08-07-2019, 07:07 PM
(This post was last modified: 08-07-2019, 07:22 PM by DavidCaruso. Edited 8 times in total.)
I'm just barely crawling out of the woodwork and I don't know enough to comment on this specific Stir / Drei situation either, but I was really surprised to see you guys are still using the old warn points system. Just to give some context, this idea was borne out of MFGG3 -- the first iteration of the phpBB boards back in 2010 -- under seemingly very different conditions than the current boards. If you look at the IPB forum archives, moderators were often banning 15-20 people a month manually (and MFGG3 was even worse). Many of these members were repeat offenders, and almost all of them (plus their friends, and sometimes friends of friends) would try to appeal the ban in some way, usually by bringing up cases where another person got banned for the same infraction for less time -- or just spamming you on PM / MSN / IRC, a lot of the time.
The end result was a huge amount of stress on the mods, since you not only had to take the individual situation into account but also all the dozens of similar situations in the past few months (two situations were rarely the same), and then adjust for that specific member's history and warn log on top of that, and then keep your cool with ten angry messages after. And of course, being human, sometimes you'd mess it up and half the board would turn on you -- sometimes even if you didn't mess it up, actually.
The goal of the point system was basically to take some of that decision-making process, and therefore some of the stress, and shift it off of the mod team. In theory, all a mod now had to do was place an infraction into one of a few categories, and the system would take care of the rest (the user's previous history was now taken into account automatically -- which helped counteract any mod bias, real or imagined, but also destroyed the perspective that a human moderator could bring). In the warzone that was MFGG3, this also had the much-needed effect that banned users would blame an abstract "system" instead of an individual moderator.
It was essentially a contrived solution to help manage an incredibly tense environment, and it barely worked even at the time. Members protested the system back in 2010, including myself (before I joined the staff), for the exact same reasons you guys are now. There were cases on the 2010 boards too, where people were banned for absurd amounts of time for what seemed like minor infractions, because their warn points built up; infamously, one member got banned for a year because he posted a GIF of a guy clapping (an event which indirectly led to The Split months later, more or less). But back then you could call that a necessary evil, because the board would have been impossible to manage at that traffic level and at that level of teen angst, without a codified system in place. The community was gigantic and yet basically falling apart at the seams; the points system was there to help keep things together and avoid all-out "class warfare", so to speak.
Again, I'm not qualified to say for sure, but I'm wondering why the same system is still in place all these years later. In 2010 the forum had hundreds of active members, maybe even thousands, but now it seems like there are only a few dozen -- returning oldbies aside, maybe -- and it seems like things are relatively peaceful, outside this thread. What are the advantages of the warn points system in the current MFGG, compared to manual bans? Do the boards have more tension than they seem, making this kind of system necessary to manage it?
The end result was a huge amount of stress on the mods, since you not only had to take the individual situation into account but also all the dozens of similar situations in the past few months (two situations were rarely the same), and then adjust for that specific member's history and warn log on top of that, and then keep your cool with ten angry messages after. And of course, being human, sometimes you'd mess it up and half the board would turn on you -- sometimes even if you didn't mess it up, actually.
The goal of the point system was basically to take some of that decision-making process, and therefore some of the stress, and shift it off of the mod team. In theory, all a mod now had to do was place an infraction into one of a few categories, and the system would take care of the rest (the user's previous history was now taken into account automatically -- which helped counteract any mod bias, real or imagined, but also destroyed the perspective that a human moderator could bring). In the warzone that was MFGG3, this also had the much-needed effect that banned users would blame an abstract "system" instead of an individual moderator.
It was essentially a contrived solution to help manage an incredibly tense environment, and it barely worked even at the time. Members protested the system back in 2010, including myself (before I joined the staff), for the exact same reasons you guys are now. There were cases on the 2010 boards too, where people were banned for absurd amounts of time for what seemed like minor infractions, because their warn points built up; infamously, one member got banned for a year because he posted a GIF of a guy clapping (an event which indirectly led to The Split months later, more or less). But back then you could call that a necessary evil, because the board would have been impossible to manage at that traffic level and at that level of teen angst, without a codified system in place. The community was gigantic and yet basically falling apart at the seams; the points system was there to help keep things together and avoid all-out "class warfare", so to speak.
Again, I'm not qualified to say for sure, but I'm wondering why the same system is still in place all these years later. In 2010 the forum had hundreds of active members, maybe even thousands, but now it seems like there are only a few dozen -- returning oldbies aside, maybe -- and it seems like things are relatively peaceful, outside this thread. What are the advantages of the warn points system in the current MFGG, compared to manual bans? Do the boards have more tension than they seem, making this kind of system necessary to manage it?