Dion

How can we help improve RPGuild? Community suggestions and discussion.

@Sherlock Holmes then that leaves us at an impasse here. I'll pretend I believe that when Mahz returns he can at least use this thread as a measure of what is important to the community perhaps. But the realist in me knows that this thread will be left to gather dust and never read by Mahz if we abandon it now. So I'd rather continue to discuss grievances even if we know ahead of time that they can't be fixed now. Or ever.

Arena Chat Thread

@Doc Doctor I didn't. That was @Dynamo Frokane who also changed my mind on arena RP being like 1x1 and made me realize it was a bit more special than that. Me personally, I'm not afraid of offending the few with my views. At least I drew a reaction, which is special to me, because it's rare to see arena RP'ers outside of your subforum. ;)

How can we help improve RPGuild? Community suggestions and discussion.

<Snipped quote by Buddha>

UGH

I won't go into it here because this isn't the thread for it but...

UGHHHH that bothers me.

Anyway I've said my piece I'll keep an eye on things if I have anything to add.

@Rica

I'm the wrong one to bark at because I'd be perfectly fine with mature adult content in public alá bluemoonRP. The implications are that this would remove ads, and I am not really a fan of that system anyway because it ties us down a lot in terms of content in my experience.

How can we help improve RPGuild? Community suggestions and discussion.

@Sherlock Holmes I suppose that I understand the pro's and con's of laying low. It's certainly more preferable and inspires (haha, this sounds dumb, but it's true) a sense of awe and seriousness when you do appear to make your presence known. Not that that works on everyone, but for newer members or members that treat this forum very seriously, it might. But I suppose that there also needs to be a trade off. You can't have a team full of moderators that are low key, busy or inactive, and then maintain that and expect it to work. You guys made a right step with Mag Lev I think. But you need a few more Mag Lev's in terms of activity. And I also feel like you need someone that is more willing to take a hardline and put his foot down every once in a while. But I can't be too sure. To be honest, you guys have become kind of a meme in terms of how much we can depend on you, and that's not really in the positive way. I'm sure you would like to turn that around and become known for dependability.

Your explanation to the capacity of what moderators can do explains a lot, I think. It isn't an excuse for why most moderators are so inactive, but it excuses why nothing ever seems to change on this website. But it seems that like before it leads me back to the same point. Why wasn't this communicated to us properly? It seems like if we were made more aware of these type of limitations, it'd have prevented a lot of headache. Failure to communicate is still failure.

It also begins to explain perhaps why the community is failing. Changes cannot be made without Mahz, who isn't here. But these changes are required to fix, fundamentally, the guild. I take it you agree with me on that, at least.

I guess your priorities make sense, to me, somewhat. But I have to say I don't like how you guys characterize yourself as janitors. This removes the burden of interaction with the community and as a result alienates you from us (even more than you already have). Whether or not interaction and engaging the community is part of your 'job description' seems irrelevant to me. You are a moderator not because you get paid, you are a moderator because (I presume) you enjoy the community and/or have connections to it somehow. To me that means you also need to take that extra step of being and remaining a part of the community. And that doesn't mean every moderator needs to be an active engaging member, but I'd say it at least means that the staff consists of some people that are actually involved in the community and are aware of whatever is happening inside the community. Again, ivory tower. Previous answers by other mods have only reinforced the idea to me that there is an ivory tower.

Disclosing what you guys do or not isn't really something I care about. I'm not looking for a message every time you move a thread or ban someone. But a statement regarding what you just described as to moderator priorities is definitely something I'd consider worthwhile mentioning.

But in the end all of that still comes down to Mahz' absence being kind of a stick in the wheel. And that sucks because it's an issue that I feel could be easily alleviated had he taken the precaution to foresee this situation and anticipate it and share some power with someone else (you, for example) that made running the guild easier while he was absent. At the moment RPG sounds like a monarchy without a monarch.

Is there any communication at all with Mahz? I know I saw him in the discord once, and Hank mentioned he had to check his skype, and mahz mentioned that he didn't use skype anymore (something like that). Seems to indicate that there's not a whole lot if any contact with Mahz. Seems.. really inefficient and stupid.

How can we help improve RPGuild? Community suggestions and discussion.

<Snipped quote by Buddha>
Wait what?????

Where?

Am I supposed to pretend like I don't exist now? (for the sake of clarity, that's a joke)

That's gotta be one of the weirder rules I've ever seen, and I work for a corporation who's favorite thing is meddling dumb rules that make no logical sense.

@Rica

Works like youtube. Mention of the word sexual or lesbian relates to sexual content 99.9% of the time when you are perusing the internet. So, mentioning it will likely result in adsense picking it up as bad bad words. :) I won't argue about identity here in this thread because you know my stances, but there's definitely a reason for it afaik.

<Snipped quote by Buddha>
Sure, I think the mods being involved in the community is a great idea (I am definitely one of the most involved members of the community I mod). But it's also possible that some of their community interactions take place off-site (either in Discord or in private threads). I know there are a lot of members here who are active, but they don't necessarily have a lot of recent posts due to the manner in which they are active.

That said, getting the community involved starts with getting those at the top of the community involved with the community (as opposed to them being babysitters). If we want to increase involvement, then having more moderator-led events like the writing contest is a great opportunity.

@JBRam2002

Eh. The discord is.. barebones in terms of activity from Guild moderators or RPG members that manage the discord. It's a frequent point of annoyance to me but what can you do. :)

How can we help improve RPGuild? Community suggestions and discussion.

@SleepingSilence Didn't I request like, yesterday, not to do this stuff in here? Think it was a pretty straight forward request.

How can we help improve RPGuild? Community suggestions and discussion.

@JBRam2002 I've been an admin of groups over 2000 members large and I think honestly that presence is just as important as taking action. I get what you are saying and I'm not advocating turning moderators into babysitters.

But, on the other hand, having moderators interact with the community is a good thing. I definitely prefer it if the moderators were 'one of us' rather than the ivory tower. And they are just too inactive now for my taste to really get that feeling.

Arena Chat Thread

@Buddha

If you think arena fighting is about who can imagine the wonkiest attacks, then I surely hope you're joking.

@Doc Doctor

I am. But in all seriousness, I didn't mean any harm by suggesting what I suggested. I'd like to see the arena get brought back to life a little bit. I know you guys are of the opinion that it's not dead, but I'm sure you guys all agree that more people = more fights = more good stuff. Perhaps consider this a challenge to come up with new ways to make arena into something worth bragging about, where rather than saying 'well other forums' arena's are even more dead than this one' you can say 'our arena is the best one on the internet.'

I hope that despite some annoyances that came out of this, you guys end up coming up with some cool ideas for this forum.

How can we help improve RPGuild? Community suggestions and discussion.

But we are going into semantics about miscommunication and should get back to the larger topic at hand on how we can improve the website. Perhaps in ways that engage the community since the management has their hands tied at this point in time in terms of mechanical improvements.

???!

@Inkarnate

Yes, please. I want to talk more about subjects that are not necessarily related to moderation or arena (lol) solely. What are issues people have with the site that bug them?

How can we help improve RPGuild? Community suggestions and discussion.

I would love to see the 18+ and non-18+ separated as well. It would make it easier to have visibility for the non-romance 1x1s, and it would basically be a clear indicator when one entered the 18+ section of "Here be dragons." This is something I feel mods could do without needing coding or tags, but it would be annoying to move all the IntChecks there.

JBRam2002 and Rica

I'll put this in my list of ideas because I personally like this idea as well and I don't see how this could create any more problems (except more clutter, but if we're going to advocate keeping arena, then adding more clutter shouldn't be wholly deniable on that basis either). I think that the distinction between 1x1 mature and not mature is big enough to warrant two different sections in that case, since most people are of the opinion that the clutter isn't that cluttery (might just be my personal opinion then).

It also helps create a more PG13 ish thing. The only question I'd have is would we need to moderate this to ensure that whatever rules we have (lol the rules state you can't use words like lesbian, bisexual or homosexual but it happens all the same) are actually enforced for once, or are we just going to pretend like it's not a thing? Either works for me personally.

In re tags: My first RP that I GM'd covered a fairly wide array of options. I tagged all the things I thought of that fit, and then was informed I could only have 5 tags. I understand from a visual perspective why this makes sense, but could we possibly remove that limit and instead only show the first 5 tags or so in areas where space is an issue? Obviously, this means the system -could- be abused, but that would be something for moderators to keep an eye on. More options for tags in general would be great too, and perhaps even an option to create our own tags (of course if they're not a common tag, searching for them would be useless).

@JBRam2002

Since I don't think a 'tag search' will ever be a thing (who wants to read 300 pages of dead roleplays) I think we can safely add custom tags without it becoming a problem. It'd also allow some dank aesthetics, which I'm always in favor of. :)

<Snipped quote by Buddha>

I mentioned this earlier as well.

I believe the problem of having a "Report Post" button is that in my experience, the mods don't just look at one post. Whenever I reported something, it required a myriad of different posts and screenshots and even then the answer was "Well they're being a dick in these several posts but that's not excessive harassment so we can't do anything."

So by that logic, reporting one post isn't going to establish continued/excessive harassment. Of course, the easy answer to this solution is to report all of the posts involved, but I feel like it would make it difficult to view the problem as a whole. What if you report 20 posts and the mods only have time to go through 10 of them in one day? Do they judge each post individually (If the system is a singular reported post, it likely will be judged as such)? How many of the 20 reported posts would it take to establish a pattern/incident? Sometimes things fall through the cracks, and other times it's a lot more convincing if you have a compilation of evidence to build your case.

By our current rules, reporting a singular post is probably not going to encourage action from the mods. It would put more stress on them to try to sift through a bunch of reported posts to see how things are related, especially if there are a lot of other different reported posts.

Additionally, the reporting posts thing brings up another question: Can we report PMs? Statuses?

@Sylph

Well, the one solution I have implemented myself is that blacklist thing, which deals mostly with people that harass others and are, for a lack of better words, problematic. But I can't really publish it here (that'd be targeted harassment) and I can't put it in the public guild discord. So it's hosted 'publicly' in my 'public' server. It's not an A+ solution but so far it's better than anything we have.

Feels kinda vigilante like though and I'd rather not get into that if we can avoid it.

Besides that, yes a report post function is really needed. If anything it's because it's so easy. I can hit the button, fill in a form and press send. It's easier to do than send a PM to a moderator. It also feels less like I'm snitching like that. I'd definitely click report post more often than I'd bother to go through the hassle of taking screenshots and PMing a moderator because even if nothing happens at least I know I did my part.

I imagine statuses can't be reported (I mean they can by sending a PM) but adding a button there would just be stupid I feel like. But PM's, sure.

As clarified earlier, I wasn't. Just the point that community involvement shouldn't be dependent on Mod/Mahz direct involvement.

@Ruby

It isn't. So far the community has done a lot for RPG. It's a dependence based relationship. Mahz cannot host RPG without community (well he can, but you see why that'd be dumb) and we cannot have RPG without Mahz. We need to work together and for some things like the bigger community projects, his/moderators involvement is definitely a dependency I'd see as a requirement.

Tough, I guess. I've seen the Moderators say, "There's no delay in Moderator response to reported issues that we've seen." And then I've seen nothing significant to argue to the opposite of that. Some people say things aren't getting reported? Not sure how that weight falls on staff. It's not as if they do anything to actively discourage reporting.

@Ruby

Disagree. Failure to satisfy the need for feedback or at the very least a satisfactory outcome of the process is definitely discouraging reporting. It might not be active and intentional but judging from the posts in this thread, people feel as though nothing happens with reports. That is why nobody reports anything if we are to believe the posts in here.

If you and a few others think their job should be some kind of community coordinator on top of what it already is...okay. Good luck. I've touched on why that may not be a good idea, not that I feel like anyone's listened to me about that in this thread. Fair enough.

@Ruby

Please quote where you touched upon why you don't want them to also be community coordinators. Cause all I could find in the part where you quoted that specific part of what I said was:

That Discord was also started with a former mod, and then had another former mod added in early on to help it along. Not current Mods, former ones. Current Mods also helped in various ways when asked. Put it a better way: people who cared about the Guild community and were active in it.

And this seems to infer that former mods have done a lot of things for the discord. IDK how that means that community coordinating isn't something moderators should be involved in. But you are in the GCS. You used to be anyway. You know how active the guild authorities are on there :)

At this point I see a couple people pushing a narrative, talking at more than talking with. So my involvement in the thread comes to an end here.

@Ruby

I'm not pushing a narrative just because you are the only one to disagree, isn't disagreeing part of talking with too? Am I not talking with you now? In fact, with numerous people agreeing with me on some points, I'd very much think we are discussing something in this thread in general, not pushing a narrative. I'm not sure who I'd be talking at. Perhaps not you, but that's because I didn't feel like you added anything constructive so far. If you don't want to add anything to the thread anymore then feel free to leave. Nobody is making you stay here. It certainly isn't me. You disagreeing is fine. But please don't say I'm pushing a narrative for speaking my mind.