are 40 reports a day minimum, at least 80% of them not worth bothering with, whichever mod is handling them tends to burn out towards the end of the list and starts making snap judgments. I've definitely done it plenty in the past.
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Oct 26, 2021 20:56
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Lib and let die posted:The nice thing about something like Google Sheets, is that you can set protected sheets and ranges, so that you could take in feedback through a form, but not allow anyone to gently caress with it, while making the sheet visible to anyone with the link. Thanks for the offer. I do think we should probably do a permanent anonymous feedback box for D&D. My concern with a permanent feedback thread like the quieter forums have is that I strongly suspect they would turn into the Posters' Court of Every Single Thread and Post like the permanent mod feedback threads in QCS of yesteryear turned into, but an anonymous comment box could be a better solution for a forum like D&D.
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Oct 26, 2021 21:00
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Mellow Seas posted:Would it be possible, in a subforum with post volume as low as D&D, to completely disable reports? Free up the mods' time, so they can spend more time following actual threads; if something really bad comes up people can PM a mod. Maybe not practical, just an idea. I think the report button can technically be removed but you can get around that via url shenanigans. I think the big problem with the "mods just read the threads" approach is USnews, which in any of it's many incarnations over the years has always been too big, fast, and difficult to moderate. The only time during my tenure as mod where I feel like the thread was under control was when we had like 4 permanent IKs for it. It sucks because we consistently have quality conversation with relatively light moderation in the various spinoff threads, like the Afghanistan thread, but people don't want to post in them because USnews regulars don't like to follow the people they're debating into the specialized threads.
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Oct 26, 2021 21:04
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multijoe posted:I can't remember if it was bought up in this thread or the QCS one but as a serious bit of feedback have you considered reversals of fortunes of persistent offenders trying to win arguments via moderation? Like vexatious complaints aren't just a law of nature you have to endure, you can just light up a few people trying to play the system and that'll probably cut down on the number you have to deal with in future The admins have made very clear that they do not want us to do this unless the poster is a really egregious case. We've had a few people get warnings in D&D, a even fewer get punished for them.
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Oct 26, 2021 21:05
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silicone thrills posted:I dont think its so much that people don't want to follow but if you are having an organic conversation/discussion about something and someone says take it somewhere else, even in real life the conversation generally just stops. People aren't really behaving any differently here than real people in an office. The problem is that USNews isn't an organic conversation. There are too many people pursuing too many lines of discussion at once, in a manner that doesn't encourage or require them to actually participate in a dialogue. It's a high school locker room, where there's a bunch of individual conversations happening until someone throws down, and then there's no room for nuance because everything is written for the benefit of the audience.
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Oct 26, 2021 21:09
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Jimong5 posted:Friendly reminder that a mod opened the discussion lol GreyjoyBastard posted:
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Oct 26, 2021 21:10
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Rules change based on proposal from That Other Thread:
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silicone thrills posted:I guess I disagree? I post here exactly the way I talk to people in person or in my company teams chat. I guess other people don't but im not looking to throw down with anyone, I just want to talk about policy and outcomes. I appreciate that, and I wish more people would do so. Unfortunately quite a few posters post in a way that would get them a visit to HR any time a serious argument starts up, especially in USnews. It was just under half of the posts per day in D&D last I checked, but generated the overwhelming majority of reports and mod actions.
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Oct 26, 2021 21:16
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Cpt_Obvious posted:Why does this really matter? Why does 2 or 3 different groups of people having 2 or 3 different discussions in the same thread a problem? If you don't want to be part of one discussion, just skip over it. If you miss something important, you can just scroll up. CSPAM manages multiple political discussions in the same thread all the time. It works out fine. It's not a problem until the aforementioned throw down, then, as Main Paineframe says, that argument utterly overtakes the thread with low-quality posts. As for the latter I understand your point; the judgement call isn't always consistent by any means, but on the other hand this is a forum, it is meant to support multiple threads. We don't have nested threads like reddit or twitter; creating new threads is the support and intended method of siloing conversations. The Afghanistan thread, and most others, indicate that the silo'd conversations tend to have a much better signal:noise ratio.
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Oct 26, 2021 21:42
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Willa Rogers posted:Question for mods: Are there any reasons to not have 10-minute slow rolls for threads like usnews, or across dnd altogether? The reason for this was that we implemented it at the time USpol, but it was widely unpopular so we turned it back off.
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Oct 26, 2021 21:43
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A Buttery Pastry posted:Who determines what is an "egregious case"? Have you tried to push harder and then had admins admonish you for it? Based on how they post in QCS, it seems like they'd really rather not be involved at all, so from the outside looking in it doesn't look like it'd be that hard to tighten the reigns on that poo poo. Let just say there's a lot of tension about policy in regards to the politics forums. Hopefully we'll get the refined sitewide rules and published mod guidelines at some point.
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Oct 26, 2021 21:46
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ram dass in hell posted:My feedback is that this thread is a very good encapsulation and example of some of the larger issues with moderation in the subforum. It featured Yeah, I came in way hotter than I should have, I apologize, especially towards the people making an effort to remain productive and civil. I just came back to the thread which had grown 300 posts since I last looked at it, a lot of which was garbage (and which Commie did not help with) and was frustrated.
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Oct 26, 2021 21:53
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Cpt_Obvious posted:I am curious about just what percentage of DnD traffic is entirely USPol. 40%? 60%? All the mods are USPol posters, almost of the participants itt are USPol posters. Most of the other threads barely have more than a handful of posts per week. Roughly half, like I said a couple posts ago. Honestly I only was a USPol poster because I got asked to IK it specifically (and to a lesser extent the PoliToons thread because I was a regular poster there) after posting in the 2020 primary thread and the feedback thread at the time. Once I was made a full mod I stopped reading it regularly, since it's extremely difficult to keep up with. In general, a lot of mods ended up being USpol regulars because they were selected to be USpol IKs, since that what we needed the most of. There's a reason I've made "getting people to make and post in more threads" a goal for the last year or so. There's also a reason prior crops of D&D mods have tried to kill off USpol in various ways. Having a single all encompassing thunderdome thread for the US produces worse discussion than focused threads and is bad for educational utility and accessibility of the forum in general. However, there are a lot of D&D lurkers who read USpol/news as a sort of curated news feed plus editorial section, and who are extremely adamant about keeping it around. The transition to USnews, alongside the new thread-thread and the loosening of traditional D&D OP expectations was supposed to give both us and users more space for focused threads, without the usual cry of "oh and is six pages of arguing about vaping not US Politics??" but we lost a bunch of IKs and mods shortly after the transition and it never really took.
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Oct 26, 2021 22:06
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Willa Rogers posted:How long ago was this, and how long was it tried? What were the main objections to it? It was some time ago now, shortly after the option to do so was implemented. It lasted a few months. The hope was that it would cut down on low effort slapfights and white noise because it would A) give people more time to cool off, B) give people more time to write their posts, and C) give the mods more time to respond to slapfights before they overtook the entire thread. I think it helped a little, but it also did result in a lot of edit wars in posts, which made conversations difficult to follow, and it annoyed posters who were trying to participate constructively in two or three conversations at a time, like USpol typically does.
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Oct 26, 2021 22:11
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serious gaylord posted:Anger is the result of months, sometimes even years, of people feeling like they've been ignored. That no-one is listening to them and in fact seeing things just get worse and worse. This is the what, third? thread about how poor the moderation in D&D is in a short space of time and each time the response is: 'We're working on it, theres new rules coming. We're taking on board what you say and we'll try and do better'. I can personally guarantee you that the mods and admins read and discuss the feedback. Not agreeing with some of the points made, or not agreeing on course of action to be taken is not failing to listen. Further, very little of what's happening here is urgent or has any meaningful consequences when poor decision are made. Threats of self-harm are urgent, harassment or doxxing is urgent, posters committing real life violence is urgent. The wrong people getting sixers is not. It is something we want to improve, because we like D&D and would not have agreeing to volunteer our time here if we didn't want to try to make it better, but a bunch of people doing the digital equivalent of throwing tomatoes is worthless.
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Oct 26, 2021 22:29
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Cpt_Obvious posted:Ok, but do you see the contradiction here? You are asking people to post more while limiting what they can post about. If they want a 6 page derail about vaping just let them derail for 6 pages. People can post all sorts of interesting graphs about addiction or the horror of the tobacco industry or they can bond over quitting/trying to quit smoking or whatever. That's the natural flow of a conversation. Eventually some other topic will pop up that peopl want to talk about. No it's the conversation that 2-3 people want to have, while the other 100 regulars in USPol PM me 8 times and file collectively 30 reports about because they want to discuss breaking news in USNews, not vaping policy.
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Oct 26, 2021 22:34
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silicone thrills posted:I've seen this happen with something that was relevant recent news though - where people are still having a very productive conversation about say a news item that became relevant the day before and its just like BREAK IT UP BREAK IT UP TAKE IT SOMEWHERE ELSE and its like ... well poo poo. Because when those new threads are actually made not only does the quality of the conversation frequently improve, but the posters who did not want to discuss it at length don't get upset and whining in thread about it. Conversations aren't usually sent to their own threads unless they're pretty lengthy and other news is happening. Like again, let's say Afghanistan. That thread produced 1900 posts over the course of about six weeks, and was much, much faster at the beginning of that period. That's a lot of posts on that topic per day, enough to stymie a lot of other topics in USnews if it stayed there.
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Oct 26, 2021 22:43
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"Mods aren't allowed to participate" is not a viable policy unless Jeff starts paying people money to do it. People volunteer because they like participating in the forum they mod.
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Oct 26, 2021 22:49
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That sure is a lot of words to call me a patholical liar, MSDOS. It's funny that you would call anyone pathological when you've spent the entire last year of your posting exclusively complaining about D&D in other forums. Don't post in this thread again.
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Oct 26, 2021 22:52
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silicone thrills posted:I'd say afghanistan was fairly unique and because it is a huge topic it definitely deserves it own thread. But does a topic like "President calls to ban bubble gum flavored vapes" deserve its own full thread? ehhhh there isnt a ton to eek out of that stone. Yeah for sure, but there are lot of news stories that kind of unfold over the course of weeks or months and deserve their own thread, or are just recurring. Speaking of which I need to post the general US Foreign Policy thread, cause there was some interest in discussing that kind of thing in depth towards the end of the Afghanistan thread.
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Oct 26, 2021 23:02
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Democrat party is the most annoying little shibboleth because the people using it are just doing so to get a rise out of people and the latter always, always fall for it. It's incredibly childish of both parties. Generally the only blanket word ban I support are slurs, including ableist ones, and I don't really care if anyone thinks I shouldn't. There are some others terms of abuse that I'll shoot side eye at but I support looking at them in context and determining if they're being used in a way that's harmful. Generally I trust that D&D posters make a conscious effort to avoid acting and posting in a bigoted way and that they'll edit their behavior if called out. It's always heartening to see that someone has edited out a part of a post and replaced it with an apology before I even get to it.
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Oct 27, 2021 00:11
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Also Lib and Let Die and least a few of those are warnings to the effect of "you are close to a forum/threadban". Vitalsigns for instance isn't forum banned and honestly I'm perfectly happy to let his USnews threadban expire at this point since it's been a few months and he's been a consistantly good contributor elsewhere.
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Oct 27, 2021 00:13
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Threadbans and forumbans were specifically an admin directive. The idea is that by using them instead of harsh punishments, someone who is a problem in one place but not others isn't denied access to the entire forums because they can't contain themselves in one specific area. I'm... torn of the efficacy really. For some posters it's absolutely worked, for others it's just encouraged a bad poster to be bad elsewhere instead, and for some others they'd probably have been fine to come back after like a week or something via normal probations. I do think that threadbans in particular have been overused lately tbh.
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Oct 27, 2021 00:20
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Gumball Gumption posted:This might be outside of this thread but if they're an admin decree why have they been given no technical support? It's very odd and feels silly to avoid using the tools we have, probes and bans, to use these adhoc tools that you're not even really keeping track of and then also not give you any way to make it a real system. It's really weird and something that I never understand about SomethingAwful. We're a gated community yet really hate the idea of using that gate. Preaching to the choir here.
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Oct 27, 2021 00:27
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Gumball Gumption posted:I also have to be honest, it's kind of funny that the thread started out with this Ok, I think this does need to be said. The idea of having a functioning admin team actually overseeing the mods and developing consistent policy really didn't exist prior to 2019, afaict. Like before that there were 1-2 boss admins at a time who specifically handled big executive decision stuff but otherwise mods were left to their own devices with no oversight. The whole fyad drama into lowtax situation in rapid succession kinda upended everything and there has kinda been a (glacially slow) effort to figure out what consistent policies and practices on the site should look like. There has been some experimentation, and the lack of an admin who is particularly familiar with the politics forums has made things kind of difficult. Not to mention the codebase for this website is a loving disaster that's still being cleaned up pretty heroically by astral. This isn't really intended to be a "this is the admins' fault" post because the D&D mods have made poor and inconsistent decisions too, but some of the inconsistency and inertia does happen above our heads.
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Oct 27, 2021 00:40
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Freakazoid_ posted:So you do support blacklisting microaggressive name calling? Cease to Hope posted:Holy poo poo this is the worst idea I've seen in my entire life. Thankfully it's also completely impractical! But do not make a shitlist of enemies of D&D. Pentecoastal Elites posted:You say this is the worst idea you've ever seen in your entire life, but did you not see the very next sentence where he suggests a Something Awful Moderation JIRA? Cease to Hope posted:I meant the whole post, in fairness. mentholmoose posted:I don't have many thoughts on D&D but I think it's an absolutely incredible idea to implement a connection between code radium wrote and a JIRA server. Please do this immediately. Stop. We'll give the "debate other posters in this thread" thing another try tomorrow.
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Oct 27, 2021 00:43
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Willa Rogers posted:lmao, if this doesn't sum this poo poo up. There are very fine wailers and frothers on both sides, believe me. We get plenty of reports from our cspam crossover posters.
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Oct 27, 2021 00:48
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I'm going to go ahead and open the thread back up to civil and productive discussion between posters since the mods probably aren't going to be around a ton overnight. Grooglon posted:I hate how D&D talks about rape in general, in both the apologia and the "why do you love rape, biden voter". It's extremely distressing in a fight-or-flight panic kind of way. Yeah this is any ongoing issue that I constantly worry about and don't feel that I have a grasp on how to handle. I want D&D to be a place where people can respectfully and above all safely discuss abuse, but the current dont-ask-dont-tell-esque setup is awful and leads to an environment where no discussion can happen at all. My observations are: ---Accusations of abuse need to be handled with utmost respect and circumspection; skepticism is weaponized against victims in order to silence them, especially by powerful people. ---Bringing up accusations as a litmus test of other posters is exploitative and highly disrespectful both to other posters an survivors in general; many posters have suffered abuse themselves, and labeling people as pro-rape is wildly out of line. ---Posters need to feel confident that they can share, discuss, and learn without risking severe punishment for honest missteps, unless they've severe. Survivors need to feel confident that should moderation be needed, that have someone they can trust to discuss the issue with them and act appropriately. I'm particularly interested in hearing advice from people who have some experience or expertise in how abuse should be discussed. This is strictly voluntary, any poster who doesn't feel comfortable discussing this subject in this venue does not have to.
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Oct 27, 2021 04:24
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thatfatkid posted:Please don't put words in my mouth. That is nothing like what I've said that there is no mass slaughter of uyghurs, their quality of life, life expectancy has improved recently, they are allowed to worship as Muslims etc. and therefore what is happening is not a genocide. I don't dispute their being detention facilities, but those existing do not a genocide make. This is fundamentally the same argument that colonizers made about native populations, and yes "have you considered how the victims of ethnic cleansing benefit from being forcibly 'civilized'"is a verboten position.
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Oct 27, 2021 15:23
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thatfatkid posted:No it isn't. China, a nation with a history of being exploited by literal colonisers is being accused of mistreating the uyghur population by those very same colonisers. It's a transparent narrative that western states/media (spearheaded by everyone's favourite fundamentalist neocon Adrian Zenz) have pushed to rattle the sabre at China. Ok could you just clarify for me: do you believe that the western reports of ethnic cleansing are sometimes sensationalized, exaggerated, or poorly research OR that some level of harm is being directed at the Uyghurs but the benefits of Chinese occupation outweigh those harms OR that the harms do not exist at all?
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Oct 27, 2021 15:58
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A Buttery Pastry posted:I haven't paid much attention to the various claims, but is that a thing? Ethnic cleansing is about removing a population from a territory (whether internally or about forcing them entirely out of your country), which is not an accusation I've seen made against China. I've seen the words used, but not claims fitting the definition. Sorry, I mistakenly believed that forced assimilation was a kind of ethnic cleansing but upon checking I found that they're typically used in distinct ways. Pretend I said 'forced assimilation' in my prior post instead.
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Oct 27, 2021 16:38
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Best Friends posted:Wouldn't this exact post, made by someone who isn't in the d&d in-group, be ban-able genocide denialism? Not if I was modding it, and I'd yell at another mod who banned someone for saying 'forced assimilation' instead of 'cultural genocide'. I'm fine with people not using the term 'genocide' because it's obnoxiously loaded and tends attract arguments over exact definitions. I'm not fine with people arguing that anything bad happening at all is western propaganda.
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Oct 27, 2021 16:50
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ram dass in hell posted:It sure was! Hey FoS, any plans to actually read the multiple effortposts made in response to your questions about sexual assault from yesterday, or is it another case of demanding effort from rape survivors to educate you and then ignoring their work and/or punishing them for it? Yes, once I get through this issue I'll return to it.
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Oct 27, 2021 16:52
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Best Friends posted:The post is literally and explicitly denying that genocide is happening. Genocide denial is the specific red line that has been brought up over and over. You are changing the rules to say that now genocide denial is allowed and mod authorized, and the new rule is you can't deny that forced assimilation is happening. Not using the specific term "genocide" while acknowledging the abuses is not genocide denial. Muscle Tracer posted:nope, it's part 3 of Fool of Sound's question. It's about whether you think the event happened / is happening, not the words used to describe it. Seems obvious!
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Oct 27, 2021 17:07
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Cpt_Obvious posted:Yeah but that's not how your mods are enforcing "genocide denial" so is this an official change in policy going forwards? They're not "my mods", I'm not an admin or even boss mod of D&D. We try to review each others' decisions but that doesn't always happen for various reasons. That said if anyone gets punished for not using the term "genocide" while still acknowledging that abuses are happening, then they can PM me or use the discord link in the rules thread to otherwise contact me and I will review it and yell at the mod who did it.
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Oct 27, 2021 17:17
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Hey since context is important, want to reveal who you were before you put on the mask?
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Oct 27, 2021 17:31
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