Suggestions on how to improve the forums

[divisionten]

Considering 90% of the stuff in TWD is handled by Vain...

And Vain is right. We each have specialties. I rarely ban, and I usually only do so if its a known bot and/or I'm the only one online (time zones, ftw). Mostly, I make FAQs and clean out spam. But when I do have to bring the hammer, I honestly feel guilty. I don't like silencing pople. But I like it when people harass others even less. I grew up with bullies. I know how hard it is to be on the receiving end.

But Vain is right on one account- ban reasons may not happen because of something you saw. Offending content may have come in the form of a harassing PM, and we must respond to those too.

We have a code of conduct, and there is one for the forums too, the one made by David E. It still stands today as it did when he wrote it a few years ago.

[DAISHI]

Can someone tell me what's so wrong with TWD forum?

[ryannumber1gamer]

There's nothing wrong with it really but it can get annoying seeing piles of threads just to see....

WHY IS EP 3 NOW OUT YET TELLTALE GAMES?!? I'M NEVER BUYING FROM YOU AGAIN!

Not everyone is like that but there is loads of threads and posts like that.

[Gman5852]

Originally Posted by DAISHI

Can someone tell me what's so wrong with TWD forum?

A lot of complaining really. Telltale didn't realize that the monthly episodic formula they've had for so long doesn't work when the game has branching paths based on previous dialog, and they are taking the flak for that big time!

Doesn't help that Telltale had a bizarre lack of communication to us during this first delay as well.

[ryannumber1gamer]

I will agree that Telltale should have told us episode 2 was delayed but now it's all just stupid complaining.

[Gman5852]

Originally Posted by ryannumber1gamer

I will agree that Telltale should have told us episode 2 was delayed but now it's all just stupid complaining.

They have the right to be mad, they were told monthly and it isn't monthly. Some of the stuff they say is bad, but they still deserve to be mad and have the right to complain.

Plus their threats don't mean anything. Odds are the forums here are the minority on telltale's customers, so they aren't taking any damage from this in terms of sales.

[ryannumber1gamer]

But Telltale has done this with piles of their games which they said episodes came every month. Bttf has it.

Episode 1:22th of December
Episode 2: 16th of February
Episode 3:29th of March
Episode 4:29th of April
Episode 5:23th of June.

[Gman5852]

The second episode had that planned from the start, and episode 5 was when the series was almost over and it was obvious Telltale knew what they were doing with those games. The new guys for this game just recieved one episode followed by no news whatsoever about episode 2, just that there was a delay. I think they have the right to complain there, not in this level, but a right certainly.

But that is off topic, the one thing I'd love to have for the forums would be to allow images to work in spoiler tags. That way people can just do that and then people that don't care can scroll over it and not have it load for them, while people that do care can click and see it.

[Giant Tope]

Originally Posted by divisionten

But Vain is right on one account- ban reasons may not happen because of something you saw. Offending content may have come in the form of a harassing PM, and we must respond to those too.

What I mean is that there doesn't really seem to be official conduct of business. Decisions always come off as whether or not it felt right to do by the mod at that time rather than actual code of conduct and I feel like this causes a lot of conflict both internally and externally. From my understanding, you folks get a very general guideline of how to run the place, but overall there isn't a whole lot of structure to it.

It's honestly a huge shame that there isn't really a community manager who really cares anymore about the community and I feel like everyone suffers for it.

Originally Posted by divisionten

We have a code of conduct, and there is one for the forums too, the one made by David E. It still stands today as it did when he wrote it a few years ago.

This guideline was written 4 years ago before there were any community mods onboard the the crew. Along with this, the guideline was written to give something of a resemblance of a structure for the place as the forums became flooded with preteens that were excited for the new Strong Bad game. (Note that the forum games section was created around this time period as well.) If you read them over, it's just incredibly generalized common sense. Before the audience change, the Telltale crowd was incredibly tiny and rather mature. They self moderated themselves with the gentle guidance of the friendly staff from time to time.

The forum has changed a lot since even the last edit of this guideline.

I mean, goddamn, when was the last time bullet point #2 of the guidelines actually happened? I still haven't gotten my goddamn contest prize, and second and third place got them a long time ago.

With the moderating crew being entirely volunteer based at this point and with the forum getting much bigger, there needs to be guidelines and general rules of how to go about business. There needs to be rules on what situations constitutes a warning or infraction, how many warnings/infractions constitutes a ban, and how long a ban should be in which situations, ect. This new guideline needs to be stapled up to the top of the board.

I'm not saying you guys don't work hard. I'm not saying you guys are meanie pants and I hate you guys. Furthermore, I'm not saying that I'm some sort of all seeing genie and I will make this forum better if you just follow me.

I'm saying you guys, as dedicated and nice you guys are to the community, need more structure. I think this would help improve the forum and that is why I posted in this thread.

Another note: I personally don't think posts need to be outright deleted unless they contain gore, pornography, unwanted personal information, or legitimate threats because if they get instantly covered up without anybody knowing about it, then the community would have no idea that sort of action was wrong. Even in the cases of the exceptions, I'd imagine it'd be best if they were snipped out by mods with an explanation. However, that's not my call to make.

[WarpSpeed]

There's a rule that you're not allowed to talk about why a member is banned, probably to avoid criticism that whatever behavior really merited a ban. The result can be stifling, though. Perhaps when someone asks why so-and-so was banned, a moderator could respond, saying this person had ignored three warnings, was getting out of control, and needs a couple of weeks to cool off, or whatever. Then, when inevitably someone yells that that's no reason to ban anyone, just don't respond.

[Vainamoinen]

Originally Posted by Gman5852

The second episode had that planned from the start...

Don't drag this here please. I've enough of this as it is.
Counts as off topic here.

Originally Posted by Giant Tope

What I mean is that there doesn't really seem to be official conduct of business. Decisions always come off as whether or not it felt right to do by the mod at that time rather than actual code of conduct and I feel like this causes a lot of conflict both internally and externally. From my understanding, you folks get a very general guideline of how to run the place, but overall there isn't a whole lot of structure to it.

You might think more "bureaucracy" in that area would be a good thing. I do not agree. If mods are always invoking some kind of moderator constitution, they're listening less to the community and to other mods.

We can not just count the number of offenses and then yank a community member out. There can not be a code of conduct listing various offenses and their severity. I am convinced that the attempt alone would massively increase arbitrariness in mod decisions and end in less guidance for the volunteers.

Moderators DO decide on a case to case basis. These are individual personal decisions, and I understand that this irks you. In my experience, what results is a pretty lenient moderation, while the team discussion prevents that a mod is going rogue. We're not the police, we're part of the community. When we take measures, we take the personal into account. When a good guy who has been around for years suddenly starts spewing insulting nonsense, we'd like to know the reasons before possibly kicking him out of a community he or she might need as support. Introducing hard and fast "mechanical" rules, we'd eliminate the personal.

Originally Posted by WarpSpeed

There's a rule that you're not allowed to talk about why a member is banned, probably to avoid criticism that whatever behavior really merited a ban. The result can be stifling, though. Perhaps when someone asks why so-and-so was banned, a moderator could respond, saying this person had ignored three warnings, was getting out of control, and needs a couple of weeks to cool off, or whatever. Then, when inevitably someone yells that that's no reason to ban anyone, just don't respond.

First, we would be talking about the banned member behind his back, making him more angry than he probably already is. Sure I could go on the Walking Dead forum posting "that last one was banned for two months because he tried to organize a shitstorm, made ten insulting, duplicate and disruptive threads total (closed or moved, not deleted), ignored clear warnings, then continuously PM'd moderators accusing them of censorship". But first of all the banned member would have no way of defending himself while the questioning community would have more inquiries even a team of 20 moderators could answer immediately. We won't spend 95% of our time here explaining ourselves. As you can see, we do enough of that already, and I haven't seen this in ANY other forum that way.

Occasionally ban reasons have been announced, and I think I was at the forefront of this once. I don't do this at all today. When someone is actually banned, the decision stands. No discussion. Professionalism and continuous justification of one's acts are at cross purposes here.

As soon as TWD Season is over, I hope bans will be of the utmost rarity again anyway - which will probably lead to more explaining again.

Originally Posted by Giant Tope

Another note: I personally don't think posts need to be outright deleted unless they contain gore, pornography, unwanted personal information, or legitimate threats because if they get instantly covered up without anybody knowing about it, then the community would have no idea that sort of action was wrong. Even in the cases of the exceptions, I'd imagine it'd be best if they were snipped out by mods with an explanation. However, that's not my call to make.

There seems to have been a central traumatic experience with deleted posts in your forum past. I apologize for it. Fact is - posts are VERY rarely deleted. I sometimes did it (WITH announcement) to give a topic a new chance by killing off the completely derailed discussion elements. Only experimented with it when I started out, didn't like the feel. And at present, a lot of the insulting stuff I usually would have deleted or snipped in the TWD area just "remains" with an infraction - as testimony of the particular user and for future reference. The tone in there is rough - users should know.

Snipping means directly cutting areas of meaning out of a user's message, leaving the other users to actively guess the rest of the effectively crippled original message. An added moderator explanation feels a lot like mockery to the user in question, whose message was undoubtedly obscured. To be honest, to me, deletion actually feels less like censorship than snipping. But I'm coming from the journalistic field of professions in RL, where an edited article often feels worse than one simply not published.

[GuruGuru214]

Couldn't have said it better myself.

[Vainamoinen]

Here's something to improve the site: Only registered members to post on the blog.

The people who obviously gather there know NOTHING about how Telltale works, yet voice their utmost profanities just because some of them get the third episode next week.

[ryannumber1gamer]

Yeah i agree with you. I live in the UK and i am waiting for Ep 3 for PSN. But you guys don't see me starting 50 threads just to say ''EP 3 IS NOT HERE YET TELLTALE IS CRAP!'' I have 3 steps for people like that.

1.Shut Up and get over it and just play something else.
2.If your conplaining about spoilers then stay out of TWD fourms
3.Stop making the Mod's jobs harder.

[ryannumber1gamer]

Ok i am starting to get annoyed at the amount of bots that's been spaming the fourms a lot lately. I think something has to be done about it. I know mods can't be on all the time but so here are my suggestions.

1.Telltale do something extra to prove that new members are not a bot.
2. Start modding a few more people who have proven they can handle being a mod and my suggestions for people who have proven themselves arearth Marsden,Shadowknight1,Der_Ketzer. But since a good amount of you guys have been here longer than me i guess you would know better who have proven themselves.

That's all i can think of right now guys.

[Vainamoinen]

Yes. Even the TWD forum doesn't get on my nerves as much as those spambots this weekend.

But I fear Der_Ketzer would rather jump out of the window than let us make him mod.

[ryannumber1gamer]

Yeah i can guess how hard it can be for a mod lately with spambots and the people crying about TWD.

[Darth Marsden]

Oh trust me, the last thing you want to do is give me more power.

Besides, I only ever hang out in General Chat, and there's plenty of mods here. All I'd be doing is catching things a little earlier than them, which really isn't enough of a reason to make me a mod.

[ryannumber1gamer]

You already got power?! Wow this is new news.

[Darth Marsden]

Well, I AM a Dark Lord of the Sith. Power kinda comes with the job.