[Discussion/Announcement] NSG's "Wing" Megathreads

[Washington Resistance Army]

Suggestions rn would be as follows:

Revamp the rules entirely, it's late and I'm not gonna make a full list of what should go and what should stay but several of the rules (ie trolling) are bizarrely enforced and don't seem to match standard internet definitions of the word at all.

Questers suggestion of a general mission statement and what exactly forum culture should be in specific subforums (ie General) would be massively beneficial both to players and it would help moderation weed out those who go against the statement and only drag the place down, of which General currently has more than a few.

Reallow megathreads with a more stringent requirement to stay on topic and not become chat-y.

I'm doubtful this one will get in but it would go a long way in making moderation look better to the userbase. People who are primarily active on the game side should be barred from being game mods and should be sought after to be forum mods and those active on the forums should be barred from forum moderation and should attend to game side. As I've touched on previously people from most every side of NSG believe moderation is biased in one way or the other and having outside people unconnected to the ongoings they moderate would make the idea of bias a much harder one to sell and would ideally improve faith in the team.

[The Archregimancy]

Just a quick note for clarity...

I'm deliberately refraining from commenting on the feasibility of any the suggestions that are currently being made; this is a deliberate tactic on my part so as not to discourage suggestions by seeming to be for or against specific ideas.

It doesn't mean that I'm not reading the suggestions and comments.

[Valentine Z]

I'm doubtful this one will get in but it would go a long way in making moderation look better to the userbase. People who are primarily active on the game side should be barred from being game mods and should be sought after to be forum mods and those active on the forums should be barred from forum moderation and should attend to game side. As I've touched on previously people from most every side of NSG believe moderation is biased in one way or the other and having outside people unconnected to the ongoings they moderate would make the idea of bias a much harder one to sell and would ideally improve faith in the team.

Again, just my 2 cents on this bit. I am a bit doubtful of this and thought to myself "Will this be inefficient because the gameside player won't know much about forum ongoings?" Then I realised that you make quite a fair point, since Moderators, I assume, are trained on handling all aspects of things, from Gameside to Forum Moderation.

One concern I have of this idea, if it came into fruition, would still be on possibly needing more mods to make up for the areas they cannot touch (and the inefficiency that might come into play due to timezones, among many other factors). Take an average NSGer, for example. They obviously cannot mod NSG itself, but they can still try to mod other sub-forums because of their unfamiliarity with, say, P2TM (Portal to the Multiverse) users.

Would you say that it will be feasible for your suggestion to include sub-forum Mods to rule each of the places whose users they have no familiarity with?

• Gameside Mod to deal with GHRs and RMBs, or flag / custom field violations.
• Sub-Forum Mods for, well, each of the sub-forums.
• And then you have the Senior Mods / Admin, who could overlook all the forums and will need perhaps at least 2 of them to make a ruling on more serious stuff like losing Editing Privileges (that's actually a thing, from what I have seen), Signature Privileges, DEATing, DOSing, or to overturning rulings.
• Exceptions still apply to adspam or obvious DOS, of course.

Trouble comes when you are rather hard-pressed to find a nation/user that consistently stays in one sub-forum all the time, be it with their main nation, or puppets.

Again, just my $0.02. I am not going to claim my own suggestions as superior, and I am simply throwing it out here out of some interest.

[Grenartia]

I'm doubtful this one will get in but it would go a long way in making moderation look better to the userbase. People who are primarily active on the game side should be barred from being game mods and should be sought after to be forum mods and those active on the forums should be barred from forum moderation and should attend to game side. As I've touched on previously people from most every side of NSG believe moderation is biased in one way or the other and having outside people unconnected to the ongoings they moderate would make the idea of bias a much harder one to sell and would ideally improve faith in the team.

Except, this would be a worse decision than locking down the RWDT and LWDT. I can easily see mods who were recruited from forumside making decisions that would utterly piss off all of gameside (and would make this entire thread look like a tempest in a teacup in comparison). And there's absolutely no guarantee that mods recruited from gameside would be any less likely to be biased than mods recruited from forumside (I know of more than a few people gameside who have very little tolerance for certain ideologies, and they're not out of the ordinary).

In essence, mods from gameside probably have a better grasp of what should and shouldn't be allowed in gameside than forumside, and vice versa.

As for allegations of political bias in moderation, I stand by my assertion that maybe some political ideologies lend themselves to their adherents being more likely to break the rules than others. Maybe adherents to those ideologies should check themselves more frequently, lest they wreck themselves more frequently.

[The New California Republic]

And then you have the Senior Mods / Admin, who could overlook all the forums and will need perhaps at least 2 of them to make a ruling on more serious stuff like losing Editing Privileges (that's actually a thing, from what I have seen), Signature Privileges, DEATing, DOSing, or to overturning rulings.
Exceptions still apply to adspam or obvious DOS, of course.

Oi, stop stealing my idea.

[Vistulange]

I'm doubtful this one will get in but it would go a long way in making moderation look better to the userbase. People who are primarily active on the game side should be barred from being game mods and should be sought after to be forum mods and those active on the forums should be barred from forum moderation and should attend to game side. As I've touched on previously people from most every side of NSG believe moderation is biased in one way or the other and having outside people unconnected to the ongoings they moderate would make the idea of bias a much harder one to sell and would ideally improve faith in the team.

Again, just my 2 cents on this bit. I am a bit doubtful of this and thought to myself "Will this be inefficient because the gameside player won't know much about forum ongoings?" Then I realised that you make quite a fair point, since Moderators, I assume, are trained on handling all aspects of things, from Gameside to Forum Moderation.

One concern I have of this idea, if it came into fruition, would still be on possibly needing more mods to make up for the areas they cannot touch (and the inefficiency that might come into play due to timezones, among many other factors). Take an average NSGer, for example. They obviously cannot mod NSG itself, but they can still try to mod other sub-forums because of their unfamiliarity with, say, P2TM (Portal to the Multiverse) users.

Would you say that it will be feasible for your suggestion to include sub-forum Mods to rule each of the places whose users they have no familiarity with?

• Gameside Mod to deal with GHRs and RMBs, or flag / custom field violations.
• Sub-Forum Mods for, well, each of the sub-forums.
• And then you have the Senior Mods / Admin, who could overlook all the forums and will need perhaps at least 2 of them to make a ruling on more serious stuff like losing Editing Privileges (that's actually a thing, from what I have seen), Signature Privileges, DEATing, DOSing, or to overturning rulings.
• Exceptions still apply to adspam or obvious DOS, of course.

Trouble comes when you are rather hard-pressed to find a nation/user that consistently stays in one sub-forum all the time, be it with their main nation, or puppets.

Again, just my $0.02. I am not going to claim my own suggestions as superior, and I am simply throwing it out here out of some interest.

Do mods receive training? I thought they were just members of the community who the moderation team deems okay and just asks if they want to be a mod, gives them a rundown of stuff, and boom, orange name. Training seems a bit far-fetched, seeing the whole team is made of unpaid volunteers on a random internet site.

[La Xinga]

Again, just my 2 cents on this bit. I am a bit doubtful of this and thought to myself "Will this be inefficient because the gameside player won't know much about forum ongoings?" Then I realised that you make quite a fair point, since Moderators, I assume, are trained on handling all aspects of things, from Gameside to Forum Moderation.

One concern I have of this idea, if it came into fruition, would still be on possibly needing more mods to make up for the areas they cannot touch (and the inefficiency that might come into play due to timezones, among many other factors). Take an average NSGer, for example. They obviously cannot mod NSG itself, but they can still try to mod other sub-forums because of their unfamiliarity with, say, P2TM (Portal to the Multiverse) users.

Would you say that it will be feasible for your suggestion to include sub-forum Mods to rule each of the places whose users they have no familiarity with?

• Gameside Mod to deal with GHRs and RMBs, or flag / custom field violations.
• Sub-Forum Mods for, well, each of the sub-forums.
• And then you have the Senior Mods / Admin, who could overlook all the forums and will need perhaps at least 2 of them to make a ruling on more serious stuff like losing Editing Privileges (that's actually a thing, from what I have seen), Signature Privileges, DEATing, DOSing, or to overturning rulings.
• Exceptions still apply to adspam or obvious DOS, of course.

Trouble comes when you are rather hard-pressed to find a nation/user that consistently stays in one sub-forum all the time, be it with their main nation, or puppets.

Again, just my $0.02. I am not going to claim my own suggestions as superior, and I am simply throwing it out here out of some interest.

Do mods receive training? I thought they were just members of the community who the moderation team deems okay and just asks if they want to be a mod, gives them a rundown of stuff, and boom, orange name. Training seems a bit far-fetched, seeing the whole team is made of unpaid volunteers on a random internet site.

I think [violet] gave out a thread how to be a mod, or maybe that was something else.

[Aureumterra]

I'm doubtful this one will get in but it would go a long way in making moderation look better to the userbase. People who are primarily active on the game side should be barred from being game mods and should be sought after to be forum mods and those active on the forums should be barred from forum moderation and should attend to game side. As I've touched on previously people from most every side of NSG believe moderation is biased in one way or the other and having outside people unconnected to the ongoings they moderate would make the idea of bias a much harder one to sell and would ideally improve faith in the team.

Again, just my 2 cents on this bit. I am a bit doubtful of this and thought to myself "Will this be inefficient because the gameside player won't know much about forum ongoings?" Then I realised that you make quite a fair point, since Moderators, I assume, are trained on handling all aspects of things, from Gameside to Forum Moderation.

One concern I have of this idea, if it came into fruition, would still be on possibly needing more mods to make up for the areas they cannot touch (and the inefficiency that might come into play due to timezones, among many other factors). Take an average NSGer, for example. They obviously cannot mod NSG itself, but they can still try to mod other sub-forums because of their unfamiliarity with, say, P2TM (Portal to the Multiverse) users.

Would you say that it will be feasible for your suggestion to include sub-forum Mods to rule each of the places whose users they have no familiarity with?

• Gameside Mod to deal with GHRs and RMBs, or flag / custom field violations.
• Sub-Forum Mods for, well, each of the sub-forums.
• And then you have the Senior Mods / Admin, who could overlook all the forums and will need perhaps at least 2 of them to make a ruling on more serious stuff like losing Editing Privileges (that's actually a thing, from what I have seen), Signature Privileges, DEATing, DOSing, or to overturning rulings.
• Exceptions still apply to adspam or obvious DOS, of course.

Trouble comes when you are rather hard-pressed to find a nation/user that consistently stays in one sub-forum all the time, be it with their main nation, or puppets.

Again, just my $0.02. I am not going to claim my own suggestions as superior, and I am simply throwing it out here out of some interest.

This opens up a whole new can of worms, I believe mods are allowed to participate in threads like any other player, which will make this a little too complicated when that happens

[Ghost in the Shell]

If I'm not mistaken, Moderation made it clear to the impacted communities of the megathreads that they were threading on thin ice. This came to everyone else as a surprise, sure, but was it a surprise for the parties involved?

No, you're not mistaken. The RWDT was *always* on thin ice. It's unfortunate it came to this but it was to be expected.

[Valentine Z]

This opens up a whole new can of worms, I believe mods are allowed to participate in threads like any other player, which will make this a little too complicated when that happens

Yeap, I myself don't see it going too well, so... eh, it's worth talking about it, I suppose. ^^;

Do mods receive training? I thought they were just members of the community who the moderation team deems okay and just asks if they want to be a mod, gives them a rundown of stuff, and boom, orange name. Training seems a bit far-fetched, seeing the whole team is made of unpaid volunteers on a random internet site.

I have no insider knowledge, but I mean, they probably are given some form of training even for volunteers. Like a crash course on "How to do Moderation", give warnings, use the warning tag, write records...

[Diopolis]

Right; out of bed. Good morning from Cairo.

GVH's suggestion of a 'general organised conference' is not, I think, appropriate at this stage. It's not an idea I would entirely dismiss for the future, but I don't think under the current climate this is presently the way forward (stressing that I haven't discussed this with the rest of the team).

What I would do, however, is challenge those of you who genuinely want to improve NS to use this thread in a more organised fashion to present constructive ideas on what you would do to improve the site. So long as it's not 'let site users elect the moderation team'; assume that's a non-starter.


While I recognise that I'm oversimplifying, and I won't attempt to quantify the different groups, contributors to the present thread can likely be broadly broken down into the following categories:

1) Posters who believe the mods are petty and vindictive people who have made a terrible decision that deliberately targets a specific group, and are all actively lying about that decision. There can be no negotiation with the mods.

2) Posters who believe the mods made a terrible decision that deliberately targets a specific group, and are perhaps not being entirely truthful about that decision, but who still care about the site enough to see if there's a way to move forward.

3) Posters who believe the mods made a poor decision and communicated it badly, but accept that they nonetheless acted in good faith while making that badly communicated poor decision; perhaps there are ways to help avoid this happening again in the future.

4) Posters who broadly support the decision, but think it could have been communicated better.

5) Posters who support the decision and don't really see what the problem is.

6) Posters who don't have much of an opinion on the rights and wrongs of the decision, but think some of the rhetoric on all sides is maybe getting a bit overheated given that we're talking about a couple of threads in an online discussion forum.


Any attempt to engage with category 1 is likely a lost cause (though no doubt we can expect further fulmination on the iniquities of the lying moderation team) so these next comments are addressed to the rest of you....

We've now spent several days and dozens of pages rehashing the rights and wrongs of the decision, and why we think it was terrible/not terrible but badly communicated/absolutely fine. I think we can safely assume that, at this point, almost one one's minds are going to be changed.

So why not use this opportunity to offer your suggestions on what could be done better in the future, whether on this type of decision specifically or across site moderation generally, in a more organised fashion.

Starting a post with 'these are my ideas for improving the situation', or similar language, will help signal that this is your specific intent. If you've already made suggestions in this thread, feel free to make them again - there's a lot of thread to wade through, after all, even for those of us who've read every page.

I'm not going to insult your intelligence by claiming that we'll treat every suggestion equally, or that suggestions will inevitably lead to action; but I'm offering you an overt opportunity to at least try, and for all of us - at least those of us who don't believe moderation is already a lost cause - to move past mutual recrimination and see if there might not be a way to build some bridges.

I think the challenge here (to me), for "improving communication", would be to identify what acts would require Moderation to "check-in" with the larger community first.

If I'm not mistaken, Moderation made it clear to the impacted communities of the megathreads that they were threading on thin ice. This came to everyone else as a surprise, sure, but was it a surprise for the parties involved?

As an RWDT regular, the mods did, after the last round of warnings/bans, post a rant about a toxic rulebreaking clique. It came off as venting and honestly seemed like it was directed mostly at a few posters who nearly threadjacked it into an anti-moderation diatribe(although I won't claim to have had no part in the culture of omerta, I wasn't a part of that). I expected a few deats, maybe a DOS for questers/TEM/nap, and possibly a three day or so lock of the thread.
It was never communicated that we were on strike three, nor was it communicated to us that the general chattiness was an enormous part of the problem.
I'm working on a condensed set of my suggestions from earlier; if there's a poster who's interested in collecting a set of our suggestions in a megapost that may not be a terrible idea.

[Souseiseki]

I personally have my doubts whether this would be an impactful change.

I think there's a subset of users that don't see much meaning in the "second opinion" of Moderators (see also: Archregimancy's definition of the "first group" above). Having the same procedure but moving it up the workflow will likely not resolve that overall sentiment, and people that don't have this sentiment likely trust the second opinion to reverse a DEAT if it is truly unwarranted.

yeah moderation has pretty much always depended on the luck of the draw and second opinion won't change that. sometimes you get stuck with... certain moderators... and sometimes you don't. second opinion, in my view, has almost always functioned as a roll of a dice to see if you get a better mod. and there's always the chance you'll get a mod that has a similar reputation as the first so that's not a guarantee things will go better. this is also why the admittedly quite unworkable "can we ask for specific mods/ask to not have specific mods to handle this issue" stuff came from the last time i remember we had one of these big threads. or even probably why the elected moderators idea that arch mentioned has come up in the past. they're all just increasingly convoluted work arounds to the underlying problem that certain people don't trust certain moderators and want to reduce their influence as much as possible since they're definitely never getting fired.

I'm doubtful this one will get in but it would go a long way in making moderation look better to the userbase. People who are primarily active on the game side should be barred from being game mods and should be sought after to be forum mods and those active on the forums should be barred from forum moderation and should attend to game side. As I've touched on previously people from most every side of NSG believe moderation is biased in one way or the other and having outside people unconnected to the ongoings they moderate would make the idea of bias a much harder one to sell and would ideally improve faith in the team.

as an addendum to the above, one of the most common defences i recall hearing of... certain forum moderators... is that they're great gameplay mods and that compensates for their lackluster forum moderation. which might be true, but that doesn't really solve the problem of lackluster forum moderation. i think one of the suggestions was for some people to just voluntarily back off from gameplay or forum moderation and focus on what their actual strengths were, which iirc actually happened and i think it worked? maybe it didn't and i just never noticed. but yes, the key point here is that i do think there's some value in having mods who primarily or exclusively deal with certain parts of the site. it's been a while since i've thought about it but i think at least a while ago the practice was that you started out doing a little in gameplay got seniority promoted into being a forum mod as well? or vice versa? and that doesn't seem like the best idea if that is how it works.

though i think having gameplayers mod the forums and forumites mod the gameplay would be a step too far because their lack of familiarity would prevent effective moderation. admittedly this will probably come as paristan, childish and cranky but i do get a little pissy when someone that has never posted in general comes into general and starts handing out warnings because i generally assume they're gonna make bad calls. and i would assume that equally someone who has spent the entire life on the forums isn't going to fully understand the nuances of how to deal with gameplay's own issues. do you have any idea how hard it was to write this post without throwing in multiple digs at... certain... groups of gameplayers? that's why you don't want predominantly forum people modding gameplay lmao.

Do mods receive training? I thought they were just members of the community who the moderation team deems okay and just asks if they want to be a mod, gives them a rundown of stuff, and boom, orange name. Training seems a bit far-fetched, seeing the whole team is made of unpaid volunteers on a random internet site.

i would assume they do. not some kind of intense formal training, but even random internet groups i was part of when i was a kid had some kind of training or induction for people enterting new roles. it would be pretty ridiculous if they had nothing.

We've now spent several days and dozens of pages rehashing the rights and wrongs of the decision, and why we think it was terrible/not terrible but badly communicated/absolutely fine. I think we can safely assume that, at this point, almost one one's minds are going to be changed.

i understand why you're moving in this direction, but i do think that this does come as a bit of convenient redirection. like "it's done, it's over, placate yourselves by talking about something else" delivered in a nice tone.

---

on a wider note, i do think that megathreads probably helped contribute to the decline of NSG and definitely fostered insulated areas with diverging "cultures". i'm not really sure how to solve that at all because i don't want my bae megathread to get closed. and i do think that, especially in the past, certain moderators were way too trigger happy in merging literally everything into vaguely relevant megathreads.

[Souseiseki]

I think the challenge here (to me), for "improving communication", would be to identify what acts would require Moderation to "check-in" with the larger community first.

If I'm not mistaken, Moderation made it clear to the impacted communities of the megathreads that they were threading on thin ice. This came to everyone else as a surprise, sure, but was it a surprise for the parties involved?

As an RWDT regular, the mods did, after the last round of warnings/bans, post a rant about a toxic rulebreaking clique. It came off as venting and honestly seemed like it was directed mostly at a few posters who nearly threadjacked it into an anti-moderation diatribe(although I won't claim to have had no part in the culture of omerta, I wasn't a part of that). I expected a few deats, maybe a DOS for questers/TEM/nap, and possibly a three day or so lock of the thread.
It was never communicated that we were on strike three, nor was it communicated to us that the general chattiness was an enormous part of the problem.
I'm working on a condensed set of my suggestions from earlier; if there's a poster who's interested in collecting a set of our suggestions in a megapost that may not be a terrible idea.

do you happen to have a link to this for reference?

i know the UK politics megathread had a similar post (though a lot less severe) complaining about perceived insulation from the rules at some point in the past but i can't find it unfortunately.

[Grenartia]

though i think having gameplayers mod the forums and forumites mod the gameplay would be a step too far because their lack of familiarity would prevent effective moderation. admittedly this will probably come as paristan, childish and cranky but i do get a little pissy when someone that has never posted in general comes into general and starts handing out warnings because i generally assume they're gonna make bad calls. and i would assume that equally someone who has spent the entire life on the forums isn't going to fully understand the nuances of how to deal with gameplay's own issues. do you have any idea how hard it was to write this post without throwing in multiple digs at... certain... groups of gameplayers? that's why you don't want predominantly forum people modding gameplay lmao.

My thoughts exactly.

[The New California Republic]

i know the UK politics megathread had a similar post (though a lot less severe) complaining about perceived insulation from the rules at some point in the past but i can't find it unfortunately.

Rule violations in UKPol are smacked pretty promptly, and always have been as far as I'm aware...

[Diopolis]

OK, here's a couple of suggestions-
1) Edit the OSRS to make it clear that otherwise borderline or too-mild-to-be-actionable flamebait will be considered actionable if it receives an actionable response. One would expect that the professional tapdancers-on-the-line would eventually start running afoul of this rule. Furthermore, make it a general policy that for flame/bait reports, the preceding postchain gets looked at by moderation to counteract reporting bias, and considered through the lens of this rule.
2) Require two mods for DEAT(at least the first one) or long term forumbans(two weeks+). I would think this is probably better to do in advance- after so-and-so gets a ban where it seems like the next step is something more drastic, go ahead and raise it for discussion.
3) Certain mods are in fact the problem, while others are not. It would be nice to be able to fill out mod dispreference sheets or something, but I don't seriously expect to get it. I'm not sure how to get around this problem.
4) Provide a notification to reported posters to allow a better opportunity to defend themselves. Making second opinions prompt would also be nice, but I'm not sure how to do that.

[Cisairse]

These are my ideas for improving the situation (I'm keeping this brief, will follow up with any questions/clarifications if asked).

Provide us posters with a rigorous, clearly-stated list of criterium for what qualified for a megathread. The OP of this thread is not sufficient.
Begin enforcing these new rules on all threads to which they apply equally.

[Diopolis]

As an RWDT regular, the mods did, after the last round of warnings/bans, post a rant about a toxic rulebreaking clique. It came off as venting and honestly seemed like it was directed mostly at a few posters who nearly threadjacked it into an anti-moderation diatribe(although I won't claim to have had no part in the culture of omerta, I wasn't a part of that). I expected a few deats, maybe a DOS for questers/TEM/nap, and possibly a three day or so lock of the thread.
It was never communicated that we were on strike three, nor was it communicated to us that the general chattiness was an enormous part of the problem.
I'm working on a condensed set of my suggestions from earlier; if there's a poster who's interested in collecting a set of our suggestions in a megapost that may not be a terrible idea.

do you happen to have a link to this for reference?

viewtopic.php?p=37166603#p37166603
I was, it appears, mistaken about the lack of communication on the chattiness aspect, although to be fair I wasn't a part of that particular incident and generally don't pay an enormous amount of attention to moderation. In any case, it wasn't explained that we were on our third strike.

[Souseiseki]

i know the UK politics megathread had a similar post (though a lot less severe) complaining about perceived insulation from the rules at some point in the past but i can't find it unfortunately.

Rule violations in UKPol are smacked pretty promptly, and always have been as far as I'm aware...

well, usually. didn't stop one mod complaining though. my memory fails me but i think it might have been the same mod that posted the above post in RWDT. maybe they just really hated megathreads.

[Grenartia]

2) Require two mods for DEAT(at least the first one) or long term forumbans(two weeks+). I would think this is probably better to do in advance- after so-and-so gets a ban where it seems like the next step is something more drastic, go ahead and raise it for discussion.

I already tell you this is probably not going to happen, because mods don't want the added hassle when it comes to killing spambots.

4) Provide a notification to reported posters to allow a better opportunity to defend themselves. Making second opinions prompt would also be nice, but I'm not sure how to do that.

Now this is a suggestion I can actually get behind.

[Diopolis]

2) Require two mods for DEAT(at least the first one) or long term forumbans(two weeks+). I would think this is probably better to do in advance- after so-and-so gets a ban where it seems like the next step is something more drastic, go ahead and raise it for discussion.

I already tell you this is probably not going to happen, because mods don't want the added hassle when it comes to killing spambots.

Writing in an "except for spam/DOS" exception would be pretty easy. Even making it an unwritten rule like the not moderating threads they're participating in would be a step in the right direction.

[Grenartia]

I already tell you this is probably not going to happen, because mods don't want the added hassle when it comes to killing spambots.

Writing in an "except for spam/DOS" exception would be pretty easy. Even making it an unwritten rule like the not moderating threads they're participating in would be a step in the right direction.

Fair enough.

Now, I already expect the mods to respond to your suggestion by saying that DEATs and DOS are already heavily discussed in the sekrit modcave, and that requiring this would be a pointless addition of time and effort. How would you respond to that?

[Hakons]

It must be noted the RWDT and the LWDT weren't chat threads. Some of it was chat, but there was also plenty of political discussion. The RWDT was useful for me because I could share a current event or an opinion without having to write up an extensive OP for a thread post. I don't want to write an essay every time I want to share something. I also don't like the culture of the wider NSG. I find many posters genuinely distasteful and crass, and I would rather not interact with them. There were still some of those people in the RWDT, but it was less. I know it sounds kind of lame to say I want to interact less with people that tend to disagree with me, but when it comes to how enjoyable NSG is, that's correct. I'm a religious conservative. Most of NSG isn't, and I've never liked it when people take my religious posts as a cue to be viciously anti-religious. In the sense that it was claimed the RWDT was insulated, I agree in the respect that it insulated my posts and interactions from people that are predisposed to be hateful of me and my religion. Even if the thread was more chatty than regular threads, I think the benefits of giving users a more enjoyable experience with a bit less hating outweigh the costs of whatever is perceived to be bad about chatting.

[Frisbeeteria]

I've mostly stayed out of this discussion, but I wanted to address this point:

Do mods receive training? I thought they were just members of the community who the moderation team deems okay and just asks if they want to be a mod, gives them a rundown of stuff, and boom, orange name. Training seems a bit far-fetched, seeing the whole team is made of unpaid volunteers on a random internet site.

I have no insider knowledge, but I mean, they probably are given some form of training even for volunteers. Like a crash course on "How to do Moderation", give warnings, use the warning tag, write records...

There is extensive training for new mods, including quite a bit of mod ethics and practices in this game. The core ethics and practices docs were written by Max and [violet], so we absolutely have direction from the top. There is documentation on not only how to use the tools, but when to use them, and how to try to avoid impacting innocent players.

Every new moderator has a different starting point and comprehension of using the tools. They start as forum mods doing simple stuff like spam removal and thread moves. Mentoring is always available from more experienced mods, and is often called upon both in discussion threads and our Staff Discord channel. No mod is required to do any specific tasks - they tend to gravitate towards their personal interests. Once they've been here awhile, they're usually given the opportunity to get "a bigger toolbox", i.e. game mod status. That allows mods who are mostly into the forums the ability to DEAT adbots and spammers without asking a GM do help. Mods who wish to engage in Gameplay or don't want the extra responsibility / opportunity can and often do refuse the 'promotion'.

There's a massive pile of other tools, most of which require special training. As a professional process writer in past jobs, I wrote process documents for most of them. It's not all about trolls and spammers - for example, we have processes for creating and verifying Class Regions and for issuing API keys.

---

tl;dr: No, we don't just hand them a toolbox and a title and push them into the fray.

[La Xinga]

I've mostly stayed out of this discussion, but I wanted to address this point:

I have no insider knowledge, but I mean, they probably are given some form of training even for volunteers. Like a crash course on "How to do Moderation", give warnings, use the warning tag, write records...

There is extensive training for new mods, including quite a bit of mod ethics and practices in this game. The core ethics and practices docs were written by Max and [violet], so we absolutely have direction from the top. There is documentation on not only how to use the tools, but when to use them, and how to try to avoid impacting innocent players.

Every new moderator has a different starting point and comprehension of using the tools. They start as forum mods doing simple stuff like spam removal and thread moves. Mentoring is always available from more experienced mods, and is often called upon both in discussion threads and our Staff Discord channel. No mod is required to do any specific tasks - they tend to gravitate towards their personal interests. Once they've been here awhile, they're usually given the opportunity to get "a bigger toolbox", i.e. game mod status. That allows mods who are mostly into the forums the ability to DEAT adbots and spammers without asking a GM do help. Mods who wish to engage in Gameplay or don't want the extra responsibility / opportunity can and often do refuse the 'promotion'.

There's a massive pile of other tools, most of which require special training. As a professional process writer in past jobs, I wrote process documents for most of them. It's not all about trolls and spammers - for example, we have processes for creating and verifying Class Regions and for issuing API keys.

---

tl;dr: No, we don't just hand them a toolbox and a title and push them into the fray.

I remember reading something for NERVUN that said a forum mod who refuses an upgrade is called a senior forum mod. I'm looking at the mod page and I didn't see any senior forum mods.