A Solution to Community Control

So, to start off I'm going to say that this thread is by no means a continuation, branch, or related thread to Nate's thread about problems with moderators. I do not want this to be a discussion at all of why moderators are good or bad choices, biased or not biased. This is a thread about the roles of moderators themselves and its efficiency in moderating the community. I'm going to ask that discussion of anything to do with that thread stay out of this one.

The way the system is currently set up, in my opinion, is too simple and lacks operational efficiency. We have Administrators and Moderators. Administrators take care of the game itself. Updates, advertising, overseeing administration of player community controls. Moderators are the current system of player community controls. They are given powers to coerce and correlate easily (Md chat), pass judgement over players, apply sentencing to players (mutes and bans), invisibly spectate games, check logs, appeal bans, and probably a couple things I may not even be aware of. My proposal in this thread is based upon the idea that Moderators have too much power and responsibility to be a reasonably effective and efficient choice for monitoring and controlling the community.

When I was a lower rank I had a good talk with Sificvoid that was the first inspiration for this. The discussion Sific and I had was about how ban appeals are taken care of in afterwind. The big issue then was people were complaining about being banned or muted. This was unfair, that was uncalled for, I didn't do/say that etc etc. The moderators absolutely hated taking appeals because they felt it took away from their time watching over the game to deal with old issues. As well as a large amount of these being fraudulent people who just didn't agree that what they did was wrong. This is an obvious problem with the moderation that, really, never got properly fixed. More mods got added so it became easier to cross-reference and talk to other moderators about the same problem that was already dealt with. Effectively this just complicated the problem and gave another duty to Mods. Creating the need to think-tank decisions in order to avoid the problem of contradicting decisions between them. Then this has the obvious problem that the mods trust each others experience and wisdom more than they do the appellant, further ingraining the punishment and giving the appearance that no appeal is legitimate.

My main idea is to get rid of what we now know as "Moderators" by separating the Moderator permissions. Reducing the amount of power a single person or group has by splitting up his duties between several players with specific roles that would sum to the job of what a moderator does today, if not the possibility to do much more. The rough draft/short version of my idea is to tier out the current moderator duties into at least 3-4 separate roles.

The first role would be a sort of janitor-like status. Preferably there would be many of these, more than 10-20 covering as many possible timezones. These players would not be marked (~), would not be allowed to reveal their status to other players, and would not know which players also had the status. Their primary role would be information gathering. They would effectively serve the purpose of oversight on the community, from within itself. These are the people who would read the reports and investigate. The job would be to watch out for any behavior that might constitute a punishment at all, and write a report on it. Gather as much information as you can and write a detailed incident report. The purpose behind the janitors not knowing one another would be that, hopefully, more than one or two would be online concurrently. They both see the same incident, and both write a report from their own perspectives. They should also probably have access to some of the logs to improve information gathering abilities. Ideally this would create multiple reports for everything, allowing cross referencing and an increased level of awareness. Other than submitting information these players would not have any power, or anything to do with what happens in regards to the information.

Also a large benefit of having anonymous informants is that it completely rids the community of the "oh shit a mods online, better behave" and "mods asleep, time time to party and spam global" mentalities. Creating a solid tone of expected behavior, instead of molding them around when big brother is watching.

The next stage up in my idea are the people who consolidate the information, and submit a decision proposal.These are the people who would read the reports and investigate. These players would ask questions of the involved parties, check logs, and perform a collective think-tank function over the proposed mutes/bans/warns. I do not believe that this status should be marked (~) in game either. However, I think it would be best to have 2-3 assigned to groups who know who each other are in order to collectively decide appropriate action. The goal would be to submit a short-version to the next stage up, the deciders. I'm not sure whether it would be good to duplicate investigations to ensure accuracy, or whether that would be redundant.

This next stage is where I envision the current mods should probably end up. The short version is that they would take the information received from the consolidation stage and issue a final decision. In order to further separate power I don't even think it's necessary to have the consolidators know which decider they submit it to. I think that this role is really where most of the current mods should be, as this is what suits them best. They have the respect of the community, the trust of the admins, and most importantly thorough experience with how punishments really pan out in this game. They would read the consolidated report and interpret the information just like they do now. The difference being that the consolidated report would be much more orderly and easier to manage than having to investigate everything themselves and manage the whole process. I think it's too much to expect a mod to objectively investigate everything, pass judgement through interpretation of his own research, then deal with the inevitable appeal all while monitoring game chat and reading all the reports and logs. This would take the reports function, as well as some housekeeping duties, and remove it from their responsibilities of things to deal with. As well as, in the next stage, taking out their responsibility to appeal decisions. This would ideally make the mods much more efficient at their job by having workable data rather than an investigation each time. As well as harnessing the current respect of the moderators to continue on the line of who hands out the punishments to not rock the boat too much. We wouldn't even need all of them for this role, just probably the main few (Pin/Hugo/Caul/Guest) and delegate the rest into other roles. It might even be wise to go with that random rank 3's idea from the other thread and make them anonymous.

The fourth stage is where the idea began, but I realized it needed a better support system to work. The appeals system is the fourth stage where players get to submit appeals for their bans. These players would not be marked in game or known to others either. They would ideally have a medium to mark cases as closed anonymously. They would review the appeal, review the logs, and decide whether it actually deserves a second day in court or if it's a fraudulent appeal. Then they would hand the case off to appeal deciders to perform the same role as the deciders, but solely over appeals. To curb the volume of this system I think it would be best to apply punishments to fraudulent appeals. Such as a 10-20% increase in ban/mute time, as decided by the appeal deciders.

Also, now that I think of it there should be an audit of the decisions made. Not as in depth, but definitely necessary. Just a quick skim over, people solely in charge of checking the logs for compliance with how the system is supposed to run. People working in the background away from all decisions.

Another big problem with this is that it doesn't have an in-the-moment system of moderation. If someone is spamming, who is going to stop them immediately? I didn't really think about that too much and Desu brought this to my attention. First mull over in my head says give all levels a basic permission to temporarily mute, warn and kick from game. Have everyone, even janitors, able to give small amounts of punishments before or during the incident going through the system. The amount of janitors, appeals janitors, consolidators, deciders and appeals deciders alone all with this basic level of security would probably cover the "in the moment" necessities. If my proposition of making mass anonymous janitors was the case, giving just the janitors all temp warn/kick abilities would fix it easiest probably. Of course punishing abusers harshly, and making it so warns/kicks don't show who gave it out to the warned/kicked player. Obviously this whole thing is a giant work in progress so post any problems or solutions you see.

I realize that this is a lot to take in as an idea, but i'm throwing it on the table. What i'm proposing is a complete overhaul of the moderation system we know and not so many of us love. The current system has just led to more mods, and more disputes over those more mods. If there's a problem with people not getting punished,reports not getting heard, or an outbreak of "oh shit no mods onine" syndrome; there's a cry for more mods. But, each mod has an immense amount of responsibility, and is expected to carry it out all objectively. Making it very difficult to find the necessary amount of worthy players to take on this heavy burden. Realistically separating out these duties is the easier route. Outsourcing investigation and reporting to the community itself, and leaving the deciding to the people who should be deciding. This system would make the moderation more flexible to the actual community, and more objective by default through having a large amount of anonymous individual report gatherers who cannot collude with one another. It would also put into place an appeal system to where no mod has to be bothered by banned players, but instead assigning that role to a specific person. I realize this would take a large amount of time to recruit the necessary amount of people for all these roles, but once it's set up it would be much more efficient than the current system.


I also want to add a disclaimer that none of the heirarchy I rough drafted is the main point of the idea. The underlying point of the thread and solution to moderation is to create a hierarchy of checks, balances and controls through separation of power rather than resting it all on the shoulders of a selected few. If you have any idea on a better breakup of who should do what, or maybe an idea to any other duties that need to be done, post your idea in this thread.

Also, I realize my paragraph structure and grammar is probably fucking horrible. It's 1am, i'm going to bed, i'll fix it in the morning.

Honestly giving janitors the ability to warn and kick people from games may end up to them being known by the community, but anyway one thing i can add to this is that if anonymous "janitors" can warn and mute players without them knowing, when you get the message, there has to be a reason in the message, and a page you can view your bans. and send information to the judges with your side of the story and any appeals you want to make.

You do realize all of this is completely unnecessary, including mods, if everyone would just behave.

Kirjoittanut Guest14502, 09.08.2012 at 09:36

You do realize all of this is completely unnecessary, including mods, if everyone would just behave.

You do realize when a group of people get together for anything someone is bound to misbehave.

Kirjoittanut PonyBatman, 09.08.2012 at 09:45

Kirjoittanut Guest14502, 09.08.2012 at 09:36

You do realize all of this is completely unnecessary, including mods, if everyone would just behave.

You do realize when a group of people get together for anything someone is bound to misbehave.

You do realize that in f2f environments, peer pressure is typically enough to maintain a reasonable level of behavior.

Why does that not work here?

Someone does something wrong (like make fun of the English skills of a non-English speaker), another member of the community calls them on it, the guy who screwed up apologizes and we all go back to playing the game. It is pretty clear. Why Mods?

Squirrels, the problem is when a stubborn person gets called out, that's where the problems begin. If everyone just apologized, we wouldn't have a need for mods. But we have stubborn people, so we need mods.

I honestly don't think we have enough people that are respectable enough to fill these positions.

Kirjoittanut I_like_squirrels, 09.08.2012 at 10:05

Kirjoittanut PonyBatman, 09.08.2012 at 09:45

Kirjoittanut Guest14502, 09.08.2012 at 09:36

You do realize all of this is completely unnecessary, including mods, if everyone would just behave.

You do realize when a group of people get together for anything someone is bound to misbehave.

You do realize that in f2f environments, peer pressure is typically enough to maintain a reasonable level of behavior.

Why does that not work here?

Someone does something wrong (like make fun of the English skills of a non-English speaker), another member of the community calls them on it, the guy who screwed up apologizes and we all go back to playing the game. It is pretty clear. Why Mods?

Because it doesn't work that way. Everyone cannot be behaviorally perfect by your standards, everyone is different in their own unique way. Some people have large Egos, some have low self-esteem, some have power, some do not. You cannot generalize the community into one "Utopian" viewpoint. We're all Human (Except maybe baal, I'm pretty sure he's a super-brain floating in a water tank somewhere), and that means we all act our own way, feel our own way, talk our own way, have opinions our own way, and be who we are, and not clustered into a singular generalization. It's not possible at the moment for us to all be perfectly friendly and have no hostilities at all, not everyone would want that. But it is possible for us to at least act decently around each other when we know we have to. The Moderators are here to ensure that we do act decently in a situation where we should, and for the most part, they do their job fairly well. I'm not saying they're perfect, but like I stated above, no one is. I don't have much more to say, sorry.

Well said Gardy, well done. I'm partly one with a large over grown ego, known to be stubborn, and start trolling those players I don't really like when I get bored. (Always worth it to troll someone.)

This idea is great! but I dont trust on the community....

people will abuse this mod-like power, even me.

I disagree here. There would be too much people to rely on to do their jobs correctly. Considering some are already judging the reliability of mods today I couldn't imagine how bad it would be with all these positions.

The only problem of afterwind is all those persons complaining about the community or the moderation.

Kirjoittanut tophat, 13.08.2012 at 14:24

I disagree here. There would be too much people to rely on to do their jobs correctly. Considering some are already judging the reliability of mods today I couldn't imagine how bad it would be with all these positions.

>Too many people
The reason behind putting so many people with minimal amounts of power is to decrease the reliance on any one mod to do their job perfectly. If you have 20 people looking out, only a small handful actually need to see it. It's not relying on larger amounts of people to do a job, it's decreasing the reliance by casting a bigger net.

>How bad it would be with all these positions.
You did read the part where I said none of these would be visible, right? No one would know how many, or who, had any power at all. Beyond the current mods no one else needs to have visible power to dispute. Visible power creates visible conflicts and disagreements, no matter how right or wrong anyone is. The ~ infront of mods in game is idiotic in my opinion, but it's too late now that we know who they all are.

In essence the whole point is just to split up the work. Mods wouldn't have to do all of the investigating, deciding, applying punishment and appeals (lol) if you just put minimal power in different positions to aid the underlying goal of community control.


Also, to everyone except Tophats and Arbitrator, keep discussion of the community out of this thread. This isn't a place to discuss whether we need mods, or why the community isn't this or that. This is a suggestion on the distribution of responsibility to control the community. Make another thread if you think mods arent necessary, or if you want to talk about the community. This thread clearly isn't popular so it doesn't need you guys derailing what little discussion of the OP is happening.

I completely support this.

Specializing jobs is very efficient, taking the workload off a single mod.
I like how you set it to anonymous, for the most part. It prevents a system of faith in a person as being above their word.

Specializing sounds got to me. But the Way suggested here will lead to too much bureaucracy, in my opinion. And like said before, a lot of people would be involved, many stages where someone can manipulate the Report before a decision is made.
And as long as someone has the possibility to punish there will alwasy be discussions about Mod A being biased, mod B being to strict and so on, however you called the Job, and how much people you put in to divide the power.

Kirjoittanut Houdini, 09.08.2012 at 00:38

Wall o' text.

"The bureaucracy is expanding, to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy." - Unknown Source

I've spent some time looking over this system, and I'll have to agree with TopHats and Tzeentch here, in that this just has too many people assigned to different tasks; it'd also require a coordinator to oversee who these reports go to. Consider:

Bob and Charlie, random 'janitors', see David harassing the lobby, and both submit reports to stage 2. But then of course, those reports would need to go to specific groups of people, and the same group to eliminate redundancy. So let's say the day after, a coordinator, Alice gets the reports, and sends them to consolidators Thomas and Jones to investigate. Well then it takes another day for both Thomas and Jones to get on, investigate, and submit another report to stage 3.

Then a few hours later, when one of the mods gets on (Let's say Caulerpa), he mutes David. Well then the next day, when David gets on, he thinks he doesn't deserve a mute, so he sends an appeal to stage 4. The coordinator (Alice again) must oversee the sending of this appeal to Frank, who oversees the logs, and thinks the appeal is fraudulent, so he send another report to Ethan, who increases the mute on David, the harasser.

After about 6 write ups and a week, David is finally punished for flaming some poor bloke in the lobby. Now consider the system nowadays:

I, Mathdino, see David flaming the lobby. I take a screenshot of his obvious harassment and send it to Caulerpa. He mutes David, and all appeals are considered fraudulent. After 8 hours and one report, David is muted. End of story.

---

I know you've put a lot of thought into this, Houdini, but this isn't a court of law; Afterwind's a pretty small community. A large judicial system may work better for a large city, but for a small town, it's much easier to just have a few sheriffs doing the work. See the quote at the top of my post.

However, I like the idea of having a group of unmarked people whose job it is to warn, take screenshots and report people- your stage 1. The average citizen is naturally reluctant to tell on fellow members of their community, but if no one knows who's reporting them, and if it's these 'janitors' jobs to report, it'd cut down on the amount of spamming and harassment quite a bit. It'd also create a pool of candidates for new mods. I support Stage 1 and the current mod position, everything else is too much bureaucracy.