Please state what point you are attempting to improve - if you have a link to current posted rules, or other information that would be helpful in making your case, please include them. State why it is you believe this improvement is important. And state how best you believe it could be implemented.
Check your vendettas and personal grudges at the door, please. Avoid inflammatory remarks, accusations, etc - this is an attempt to solve problems, not drag them out. Generalized insults and nastiness offer nothing of value to the discussion, and make it that much harder to get at the useful suggestions and feedback.
If you have a specific incident you wish to address or appeal, please post a new thread report in Moderation, or file a Getting Help Request gameside - this is not the place for reporting, or carrying on arguments.
Posts that do not suggest or address potential improvements, or are simply argumentative will be removed - either to Moderation where the incident can be addressed, or to the evidence locker so as not to clutter the discussion.
To start things off, a couple of examples that I've been mulling on to help set up the format (Problem, description, possible solutions):
-Are mods giving people too much leeway? (IE: Locking a "trollish OP" without warning the poster?) In the distant past, moderation was much harsher ("two strikes and you're DEAT!") due to far more limited tools available. With the ability to better tailor punishments to specific types of violations, have we opened an unacceptably wide leeway gap between first violation and deletion that is causing the 'teflon troll' phenomenon?
-Possible solutions?
- Require and enforce a higher standard of expected behavior? Although this would in theory reduce the amount of petty sniping in debate, this could also drive a lot of people away and worsen the existing inability some people have to take criticism or deal with an opposing viewpoint.
- Enforce a lower standard of expected behavior? Basically tell people to 'grow a thicker skin' more often, and let the truly petty insults slide entirely. While this would mean fewer warnings, it would also likely worsen the existing problems regarding the general debate atmosphere and create problematic situations where people rely on and really go to town with the petty insults because they can get away with it.
- Make the penalties harsher to compensate for the widened gap between first offense and deletion/less 'pre-emptive' moderation? Instead of giving people chances with unofficial and official warnings, would elevating more rapidly to bans send a strong enough message to correct problem behaviors? Similarly, do less pre-emptive moderation (less stopping threads that are starting to go off the rails, shutting a trollish thread down before it actually goes into definite trolling territory, etc) in favor of letting it happen and then hitting the people involved with warnings/bans/deletion as necessary? On one hand, it creates more work for moderation, as pre-emptive actions also translate into fewer warnings that need to be handed out. On the other hand, it means less opportunity for tapdancing on the line, and probably means more consistent moderation. And a lot more warnings.
- Grant much less leeway for time elapsed between warnings. Typically, if somebody went through a bad spell, wracked up a bunch of warnings and bans, but then kept their nose clean for a few months and then tripped up again, we've typically taken that gap into account and lessened the punishment accordingly. Should we give less credit for 'good behavior' when evaluating someone's record? On the downside, this would probably be detrimental to long-term players, because every now and then people slip up. On the upside, this would prevent the known abuse where someone will rack up a bunch of warnings and bans and then deliberately lay low for a few months; and it would also snag the "troll who pops up only occasionally" types who only show up to troll and then disappear entirely until they happen to remember that they have an account here.
-How do we resolve the issue of reporting bias? The forums, NSG especially, are very clearly left-leaning, and to such a point that a player of an opposing/unpopular viewpoint ends up put under a microscope and any little thing they do that might possibly be out of line gets reported by a cabal of liberal players; meanwhile, similar such behaviors by players with the more popular viewpoint frequently goes unreported. This also tends to falsely generate the impression that posters of a minority or unpopular viewpoint are protected and allowed to get away with more, if only because of the volume of reports that are deemed not actionable.
-Possible solutions?
- Make it a standard part of procedure to skim through the entire thread (or in really long threads, at least the past several pages?) Contrary to popular knowledge, moderation procedure does not presently require going through the entire thread. It was a tactic employed rather heavily during the last US presidential election cycle to try and counteract this exact issue, and some mods still do it, but it is not standard or expected. On the plus side, it would counteract reporting bias, and possibly discourage some of the dogpile reporting if those who make such reports know they run the risk of having their own behavior similarly examined. On the down side, the lock 'n trawl technique is very time-intensive, which means further reduction in moderation response times and delays, and a whole hell of a lot more warnings that such endeavors tend to turn out.
- Enforce a higher standard of behavior? If everybody is held to a higher standard, perhaps we could get people of the unpopular viewpoint who don't get dogpiled on. Similarly, it would reduce the habit some posters have of making nasty little remarks like "Can't you read?" or "If you'd read my post-" and such that are currently deemed not actionable most of the time. On the downside, this would likely result in a lot more work and a lot more people getting in trouble with moderation.
