Culture & Etiquette (aka Guidelines) - Site Feedback

Tamat·Jun 13, 2014·3 votes·3,024 views

Evening friends!

I'm looking to replace the guidelines in each sub-community with something a little less ambiguous, and more effective at shaping the culture and posting etiquette for each community. I'd like your feedback on both, but I feel like explaining the culture in the first one is the most important to get right.

Culture

Option #1:

DO post questions or feedback for the development team

DO post your ideas for new features or improvements

DO post community boards bugs that you discover during use

DO rate posts based on how valuable you think the content is

DO read the Universal Rules before posting

DO NOT post about League of Legends gameplay

DO NOT post League of Legends bugs

Option #2:

In this sub-community, you’ll find news and updates about the community boards beta. We also want to hear from you! If you have any questions, complaints or ideas for improvements, post them here.

All of the Universal Rules are in effect in Site Feedback. Please become familiar with those before posting.

This is the current direction for this part, but I'd also like to add a button that when you hover over will give you some [TAG] suggestions. I’m interested in exploring other approaches to this though.

Etiquette

Please keep all content about topics pertaining to these boards. We can’t maintain the culture of these boards if everyone begins posting League of Legends feedback, so please use caution before posting.

Examples of recent content removed by our moderators include:

League of Legends gameplay feedback

Feedback about champions / skins

League of Legends bug reports

“Why was I banned” threads

Would love your feedback on this. Once the style is figured out, and we have visualized the final product, I'll post a Culture & Etiquette for each sub-community to get more of your feedback.

Thanks everyone. :)

19 Comments

Hyrum GraffJun 13, 20143 votes

I voted both; I like that there's a little conversational style in Option 2, but option 1 is much better in terms of clarity.

ResistImpulseJun 15, 20142 votes

To add depth why I agree and believe both options are useful; the patch updates include both styles. Therefore, the inclusion of both option 1 &2 keeps a consistency with the Path Updates. The patch updates give a brief conversational style description, then are followed with the concise details or data of the change.

Sir ArmaMalumJun 13, 20143 votes

Personally I like option 2, but it needs to be a bit more detailed. I've had to answer questions like "what is a beta?" and "what exactly is the community beta?" before, and I feel it's more the fact that some simply don't understand what the Community Beta specifically is, other than something to hate on in GD of course :P.

But seriously though, I'll always go for informative, positive mood guidelines over anything else. If Option 1 is considered more popular however, may I suggest attaching a link to where things like "League of Legends Gameplay" should go, so as to approach the DO NOT as less of a blanket shut down and more as a stern redirection?

In case I was confusing (I tend to be in the morning, sorry) here's what I was thinking for Option #2:

In this sub-community, you'll find news and updates about the Community Boards Beta, the very forum platform you're currently using! Feel free to contribute your own ideas for improvement, feedback on your experience and any bugs you've run into.

All the Universal Rules are in effect here as well, please read these before posting.

To re-iterate: this is not the place for anything in-game, there are other more appropriate sub-communities for that.

As for Etiquette, I'm not too much of a fan on how it's worded. 'Boards' makes it sound like you're talking about the entire CB, and if someone comes here before the Universal Rules or front page they may be confused. so 'Boards' can be 'this specific sub-community', and if 'League of Legends' was changed to something more specific like 'game related' (As people tend to associate these boards and everything in the site as 'LoL related' imho) and small tags on the reasoning why the examples were removed like:

League of Legends gameplay feedback (off-topic)

I think it may be a bit more clear on what you're trying to say.

Just my $0.02, take from it what you will. Thanks for the early look!

ResistImpulseJun 15, 20144 votes

Instead of making my own reply to OP I think it would be better served to upvote your reply to OP and then add onto your reply.

I think you hit on a very important detail when you supplied (off-topic) after what had been banned.

I would like to add a comment about a need for Riot to recognize the importance of user friendly navigation

I think Riot frequently drops the ball on navigation. In this particular case, navigation should be added to the decription by supplying navigation for WHERE to go if you have one of the listed non-topic issues that are being removed by moderators.

The example would be adding sub-forum title regarding gameplay bugs after saying not to post those bugs in the site feedback sub forum.

DO NOT post League of Legends bugs.

could become:

DO NOT post League of Legends bugs. (head over to Help & Support sub-forum)

This improvement could be included in the more wordy ettiquitte section if the concise Do/ Do Not list feels over crowded with navigation directions included.

Example would be:

League of Legends gameplay feedback (off-topic; head over to Help & Support sub-forum)

KSHarrisonJun 13, 20143 votes

I'm not entirely sure I understand this. This is just a sample introduction to a subforum right? In that case, I would go for a mix of the two options:

In this sub-community, you’ll find news and updates about the community boards beta. We also want to hear from you! If you have any questions, complaints or ideas for improvements, post them here.

Moderators are removing off-topic discussions including:

League of Legends gameplay feedback

Feedback about champions / skins

League of Legends bug reports

“Why was I banned” threads

I like this amalgamation. Option 1 is too many points and the sentences don't read well because they feel forced into beginning with "Do." I'm not sure if Option 2 includes the etiquette part. If it does, then it's too long; if it doesn't, then it's not communicating some of the forum rules.

I think forumers aren't going to need too much help figuring out what to write as much as what not to write--and then only specific details because stating the obvious like universal guidelines is redundant. The few problem people you ward off with a too-detailed response comes at a high cost to readability for everyone else.

Brevity with an emphasis on judicious communication of rules as well as a positive welcome statement would allow me to jump right in with a grasp of what to expect.

Anyways, that's just my opinion.

thunderingiceJun 13, 20141 votes

I am with you on this. I, at first didn't think the two were comparable. Honestly, they still feel weird. But I think they are supposed to be the same content, just different ways of approaching it. I only came to this conclusion though because I asked myself "why on earth didn't they use the same content for both?", followed by noticing it was under culture. I think in option one they don't make an effort to communicate or connect, they just make expectations clear and simple. In option 2, the effort is made to be friendly and warm, but you are told to go read the rules on your own (which most ppl won't do) and so expectation are not as clear.

I originally voted option 2 as I think ppl like Morello and Xelnath with their openness and friendliness and their intentional effort to connect to the community are a huge part of what makes Riot awesome (although I acknowledge their emotional fortitude is the subject of legends). However, I would appreciate it if my vote was changed to both. I value option 2 more than I do one, but I think that both have value. Maybe GD would be a better place if there was an easy to see board of rules on all threads, that everybody assumed everybody else would follow (I may be getting optimistic here). Overall I value style 2 more, but both have value along with a time and a place.

I hope that I understood the post correctly. It felt awkward to me, and I wouldn't be surprised if I didn't understand.

bzhen0915Jun 13, 20141 votes

A lot of us actually prefer bulleted dos and donts rather than reading a paragraph and figure out what we should do. Prefer the first culture

I Main SwainJun 14, 20141 votes

ok, I know ive posted this like 10 times (or at least commented it), but I just wanna make sure its getting seen. if it is, pls tell me you are working on it so I can stop wasting everyones time with these.

anyways, I haven't been able to make any posts on the community beta since around feb; the "create post" option simply isn't there. ive tried it on my normal account and a couple others, but nothing is working. pls help, ive had several ideas, bugs, feedback, etc that ive been wanting to post, but I haven't been able to. pls help :(

Sir ArmaMalumJun 14, 20141 votes

If this has been said before I apologize, but have you gone into a specific sub-community first? You cannot post from the front page.

If it's still not there, please go to my Welcome Post and leave a comment with a screenshot and I'll see if I can help. Sorry for redirecting you but I don't want to distract from the actual topic of this post.

I Main SwainJun 15, 20141 votes

that's odd, its working now going into the sub communities, but it wasn't last time I tried. well, thank you for the help :D

Sir ArmaMalumJun 15, 20141 votes

no problem, glad it's fixed! :)

HotS Murky MainJun 14, 20141 votes

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CrazyEuropean8Jun 15, 20141 votes

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thunderingiceJun 16, 20142 votes

this doesn't look like a scam at all. should i give u some rp to help buy the bundle while I am at it.

Kitch26Jun 18, 20141 votes

How about instead of removing threads in the wrong place, you just move them to correct place?

TamatJun 19, 20141 votes

Great question! I can think of many reasons, but I only have time to go into a few.

First, that approach doesn't scale well with hundreds of thousands of posts per week. Let's say that you get 100k posts and 10% are posted in the wrong category. This is 10,000 posts that need to be moved, roughly taking 15-30 seconds to accomplish. Do the math.

It makes more sense to purge the content that was posted in error. We'll be sensitive to the fact that everyone makes mistakes, but we want to train everyone to post content in the right place, and that won't happen if we take a "housekeeping" approach.

Second, we want you to be able to find relevant content in the relevant place. There needs to be some structure, otherwise we'll have the same situation we have in our old forums. There are 20+ boards to post in, but General Discussion is the only active board. It's a dumping ground for everything; little is properly curated. This creates many problems in a social platform, all of which we'd like to avoid here.

To do that, we need to train people to use these boards correctly. Riot, and you guys. Once we have a solid base of early adopters (you guys) that are using the platform correctly, it becomes an environment where new users will learn by the examples right in front of them.

Does that make sense?

Pardon any mistakes in grammar, I'm in a rush!

PhailRaptorJul 12, 20142 votes

Second, we want you to be able to find relevant content in the relevant place. There needs to be some structure, otherwise we'll have the same situation we have in our old forums. There are 20+ boards to post in, but General Discussion is the only active board. It's a dumping ground for everything; little is properly curated. This creates many problems in a social platform, all of which we'd like to avoid here.

To do that, we need to train people to use these boards correctly. Riot, and you guys. Once we have a solid base of early adopters (you guys) that are using the platform correctly, it becomes an environment where new users will learn by the examples right in front of them.

Tamat, you do realize that the reason everyone posts everything in GD is because Rioters pretty much ignored every board except GD, right? Every other board was a ghost town that had maybe 10 dedicated regulars at most, none of whom were Rioters. The old playerbase was conditioned to believe the only relevant section was GD. By Rioters.

You need to be mindful of this going forward. If a certain section gets favored by Rioters, that section will become what GD has become today. Organization is not the problem.

C9 BartzJun 18, 20141 votes

Riot please fix your connections this dcing problem and no LP gain/loss it is not fair that people play and get nothing. On top of that now this NA dc? Please fix these problems. I have a feeling it will continue to happen since lately it has happened at least 2-5 times per month now.