About forum moderation
Noob_Master69
Member Posts: 699 ★★★★
I'm sure I'm not the only one who has noticed less moderators being online on the forums lately. Whatever the cause of this may be is irrelevant to the points I want to make in this post and is not our business to discuss or speculate about.
What I do want to discuss is what can be done to make the forums a better place
It's no secret that there are a lot of forum users who are let's say passionate about the game and in return tend to not be the most positive towards Kabam, fellow summoners, and differing opinions. Every once in a while a post emerges that leads to very off-topic and not very classy discussions. During regular Kabam business hours this seems to be not a very big issue as Miike or Jax will usually be able to lock down or delete threads without too much delay and everyone can go on their merry way.
But outside of office hours, namely the weekends, some of these less classy discussions will emerge. This weekend a post got made talking about some racist statements another player made, what insued were (if I recall correctly) 5 pages of discussion about race, some things very mild, other things incredibly racist in my opinion. On monday this thread was rightfully shut down. I feel like these threads have been increasing in frequency, although I might be mistaken.
Another recent thread I remember is a player threatening physical violence, calling multiple people a variety of slurs, and posting their (alleged) own address in hopes to beat someone up. Again, once notified Kabam took this down, but the post had been up for quite a bit before they could do anything.
And there are more of these examples, from people posting links to mods, to pitty fights in the responses to a totally unrelated thread.
In the responses to the first thread I mentioned I saw a Forum Guardian(can't remember who) mention that they think they should have the power to lock a thread if multiple Guardians vote to do so. I'm sure this Guardian has shared that opinion with Kabam but reading that is kind of what sparked this post. With the game being global, lots of people playing on the weekends the forum will be used by atleast some people any time of the day, every day of the week. So why is there no moderation in place to reflect that?
I don't know if the Guardians voting on a post being taken down is the best solution, it can lead to all sorts of drama because someone may feel targeted and this can reflect badly on Kabam if handled poorly, but so do some of these threads I mentioned.
I think a form of volunteer moderation would not be bad. especially outside of business hours.
And btw, with this I have only focussed on the bad threads, having more (volunteer) moderation could also help with things like merging threads, so many times I'll find 5 posts underneath eachother mentionin the same exact problem that has a solution, cleaning this up could lead to less clutter and perceived spam
What do you guys think? I may have totally missed the mark here but would love an open discussion!
TL;DR: Forums are sometimes a nasty place outside of Kabam business hours, should Guardians or whoever have more control?
What I do want to discuss is what can be done to make the forums a better place
It's no secret that there are a lot of forum users who are let's say passionate about the game and in return tend to not be the most positive towards Kabam, fellow summoners, and differing opinions. Every once in a while a post emerges that leads to very off-topic and not very classy discussions. During regular Kabam business hours this seems to be not a very big issue as Miike or Jax will usually be able to lock down or delete threads without too much delay and everyone can go on their merry way.
But outside of office hours, namely the weekends, some of these less classy discussions will emerge. This weekend a post got made talking about some racist statements another player made, what insued were (if I recall correctly) 5 pages of discussion about race, some things very mild, other things incredibly racist in my opinion. On monday this thread was rightfully shut down. I feel like these threads have been increasing in frequency, although I might be mistaken.
Another recent thread I remember is a player threatening physical violence, calling multiple people a variety of slurs, and posting their (alleged) own address in hopes to beat someone up. Again, once notified Kabam took this down, but the post had been up for quite a bit before they could do anything.
And there are more of these examples, from people posting links to mods, to pitty fights in the responses to a totally unrelated thread.
In the responses to the first thread I mentioned I saw a Forum Guardian(can't remember who) mention that they think they should have the power to lock a thread if multiple Guardians vote to do so. I'm sure this Guardian has shared that opinion with Kabam but reading that is kind of what sparked this post. With the game being global, lots of people playing on the weekends the forum will be used by atleast some people any time of the day, every day of the week. So why is there no moderation in place to reflect that?
I don't know if the Guardians voting on a post being taken down is the best solution, it can lead to all sorts of drama because someone may feel targeted and this can reflect badly on Kabam if handled poorly, but so do some of these threads I mentioned.
I think a form of volunteer moderation would not be bad. especially outside of business hours.
And btw, with this I have only focussed on the bad threads, having more (volunteer) moderation could also help with things like merging threads, so many times I'll find 5 posts underneath eachother mentionin the same exact problem that has a solution, cleaning this up could lead to less clutter and perceived spam
What do you guys think? I may have totally missed the mark here but would love an open discussion!
TL;DR: Forums are sometimes a nasty place outside of Kabam business hours, should Guardians or whoever have more control?
13
Comments
Edit: Maybe then can have like levels of guardian? With only the top level having the ability to fully shut threads down?
I do like this post though. Thanks for thinking about the mods as real people doing a job, and having a life on weekends. Jax and Miike do a great job over here.
More power would be helpful to take down a post that is truly hideous, but its potentially a slippery slope and at the end of the day we’re here to be helpful, not to be employees. I’d like better tech in place to filter these kinds of things, some OCR tech to pick out those lovely colourful words in those line screenshots for example would certainly not be a bad thing as i assume it’s in place to prevent the posting of 18+ images.
Still can’t decide if the op was trolling or not 🤷♂️