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For those who don't know, forums.penny-arcade.com will be closing soon. However, we're doing the same kind of stuff over at coin-return.org with (almost) all the same faces! Please do feel welcome to join us.
For those who don't know, forums.penny-arcade.com will be closing soon. However, we're doing the same kind of stuff over at coin-return.org with (almost) all the same faces! Please do feel welcome to join us.
For those who don't know, forums.penny-arcade.com will be closing soon. However, we're doing the same kind of stuff over at coin-return.org with (almost) all the same faces! Please do feel welcome to join us.
Guiding Principles and New Rules for Our Community - Discussion
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Posts
No, no.
I like what he has to say
Celeste [Switch] - She'll be wrestling with inner demons when she comes...
Octopath Traveler - MY BLADE IS UNBENDING
Did you let Thawmus clean your keyboard?
Hi
To build on this sentiment, because it ties to something I've been mulling over; perhaps this is obvious to many, but we should hold very closely that 'victim' and 'culprit' (or whatever term might best fit here) can be the same person, from various perspectives.
And they might not even know it.
For all I know there may well be a handful of users who see my screeds and reflexively think 'man, fuck that guy', because of something I said or how I treated them years or even decades ago.
Things that you or I shitposted in the late aughts or teens of the millennium might be long forgotten but were taken as an insult. I'm not saying that a ton of our folks are nursing grudges from a decade past, but this stuff runs deep, and while everyone is the hero of their own story, I'm positing that at the same time, some (or even many) of us are going to be the villains in someone else's.
We can couch our language in that what we did was because it was right and/or necessary. That there were a lack of mods. That someone was known to be an asshole and got told they were an asshole who should shape up their asshole ways.
But that doesn't mean it didn't leave an impact we didn't intend. Maybe even on people to whom the message wasn't aimed at. It's easy to say 'if you're not one of the people being shitty, why be so worried about us talking about people who were very explicitly being shitty?', but strays can land all the same when painting with a broad brush, and in the name of expedience or short hand, a lot of people (on a variety of platforms) have defaulted to awfully broad brushes.
Myself included.
Ah yes, just like in Jurassic Park.
So what you're saying is... life finds a way?
That wasn't even genetic engineering, just aggressive hormonal treatment. It was the Blast Processing of biological engineering.
Like thirty yes/no votes on people if we want fifteen people
How much do you want to bet that a lot of names will end up listed on both the would and would-not lists.
Yeah there'd be overlap, but there should also end up with a group of 20-30 people specific to one list or the other, but not both.
For example, I will use my the current HoA for my condo complex (technically CoA, but HoA is more recognizable for folks). The Board has a set number of seats and there are supposed to be elections for those seats. However, if the board as vacant seats (which we did for years) and people want to join the Board, then as long as the number of seats is equal or greater than the people wanting on the Board, then they kist get on the Board. That's how we got our current Board of petty, vindictive jerks, they just took the open seats which was enough for a majority.
Since we want more mods on Coin Return than we have here now, we have to decide what to do if not enough people want to be mods. Do we let them have the position because want to fill as many seats as possible or are we willing to deal with less mods if they can't get "community support"? Both have downsides, either we get mods that some people might not be happy with because we needed the positions filled, or we have too few mods and the mods who are supported have to deal with more work.
I also do not want to see mod elections, that is just going to cause more fractures and schisms. Having two or more users campaigning against one another is both a complete mess and just going to put people at each others' throats.
I would propose that mods should be nominated by other users, probably with at least one other person (maybe more since we have a decent sized user base) seconding the nomination. If the nomination is accepted then a poll thread can be created where people can give a digital thumbs up or thumbs down on if they want the user to be a mod. If they get a majority (51%) of the submitted responses (not everyone will vote, so can't really require majority of total users), then the position is theirs.
In the off chance that we have more approved people than mod seats, we'll need a way to pick who gets the seats. Probably weight towards people who get a higher approval % and go from there.
As far as mod action appeals, I don't really have any specific ideas, but the process needs to be detailed and, more importantly, final. While community input should be valued in these appeals, we cannot allow the most vocal of the forums to be able to just yell and shout down mod decisions. As someone who was bullied in school by a popular kid who avoided punishment by just getting his friends to lie on his behalf, the idea of some users potentially being immune to the rules because they're popular makes me very uneasy. And once a decision about an appeal is reached, it will need to be accepted. If your friend got their thread ban upheld, that sucks but you gotta accept it. Endlessly litigating every decision is not a good idea.
Just in general, the mod tools seem pretty fantastic. I don't have personal experience with vanilla's mod tools but I get the impression that a lot of it was kinda shoehorned in - like reports creating threads in the mod forum instead of creating a new type of first class object purpose built for what a report actually is.
In either case, if we use those threads, it should be simple enough to just take the link to the Infraction thread post and copy it into all the report feedbacks.
It's a bit more "paperwork" but that's a very common fact of increasing communication and I hope it's an easy enough habit to form, and if it doesn't feel meaningful we can always review.
I want to say from memory that a lot of the mod tools for these forums were somewhat bespoke. Idk if that's because tools didn't exist at all back then or if Vanilla doing it for us somehow seeded those ideas into the industry and other software copied the ideas or what but in any case it sounds like we're gonna get enough useful tools out of the box that it may be worth seriously looking at what "we" do that it can't and just saying "do we even still seriously want that?"
Like idk how common of a solution "jailing" is but if it can be done easily I feel like we as a community mostly like it (or at least find it a staple of as-is functionality); at the same time if it would be a PITA I'm not sure it's worth pushing for on principle.
But also also, from the looks of things, we've got enough folks who are at least dev-curious that a lot of stuff will get made purely just to see if it can be done.
Because I can very easily see a situation where everyone puts up their slate(s) and all but maybe one or two say "hell no."
We generate a list of names, with no limit on how long it can be or how long it has to be.
We generate this list by having members suggest names to the TT (you can recommend yourself if you really want). The TT (or whichever team is essentially collecting the names if people want it to be someone else) ask the nominated if they are willing. If it's yes, and there isn't some objective and apparent reason why that person cannot be considered, they go on the list.
Then the list is put forward with every name having a yes/no option. Any name who gets a certain percentage of yeses becomes a mod. If we get too many? We're not going to get too many. If we get too few, we appoint those we have and begin an extended process to try and get more nominations. We don't need any specific target number of mods in mind except to know the bare minimum without which we cannot function.
I think it was mentioned heaving a thread per subforum fractures the info too much, so if we did have a thread, there would be one central thread in whatever the admin (bug reports etc) subforum was called