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Then that was a failure on the part of whoever informed me though, to their credit, they didn't say you were explicitly the head moderator. Just that you were, quote, 'Team Mom to the other mods' and 'Sherlock Holmes was a Spam reg for many years (during Jorick's time as a regular user), and is essentially the head moderator.' Perhaps the fact that people see you as such is another indicator of the perceived failure to establish moderator presence/knowledge on this site.
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Do you think this is a good thing? I'm not sure how this is preferable for a moderator.
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Since I don't know you I can't comment on questions I have specifically for you but I can give you some questions that I've asked the other moderators in this thread/want to ask the moderators in general.
Do you feel like the issues touched upon in this thread are real, or are you under the impression that everything is fine?
How do you feel about the amount of moderators, and their activity?
How do you feel about the engagement of the community as a moderator? Do you think it's not required?
How do you feel about the quote that states;
<Snipped quote>
Do you feel like the community is deteriorating, whether through shrinking member counts, increasing toxicity or any other reasons?
What are your ideas on how we can fix the community?
What are your ideas on how we can make the community better (in case you are under the impression there are no problems)? We can always make the community even better, so 'the community is already good' won't really suffice here.
What are priority issues for the moderators at the moment?
What are your concerns in terms of moderator recruitment processes?
What are your concerns in terms of how moderators currently discuss and act together?
I'll answer you in a lump sum, rather than quoting each point individually:
(I'm posting in between some unexpected projects this morning, so hopefully this will be coherent, even if I'm typing everything a little disjointedly.)
The whole 'Mom' schtick came from my days in Spam -- I was always viewed as the level-headed one, someone who was fair and would not choose sides lightly or pander to whoever happened to be popular at the time. I was known for giving good advice and being unerringly even-tempered -- this is ultimately why I was promoted to moderator. My username was aptly chosen: if you've ever read the stories, Holmes has a personality that I largely identify with. This is beneficial in a lot of respects, but it is also somewhat detrimental in others -- I am able to objectively reason any point and conduct myself maturely, but I'm often seen as somewhat aloof and arrogant. Because I've always been a cool head when surrounded by chaos (such as Spam once was), people felt comfortable to approach me for advice on almost any matter, despite the fact that I'm not well-known for inspiring "warm fuzzies" personality-wise. (I'm sure Hank will vouch for the majority of this, since we've known each other for several years now.)
I was a decently well-known entity on the site before Guildfall occurred. At the time, I was on the site almost constantly -- I was working from home and had the luxury of popping on here frequently. Since then, I've moved to New York City and I have a much tighter work schedule, but I still come on several times a day to check the moderator forum and weed through my PM box. I have always been comfortable being a 'behind the scenes' type of person -- I enjoy being low-key and helping out when/where I can, so my style has always been to lurk and keep an eye on things from the shadows. I generally don't say anything unless I feel like I have something to add, which gives me the appearance of being less active than I actually am, I suppose. (Take this thread for instance -- I've been following it since the beginning, but I kept quiet until I actually had something to add.)
I'm not saying whether this is preferable for moderator behavior or not -- it's simply how I am and how I have always been.
I am far from a point where I think things on this site are ok. The community is on life support (in a lot of respects) and the tools with which we have to moderate by are rudimentary compared to what we used to have. (Pre Guildfall.) At the moment, moderators have very little functional power, aside from banning and warning. That is pretty much all we are capable of, aside from hiding threads or moving them on occasion. We don't have the tools to research users like we once had, we don't have the ability to do temporary bans (unless we physically keep a list of time frames and physically ban/unban people on a case by case basis), we cannot do name changes or any other under the hood changes that most moderators on forums are able to do. People like to point out that the site needs some updates and for things to get finished -- the moderator tool kit is no different.
We'd all like for Mahz to be more active, but the reality is that he is a busy guy and we are not necessarily at the top of his list priority-wise. This is not to admonish him, this is simply a fact. I appreciate all that he has put together on this site and respect the fact that he pays for everything from his pocket out of the goodness of his heart, but I think we can all agree that we'd be blind if we ignored the fact that improvements/updates on the site need to be made. That all said, these are things that the moderators have discussed at length in our own forum -- I know I've personally said that I would like someone to be appointed as an admin to help Mahz and be more accessible on a regular basis. (Even though Contra Fates was spotty in her availability at times, she was at least accessible.) We've also discussed bringing on more moderators, but unless Mahz pops in, this is not within the moderator's toolbox and he would have to make the changes.
(We can discuss things all we want, ultimately the discussion does little unless we can get Mahz on board for some changes. It's the same in these regular threads as it is in the moderator forum -- we only have so much power.)
Priority issues for the moderators are getting more help -- both in a sense of potentially expanding the staff, as well as getting the moderator toolkit up to scratch. If Mahz can't be around, then he needs to share the abilities to make changes by appointing another admin or giving the moderators more power to make changes in his absence. As far as working as a moderator team, we seem to work fairly well together as far as communicating behind the scenes goes -- when there is a problem, it gets handled. Hank is right, however, when he says we're mostly 'janitors'. We sweep up after everyone, sorting out disagreements and whatnot, moving threads, and disposing of the spambots when applicable. Really, that's pretty much our lot day in and day out. It's not fun or glamorous, but a lot of stuff that gets done behind the scenes that regular users don't really see.
Could we be more engaging as moderators? I know I probably could, personally. While it's my preference to lay low, I can understand how that might create a bit of a detached feeling on my part from the regular community members. With the demise of Spam, which was my regular haunt (aside from my RP's), I don't post much outside of the moderator forum these days. I am around the site, but I don't tend to leave much of a trail outside of my moderating duties. I'm far from a perfect example of a moderator in terms of being sociable -- I do my duty and don't do much to grow the community these days. I could definitely work on that. (Part of it's available free time, part of it is a bit of apathy on my part because the community is a shadow of what it once was -- the first part is understandable, the latter part has no excuse.)
As far as appointing new moderators, I don't know that I have a way of improving the system devised, since we don't really appoint them anyhow. Really, it's always just been taking a community temperature and seeing who stands out based on recommendations. It's not a perfect system.
TL;DR -- I'm not as social as I could be, but I do keep up on my moderator duties. Our community needs some attention, both through site updates and community-building activities. We need more staff and the staff that we do have needs more power, so that we can do things in Mahz's absence.
EDIT:
@JBRam2002 all of these have been mentioned before but that doesn't mean you can't raise these issues again because they are all valid and in fact most people here share your opinions.
It's kind of strange that we don't have a report button given that the always updated rules literally state you should use the report button. ;) You're right though and a report button would at least fix the problem of people not reporting anything.
This is one of my biggest site peeves as far as being a moderator goes. We
DEFINITELY need a report button.
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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?
Actually, it would show us the problem post, but we also would go and read through the thread to get context anyhow. That's how it always worked when we had a report button in the past.
Marik
TokyoPewPew