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You make a very good point, Vaughan, and in a forum with active moderation your view would carry the day. The key thing, to my mind, here is that there is no moderation so Gizmo has to intervene to deal with any problems. This isn’t the best use of his time so it happens sporadically and for a short time.

 

The issue, therefore, becomes one of what can we do to reduce trolling, bullying and abuse. I like the idea of thread opener having control over what happens to their thread. My reasons - very much as has been said before. Offending or seriously off topic posts would be deleted.

 

I think, Vaughan, that you overstate the risk that a thread opener would delete posts disagreeing with their point of view. Most people, in my experience, enjoy debate and find civil argument interesting, informative and stimulating. I think the first posts to be deleted would be offensive or abusive posts, thereby making it more difficult for the trolls to derail a thread and start their insults and abuse.

 

At the end of the day it is Gizmo’s decision and he has indicated that it is on the cards for the next forum software update. The sooner the better as far as i’m concerned. As Twiggy says, if it’s just a setting in the software then if it doesn’t work out it can easily be switched back.

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After taking into consideration others ideas and opinions on the topic... I agree that the personal diaries should be able to be moderated by the user, but the rest of the forums, especially debates and opinionated polls should be moderated by a higher up. If left up to the public anyone who disagreed would be deleted and reported within minutes of a threads open.

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After taking into consideration others ideas and opinions on the topic... I agree that the personal diaries should be able to be moderated by the user, but the rest of the forums, especially debates and opinionated polls should be moderated by a higher up. If left up to the public anyone who disagreed would be deleted and reported within minutes of a threads open.

 

 

While I still think most people would not just delete posts because they disagree in any thread they create, I do agree this is another option that could be considered, especially as most of the drama was happening in peoples dairies.

I am not sure though if it can be done that way, where just a certain section of the forum can be set to allow self moderating, maybe Ash can let us know if that is possible. 

Although I still do feel that for the forum to open up again to people making threads for discussion we should try this on all created threads and see how it goes.

We can all give our opinions on what will happen, but no one really knows until it is tried.

As it can be so easily turned back, I can't see any real harm in giving it a try.

 

We also have to consider that at the moment no new accounts can be made and it looks like approvals for posting to new accounts that were created before that came in is still not happening.

So something needs to be done so that can start happening again.

I think we all know what will happen if they are opened up again with nothing being done to prevent the same things happening that have dominated the forums of late.

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My view is that a better idea would just be to get some mods from the community. It really isn't a hard thing to do at all as long as the devs can just not get emotional about it. They need to see the mods as their employees not their friends, who are doing an important service for the community, and if they are not working out and preforming as expected then they just need to find someone else who is a better fit. All they need to do is contact a few people in the community who seem to share their views, and who obey the forum rules, and ask them if they want to try moderating. Then they just need to review how people are responding to the new moderators actions, and make sure they are not abusing their new power. It seems to work lots of other places, so it should here as well.

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Since its upcoming updates thread i wanna ask Gizmo if we gonna get new clothes soon cause we havent got in years

clothes are very important

 

So any new clothes Gizmo soon ?

We got the shirts and the baggy dress... though I have trouble wearing these items have seen plenty who dont mind.

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Yeah. I dislike the idea of self-moderation.

If anything, you'll have more angry people and more posting cross-threads like we just had.

 

User A posts something, User B replies with something User A doesn't like, they delete it.

User B then creates their own post, reposting what User A didn't like. User A replies, User B deletes User A's reply out of spite. User A, OF COURSE, goes back to their own post and talks about how horrible User B is.

 

Now the censorship has backfired, both parties have been censored (but both posts remain, so nothing has been censored) and both are unhappy.

 

The real problem is just that people are too sensitive and they don't understand what a discussion is. Giving them censorship tools won't make any of that better, you'll just have a bunch of little speech-Nazis.

 

I see your point, and yes I think that will likely happen to, but only to a small degree.

The way things are now, and even before the moderator quit, pretty well all threads were getting completely trashed, including the devs threads.

A player creates a thread, B player comes in, insults, degrades and discredits player A, player A responds trying to defend themselves, player B insults again and tries a new way to discredit, Player A responds again.

Then others join in and we end up with pages of nothing but trash.

It happens in pretty well all threads that are created and unless something different is done it will continue to happen.

 

What you are saying is likely to happen, although I do not believe it will happen in anywhere near all threads.

Also I would think if it does happen you would not find pages of it going on, people are simply not going to want to trash their own threads trying to reply to people bagging them in others.

They may something in a post or 2, but I think that would be about it.

 

Plus don't forget we will still be able to report posts in other threads, so I think you will find that a good amount of people will just report these posts done in other threads that are designed to provoke and not even bother upsetting their own to reply.

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Most public forums have Self-Moderation tools available to you as a default or atleast allow you to use them once you've been a member for a long time and have contributed to the community. Perhaps lock it behind a specific rank you can reach when you've made X posts (That are not spam) or something along those lines, such as the "Advanced Member" rank etc. I understand your point with User A misusing the self lock etc. But it's similar to our "Community Status Updates" posts, we are able to lock those, but not many people misuse the lock for those, maybe at first, some people may misuse the lock tool on their own topics, but as time progresses, the lock tool will only be used when topics do seriously get out of hand, and Gizmo/Admins can easily change the rank of a person who is misusing the lock tool so they can never use it ever again on their account.

 

Just my two cents on the matter. :)

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Most public forums have Self-Moderation tools available to you as a default or atleast allow you to use them once you've been a member for a long time and have contributed to the community. Perhaps lock it behind a specific rank you can reach when you've made X posts (That are not spam) or something along those lines, such as the "Advanced Member" rank etc.

In last days/weeks many of people who were participating in this crossfire insult, trolling and shit-post fiesta were old members of this forum with tons of posts. Hell, RobT himself had 8+ thousands posts, and even if most of them have zero value - I pretty sure there is some of them that actually can be considered as a valuable and informative posts and he is also member for a long time. Being member for a long time and having a lot of posts does not automatically making you a decent person respectful to other people and opinions.

And I don't think that self-moderation is a good idea in general, I agree with Vaughan_Rarius that "topic belongs to forum and if you post in public, you invite people to comment or post". There is not such a thing as "your topic", there is a "topic you started", it's not actually making it yours. And I also agree with Xandisweet that an exception can be made for personal diaries, these are actually can be considered as "your topics", because it's all about yourself. 

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The way I see it, bitches gunna write crap if they want to, but this would take away at least half of it. Random example, I am commenting in a thread on gay issues within 3DX and how that affects me, some dickhead makes a narky remark about how I am a penis puffer and I should go play with the fairys and shut up and stop complaining. OK, normally that comment would stay there, create bad vibes and attract responses from other people which would drag the conversation off topic, plus I would be upset and either have the option to ignore it or respond. If I ignored it I could keep discussing but with distractions from it sitting there and me not wanting to respond plus others chiming in and commenting on how wrong the statement was anyway, if I responded in any way to push back and defend myself the offender would be getting just what they wanted and keep baiting, with me responding back and forth and the thread getting totally derailed, plus it's likely that a few people who would otherwise look into the thread and get involved (a thread can be seen like a room where someone decides they want to sit a while and spend some time) would just see bickering and bitching and close it and leave, which is what the trolls want, to shut down conversation and make it all about themselves, so the thread would suffer as a whole by losing participants. But in this suggested option, the thread creator would just delete the offending comment and the conversation would continue with no distractions. I would not care what they did or where they went to say whatever homophobic things they wanted to elsewhere because I would not be interested in reading it anyway, and the conversation I was involved in with other interested parties would continue. I've got no interest in controlling other people and making them behave in a way I approve of, I DO have a huge interest in being able to get on with my social interactions without them in my fucking face baiting me. So yea, it would not remove all shit and those people would still go elsewhere and bitch amongst themselves, but who the fuck cares, it would mean normal conversations could be had without harassment. If someone wants to create a thread on a certain topic or with a certain vibe, let them create it and maintain it themselves, there is no danger in doing this, like I said bitches gunna go and write bitchy things elsewhere anyway, even without this happening, but this way some threads would at least be drama-free depending on the person who created it and how they moderated it, and people would vote with virtual feet as to what threads they gravitated towards and stayed in. Currently they are all the same and we have no choice, this way we would have a choice. I think it's worth a try and nothing to be worried about. Yes, all things can be abused, but that is no reason to not push forward and try to progress and try to fix a long-standing issue.

 

I agree with Rockster.

 

The point is, even if we get a moderator back this is not enough to hold a thread on topic. A thread gets pretty fast out o control and its hard for  moderator to clean a thread up so the normal conversation can continue.

You would need a lot of moderators but you have to pay them. This can become pretty expensive if you have to pay more moderators as you have developers just because some have fun to get threads of those down who they don't like.

 

 

My view is that a better idea would just be to get some mods from the community.

 

We had this and it was a disaster There were two attempts and they both failed.

Players are never unbiased and the danger that the player is abusing the power is pretty high.

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Self moderation? Lol so now everyone will own their own little thread in some section? The irony of that is inescapable.

 

People owning their own little thread?  It would last less than 2 weeks before someone used their little slice of heaven to talk smack on someone and delete any replies they made to the grievance in their thread-and a mod having to intervean anyway.

 

It would last less than a month or two before Gizmo thought "fuck this" before disabling that feature due to abuse . 

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Moderating your threads means that trolling will be restrcted to those threads one of the trolls creates and threads where they are tolerated. Most people won't go there except to remind themselves what trolling is. Sensible discussion threads would have trolling posts removed pdq, unless the thread owner wahted to make a particular point.

 

For the idea to be effective it needs thread owners/starters to be pretty active in their own threads and, once some kind of conclusion is reached, they should be able to lock the thread. If they make a mistake and lock the thread too soon then all it needs is for someone to start a new thread and link to the old.

 

rhet seems worried that people will delete posts that disagree, just because they disagree. I side with Dave and think that most people enjoy discussion and find disagreement, when done is a sensible way, a good thing. ISn't the point of discussion and debate to seek to persuade, not to batter the opposition into submission?

 

Troll threads can be reported to Gizmo directly, in the absence of any moderators. This means he has relatively little to wade through before he makes a decision of what to do.

 

Lastly it will require a certain amonut of self discipline on the part of the sensible posters not to respond to trolling posters. The last thing we want is for the thread starter to take break, grab some sleep or whatever and come back and find things have gone bonkers while they were away.

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Well according to Ash, the ability to moderate your own threads can be taken away from each individual.

So why not have it so we all can, and if we abuse it we lose it.

My opinion is there will only be a hand full that will abuse it, and they will soon lose it.

Plus if it is known you can lose the moderating tools, wouldn't that also make people think twice before doing anything that can have them lose that.

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btw - I've just thought of this, and I know it's been alluded to but not actually said in plain speech. Allowing thread starters to moderate their own threads gives them ownership of the thread. Like they'll take a bit of trouble over getting it right, yeah. 'Cos they're personally invovled in it in a slightly bigger way than if they just fired it off and allowed someone else to take responsibility for it.

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There are two aspects to this discussion. The first has been about self moderation of forum threads. The consensus seems to be that it’s well worth a try. Gizmo has given a commitment to this, Ash has indicated that it is a practical proposition in his experience, Rockster has indicated how it could work from his experience as a moderator. I really ought to acknowledge Twiggy for re-opening the topic too. In short, let’s get on with it.

 

The second aspect is World Chat, which is nothing like so easy to attend to. Trolling and bullying is the norm there, as far as I can see, and is a far more serious problem than spamming rooms. World Chat does need some level of moderation, the minimum being responding effectively to reports in an impartial and consistent way. To my mind the optimum would be active, real time monitoring of World Chat. When this is coupled with allowing room owners to eject, room wide ignore and ban people who cause trouble provides a powerful tool to make life difficult for trolls. In short, room owners moderate their own rooms.

 

The public rooms are the responsibility of the official 3dxChat moderators to police.

 

I haven’t addressed the associated issue of bullying by PM, bullying by hug or kiss etc, although in user rooms a room wide eject, ban or ignore would be effective. Would a room wide block of World Chat by the room owner help?

 

I’m just thinking aloud here so please forgive my being a bit random. I wanted to open up discussion about in game trolling and bullying.

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MeiLing is right.

 

There are two important discussions I think that are here in this topic that may get lost due to the vast goal posts here that this topic could cover.

 

This topic was set up by Gizmo to discuss current upcoming updates and while the two topics do fit into this category, they do seem to be taking on a life of their own and deserve their own topic.

 

1.  Forum Moderation.   Is it a good idea for Forum members to moderate their own topics or should 3DXChat appoint their own Moderators.

 

Here's the topic:   http://3dxforum.com/index.php?/topic/8477-forum-moderators-moderation/

 

2. 3DXChat Economy. Should 3DXchat have an economy where members can sell their builds etc... or should we maintain the uniqueness of sharing.

 

Here's the topic    http://3dxforum.com/index.php?/topic/8478-3dxchat-economy/ 

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Probably makes sense to keep the forums as they are for a while to see if the nastiness has been dealt with by other means, as would appear to be the case. In a small community it's amazing how profound the impact of one or two negative people can be on its culture and conduct. It's much easier to destroy than create, after all. Self-moderating threads wouldn't stop trolling but merely alter the methods by which it was done.

 

Also, a degree of provocation is a good thing! Most well-adjusted people know where the line between cheeky and cruel resides....

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All these talking about managing our own topics is a bit of nonsense.

 

Peoples will only remove the posts that don't fit it. If someone start a discution about strawberry, i don't think they will cancel a post of someone who don't like them unless the post is insulting.

I mean, if peoples create topics it's mostly to have a discution, not to not to have 150 pages of peoples saying "i like strawberries too".

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Vaughan has missed one aspect that has been part of this thread since it’s inception, namely that of what to do about in game bullying and unpleasantness in world chat. I’m not sure I see the point of drawing these out in to separate threads except as a means of summarising a consensus, which is an excellent idea. Keeping the overall discussion about several related themes together is indicative of how contributors are thinking about these issues. So I don’t see problem with letting them run.

 

Since this thread settled down i’ve found most people’s contributions helpful and interesting. We can see how a forum can operate, most of what we are talking about is how to keep it this way.

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