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Let's talk about moderation

ModCaptainMårvelous·10/18/2013, 3:40:06 PM·40 votes·3,971 views

Mostly because one of the biggest issues with the previous forum was a moderation feel that overall made much of the community mad. So I think this discussion should shed some light on what might be best for the people in this new forum and how the Rioters can best handle this. So to start off, here are some of the hot button issues with the moderation system on the current forum:

  • First, and biggest, moderation seems invisible. There is rarely an active presence felt and there has never (to my knowledge/experience) been a moderator coming directly out of the woodwork and saying they are a moderator. This leads to a "hand of god" problem where things will happen without warning for many.

  • Wildly inconsistent rules/regulations that borders on bias. Certain posters will break the rules, "flame" other users consistently, cause many problems and overall make the community a more unfriendly place yet suffer rarely, if any, backlash. Meanwhile, other posters will slip up once and be hit with an instant perma-ban with only "Violation of the Summoner's Code", allowing for zero learning or repentance/reformation. Not to mention a distinct lack of adherence to the subcommunity movement. (90% of what's on GD shouldn't be there, only about 5% of that is moved and sometimes not even to the right forum).

  • Lack of presence most of the time. Several extremely rule-breaking threads (Porn threads being a major point) will remain open for hours and garner hundreds of posts and views before someone notices. Yes, GD is a hard forum to follow but shouldn't there be a sort of red flag if there are an influx of attachment posts and views?

  • Forum users have little-to-no say in how things are done on the forums. While attempts had been made to discuss and talk with the moderation, all of these have fallen on deaf ears and even major user attempts to overwrite something the majority consider an unjust decision are ignored or pushed to a barely seen subforum to die a slow death.

With all this criticism in mind, here are some of my personal opinions on how moderation can be better handled here, as well as ideas overall on how to maintain a civil atmosphere in the community beta even when the influx of negative/insulting users migrates here.

  • Moderators are known. Give them a tag, give them a badge, just give them a way to determine and stand out from the crowd. People can actively talk with them and this moderation will feel more like part of the community.

  • Appoint players as moderators. Keep in mind, there is no benefit and this is strictly volunteering, but many users would likely want to help moderate the forum for little/no cost (Even a small RP benefit might be too much). As they are under company regulations, it'd be very easy to ban/utterly block them should an abuse of power occur.

  • Have 1-2 moderators per subcommunity instead of several overall moderators. Giving "districts" encourages people who are more specialized in these communities a better grasp of what is acceptable and what is not, along with removing the error of spending too much time moderating one section vs. another section.

  • Have a clearly defined reason/notification system when someone is banned or a thread is moved. Not much, just a simple "You have been banned for: sjfiaosjoiasjf" or something akin to that as opposed to the blanket statement of Summoner Code violation.

  • Have moderators work closely with support or at least add a forum issue support tag. Currently if you have a problem with the forums or another user, there isn't a designated place to put feedback asides the general feedback, which is more akin to just a "How'd we do?" sheet.

Along with this, any red input would be great in shedding light on what your plans for the moderation are. Get some real wonderful discussions going on in terms of what your plans are for the beta as well as our personal feedback on the path you plan to take!

34 Comments

RiotKrylhos10/18/2013, 6:50:04 PM10 votes

Thanks for taking the time to write this out Captain.

First of all, we're rolling out a "flag post as inappropriate" feature to help the community bring inappropriate posts to light if they happen to slip through the cracks. That'll be coming out in the next couple weeks.

Within this community system, we're wanting to shift a lot of the responsibility of conduct encouragement to each respective sub-community (while still maintaining global moderators). For example, you might get away with a little more flaming in a community that tolerates it more than another. We'll be seeing this more and more as the platform evolves.

As for ban messaging, I whole heartedly agree that you should be told why you were banned (even if it is obvious, which it is in some cases). We're also planning on presenting delete reasonings, so if a thread is removed the OP can know why. To help educate and advocate for change in behavior, transparency is a must.

Also, I hope you're recognizing with this community platform that community members have a huge impact on certain features that make it out to help improve overall quality of life for community members.

RiotHeintzer10/18/2013, 6:44:31 PM6 votes

Great feedback. Moderation on a platform like this requires a vastly different approach from vBulletin, and I agree that our current moderation there can feel a little impersonal. To be frank, the scale of the community means that we've needed to focus on clear offenders like spam, porn, racism, and clear abuse - but there's a lack of a feedback loop, and that can lead to frustration and the sense that it's the wild west, with few rules and inconsistent enforcement.

It's something we're still working out and we'll likely need to figure it out as we build this platform with you guys.

In particular, I'd love to hear more thoughts about how a player moderation program would function. I really like the ideal of it, but I'm worried about the real life implications. What's the application and selection process like? How do we evaluate 'mod performance'? How do we evaluate what an "abuse of power" is? What kind of incentives are appropriate?

Kidro10/18/2013, 7:25:31 PM4 votes

I agree with alot of points made here but I do not agree with player moderation. Well I don't agree with it completely, in my opinion player mods would be okay as long as they couldn't ban anyone or edit players posts. They should only be able to delete attachments, and bring the attention of a post to a mod for deletion, moving, or banning a player.

ltachi10/19/2013, 10:51:11 AM3 votes

Who is CaptainMarvelous?

TheVoiceofExile10/18/2013, 9:46:35 PM3 votes

I completely agree. Just having posts randomly disappear and whatnot is a bit off-beat so to say. I'd like to see it go one step further as well, instead of just removing the post and telling the user why it was removed I think we should leave the post location there and clear the post but replace it with the reason it was removed. That way we can make examples out of players that have their post removed by publicizing the reason it was removed, which should in turn increase the knowledge of the community as to what an appropriate and inappropriate post is. Also I'd love to become more entwined with the community, especially since I plan on seeking a position one day at Riot :D

Auryiel10/19/2013, 12:36:15 AM2 votes

Still don't understand why you're banned.

Meanwhile, just browsing GD, I can find you 5 guys who deserve a perma-ban in 10 minutes. And they're still posting every day.

TBH I don't expect Riot to be any less shady with their moderating in the future. They like to keep it unreasonable it seems.

COBRA C0MM4NDER10/19/2013, 3:21:32 PM2 votes

I'd like to add this, player moderators is a good thing, but they should be voted in by the community.

If they post a lot of good topics and help over a course of time. (no bans/misconduct over a 3-6 month period as example)

I'm not going to go into RP rewards/incentives here. you pay nothing for the game & you shouldn't be rewarded for volunteering with cash-like incentives. (maybe after a bit of service [6 months-1 year] this could be implemented in form of unlocking a top tier champion with a skin...maybe an exclusive skin specific to moderators with NO CASH VALUE or a client UI skin only they have access to)

And with player moderators, I'd think having a performance forum would help keep power abusers in line. We as players could report on the person in writing as to their performance seen by ALL within that forum, visible only by accounts of certain level (20 is a good base, it'll show you not only like the game but have invested enough time to help out the community as well if that's what you done along the way).

I'm mostly saying that if you're wanting to become part of this community to help the game and the players you should at least have a decent track record...I'd have no respect for this system if we just let any level 3 Tom, Dick or Jane jump in to spam posts or disrupt things within.

But mostly I'd like to have this Hand Of God thing removed...this ain't Dungeon Keeper here, if you get slapped...you should know who done it, why and any other reasons other than for the sake of watching the imp scurry to off to Banland or Suspension Town.

responding to he RED, the flag post as inappropriate is a good thing to have. STAY ON TARGET!

that's it, that's my wall of text on that. The idea is great

Shro0mie12/31/2014, 4:44:47 PM1 votes

"Appoint players as moderators. Keep in mind, there is no benefit and this is strictly volunteering, but many users would likely want to help moderate the forum for little/no cost (Even a small RP benefit might be too much). As they are under company regulations, it'd be very easy to ban/utterly block them should an abuse of power occur."

This, also, on the red flag part. Is that the reason why when I posted something SUPPORTING RIOT against the VAST MAJORITY on the post CALLING RIOT GREEDY MONEY MONGERS but used a couple "inappropriate word" in reply LIKE MANY MANY OF THE POSTS ABOVE CALLING RIOT MANY AWFUL WORDS but because I was a MINORITY saying Riot was NOT GREEDY MONEY MONGERS (hence this game is free if you choose it to be) PEOPLE GOT PISSED OFF and FLAGGED my post CAUSE THEY DIDN'T LIKE IT that thats why it got deleted in about 2min while people calling other people things like "greedy F$$$s" got to stay since no one red flagged them cause they AGGREED with their message?

silverbacon10/18/2013, 7:01:52 PM1 votes

Agree with everything said here.

Player moderators are a really good idea. It has worked on a number of communities I have been in over the years and takes the heavy load off the other moderators. One of the biggest problems forums have is that it is not reasonable to always have someone online. Player moderators can eliminate that problem.

ploki12210/18/2013, 7:17:41 PM1 votes

Unsure if you've seen Pendragon's PoV about this, but if you look at his profile, you may be able to find it.

As for me, after reading his thoughts, I must say I'm leaning toward that side...

Basically, I'll give my feeling point by point :

  • First, and biggest, moderation seems invisible. There is rarely an active presence felt and there has never (to my knowledge/experience) been a moderator coming directly out of the woodwork and saying they are a moderator. This leads to a "hand of god" problem where things will happen without warning for many.

I never really had a problem with Deus Ex Machina moderation. Basically, I only believe that if Moderators were known, it would lead to both brown nose'ing and free hate'ing. The fact that right now, apart from Reds, if there are any, moderators are hidden means taht the blames always fall down on Riot, which is pretty much to expect.

  • Wildly inconsistent rules/regulations that borders on bias. Certain posters will break the rules, "flame" other users consistently, cause many problems and overall make the community a more unfriendly place yet suffer rarely, if any, backlash. Meanwhile, other posters will slip up once and be hit with an instant perma-ban with only "Violation of the Summoner's Code", allowing for zero learning or repentance/reformation.

I believe the problem here isn't the consistency of the punishments, but the consistency of the frequency of the visits. Basicaly, you can't moderate faster than a few million users post. That means that there will be slipups, and like everythign else, negative experiences outweighs the positive ones.

  • Lack of presence most of the time. Several extremely rule-breaking threads (Porn threads being a major point) will remain open for hours and garner hundreds of posts and views before someone notices. Yes, GD is a hard forum to follow but shouldn't there be a sort of red flag if there are an influx of attachment posts and views?

Like I said above, it's at most a few hundreds vs at least a few hundreds of thousands. That's why the -15 system was created. Unformtunately, it failed since people didn't downvote innapropriate topics.

  • Forum users have little-to-no say in how things are done on the forums. While attempts had been made to discuss and talk with the moderation, all of these have fallen on deaf ears and even major user attempts to overwrite something the majority consider an unjust decision are ignored or pushed to a barely seen subforum to die a slow death.

This one is basically simply a cluster of all previous things. The users didn't use the tools at their disposal, which lead to seeking moderators. The GD had a plague because of lack of self-moderation, which lead to people seeking better courses of action. The GD getting plagued lead to more people going to GD, which made subforms die. subforums died, which made people not use the tool at their disposal, out of disbelief.

 

As for the solutions, I'm at least skeptical (since they overlay, I will reword them...

  • Appoint players as moderator

I honestly believe this won't solve a thing, as explained above.

  • Appoint moderators to specific communities

Once again, this will probably only force people to elect an "elitist" community, the one with the best mods or something like that.

  • Better conveying bans

Can't say I've had much experience with it... but that's a given. I'm also pretty sure they already know it's lacking.

  • Better forum support for players

Once again, I do believe that their PS is lacking o na few facets, this one is one of the biggest offender.

 

 

All in all, I believe that the best case would be self-moderation. however, old forum proved us that it won't always work out well.You then come to a fork :

Do you

  • Put more effort into making self-moderation easier and more fulfilling?
    or
  • Put more effort into enforcing an external moderation?
Vsin10/19/2013, 12:23:39 AM1 votes

I don't have an issue with mods being unknown entities. I do have an issue, however, with stuff vanishing into the ether without any trace or explanation. The League forums are literally the only vBulletin board I know of that has such little feedback with regards to what the mods are actually doing. Heck, the Guild Wars 2 boards on launch day had comparable traffic to the League ones, yet they were considerably more consistent with their sentencing, gave clear statements as to why they acted as they did, and consistently cleaned up threads that matched their criteria. And mind you: I hate those mods and their extreme intolerance, but I can at least call them consistent.

None of those elements apply to League of Legends moderators. It's as though Riot hired your average minimum wage tech support team and then told them to get to work.

For crying out loud, I can spot each porn thread from the OP alone, and they get bumped so fast that they're extremely difficult to miss. Yet, several of these threads stay alive for upwards of 24 hours - heck, Trundle 56 wasn't even spotted for 48 hours until a companion thread showed up with flashing neon lights and notified everybody.

Yes, this is negative feedback. But what else can I say? I can't pick out individual factors when I cannot see ANYTHING redeeming with the present moderation team.

Zodai10/19/2013, 11:04:11 AM1 votes

Great post Captain~

Maybe you'll continue posting your stories on the Community Beta ;p That said, I do hope some of these moderation improvements make it over to the main forums - It's sounding as if the new forums won't have an actual 'general discussion' tab at all; and it worries me D:

mambawarrior010/30/2013, 5:24:45 AM1 votes

In all honesty, why is it exactly that support is not allowed to tell you why you were forum banned? I was permanantly banned from the forums with no prior warning, and was banned on a second account for asking why I was banned. I then Emailed support and was informed that they were not allowed to discuss reasons for bans, and I was wondering why exactly that was? I can accept my ban, but I would really like to know why. I think it was because of a parody thread (copy-paste with a few words changed, I thought that was a great technique for making humorous posts back when I was new to GD, but in all honesty it's been so long I don't really remember the exact content of this thread. I have remained on the forums for well over a year now on this new account, and was never forum banned or warned on it, so I feel that my content isn't necessarily all that bad.

General Elephant10/18/2013, 5:48:37 PM1 votes

I approve. Well put. + 1 :)