Message From The Admins

We've had to do some painfully subjective bans over the past few days. I say painful because they are bans that were made due to cumulative, subjective issues with certain users over months and years, and not single infractions that broke the camel's back. (So to speak.)

These are always extremely difficult calls to make, and by our internal policies can only be made by an admin -- not a mod -- because they're a subjective judgement call made for the health of the site and not due to violations of any particular forum rule.

These events are extremely rare. In the entire site's ~5 year history, I can count the number of these bans we have made on one hand. This is because making bans for subjective reasons that aren't backed up by specific rule infractions harm the users' overall perception of our integrity and consistency. If we can nuke some guy for no specific reason, what's to say that you aren't next?

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Our moderation is short-staffed. It has been for awhile. This is mostly due to the fact that everyone I have approached about the job who I feel is qualified (I can share my requirements later if you're interested, but that's another post) has turned me down.

Honestly, this is expected: the people who are sane enough to understand the nature of the position and the thankless level of responsibility are typically too sane to accept the offer.

Being a moderator is thankless, strenuous, and altogether pretty awful. The fact you only appear out of the woodwork when something has gone wrong, plus general human mental quirks around confirmation bias, means that the more you do your job, the more you will inevitably become associated with being the bad guy. You must constantly fight this perception, and it requires skill, diplomacy, training, and a certain level of self-critical diligence and effort that is often unreasonable to expect from volunteers.

I have gotten a lot of feedback about heavy-handedness among some of our moderation staff, and you'll just have to trust that I have taken it to heart. But I believe all of our moderators are doing the best job they can within the limitations of the rules we have imposed upon them. We need to work on consistency and avoiding the perception of favoritism. When favoritism appears to occur, users can't always be expected to give us the benefit of the doubt and understand there is almost always non-public, extenuating circumstances that have caused it.

I ask that you believe me when I say that we're working on it.

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That being said:

Users need to understand that our mods are limited in their powers. They cannot perform perma-bans, nor temp-bans without providing lengthy documentation and evidence. Even then, there are typically threads about the user in the Moderator forum that involve every mod, and every admin, and frequently run to many pages before a decision is made. Just about the only decision a moderator is allowed to make in a vacuum is a topic ban, and even then, I'm pushing towards using them less and less as a disciplinary tool in general.

Why do I tell you this? Because I get a lot of complaints about a single moderator, attributing blatant, dictatorial, vengeance-driven behavior and permanent, ruthless disciplinary action that they simply do not have the power to take even if they wanted to. This tends to make me skeptical and dismissive of the overall claims even if there are nuggets of truth buried in there, because I start to distrust the reliability and intentions of the messenger.

We site admins have a famously low tolerance for drama. We have no interest whatsoever in investigating who said what to who, who exaggerated what about what situation, who has an agenda against which user clique, who's spreading rumors about what relationship, or any of that.

We run a FFXI and FFXIV gaming site, of which the forums are one small component of the overall operation. There isn't enough you could pay any of us to keep track of all that drama, and if you try and play games with the moderators or admins based on any of it, the admins are quite likely to just advise nuking every affected party so we don't have to waste our available free time and precious sanity tracking down who's saying what about who. That's time and effort we could be spending on making the site more useful for everyone else.

This isn't me being mean, or lazy, or dismissive. This is practical reality. We aren't on these forums all day like you guys. We simply can't keep up. There aren't enough hours in the day.

And that's just the admins! Moderators are all volunteer, so they have even less of a reason to do so. Frankly, I'm amazed they haven't all told us to go to hell by now.

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This means that if we end up getting a group of users who are consistently the source of reams upon reams of stacked-up drama every time we visit the site... users who consistently tiptoe right up to the edge of the rules and then fill our Inboxes with reports, complaints, bizarre-*** interpersonal drama about relationships and stalking and disagreements and sniping, etc, eventually an admin (like me) is just going to make the call to nuke them just to keep us all sane. It simply isn't worth it.

There is a cut-off of diminishing returns such that your contributions to the forum are not worth the sheer effort it takes to keep you around. It's nothing personal. No harm, no foul. There's the door.

I've recently made this call about two elder users. Banning Sevourn and Flionheart was my call -- not our moderators' -- so you can stop sending me PM's alleging forty different drama-filled conspiratorial interpersonal narratives about how or why a certain moderator would have done so. You just make yourself look like part of the problem.

Like I said, the number of bans we've made like this in the half-decade the site has been around can be counted on one hand. In both cases, the record of warnings, topic bans, temp bans, perma-bans-and-pardons, etc number several pages of text in the user's account notes.

So please do not freak out that suddenly the red-barred ban hammer is going to come down on your head with zero warning. We don't operate that way. And we're not going to start flipping out and banning people out of sheer frustration alone.

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But you need to realize that the smooth operation of this site is a partnership. I need my mods to be consistent, polite, diplomatic, and patient. If they aren't doing that, I still need to know. Please continue to report your concerns. Your feedback is always taken to heart, even if it's just tucked away into a corner of the admins' heads for future consideration and does not result in immediately action until I get enough consistent complaints to make a case.

But I need my users to avoid twisting themselves into impossibly complex, nasty Gordion Knot relationships, while engaging in moderator-backed efforts to destroy one another's reputation and credibility, and then running to an admin when it blows up in your face. It's important that we all establish realistic expectations of what we can expect from you, and what you can expect from us.

Everyone needs to take a few steps away, and breathe.

Thanks.

First off thanks for taking the time to write this up even though you didn't have to to clear the air, it's appreciated.


This is the only issue I have with some of the moderation on this website. I feel that sometimes decisions are inconsistent with others, and can be rather condescending and/or rude in some cases.

I'm not alone in this. Honestly I can see how it can become quite annoying to moderate this place with some of the characters around here, but still, it should be handled professionally. In most cases it is, but there are times where it's evident that the decision was more heavy handed, and sometimes the reaction (usually PM, not public declarations) are sort of rude.

I just miss the dirty pictures

To be honest i don't know how any admins or mods on this site get through a typical day.

I appreciate you taking the time and understand where you are coming from. I would however argue that the mods DO indeed have a TON of power, as the one that I assume you're talking about is capable of:

1. Topic Banning on a whim
2. Deleting posts and entire topics on a whim
3. Temp banning (uncertain of how long that mod is allowed to ban before he has to do "paperwork", but it also appears that due to your belief that these defendant user's claims are biased and only contain a "nugget of truth", that mod pretty much gets to ban whom they want and you'll approve, because you will always side with them.)

I don't say these things to start an argument, but to really say I appreciate your position, and think the problem is a bit worse (from the user side) than is being stated.

I (and I know several other people) have pretty much stopped posting on this site on a consistent basis, and have stopped providing job/game data/info/commentary because the filter on "what will be deleted/banned/erased without even a warning" changes by the whim of that specific mod. Luckily there are still several people that post valuable information and haven't had problems, but the overall diversity of the site suffers. It's easy to trivialize this when you have a large group and you can say "we can do without a few good/bad people", but it does hurt the system.

Keeping a mod around that gets consistent objections/reports for abuse, deletes information/posts without warning (hard work and players voice), and bans/topic bans people that ask why, just because we're short on mods, only does a dis-service to the community.

I'd wager expanding your criteria for who can be a moderator in favor of not having to continue the employment of troublesome moderations would be more favorable than keeping a moderator around that drives off a large % of the community. It's gotten to the point where this site is brought up as an example on other sites of what not to do.

Maybe it's me not noticing but...what are you talking about? I can't recall any constant 'feud war' between anyone other than Flion and Elana usual bickering.

This post sounds as what my homies in the hood call "salty".
They can delete what they want, and I have confidence that it's not "just on a whim" in most cases with what you complain about.
This is coming from someone who's butted heads about post before, been topic banned, and has had posts deleted.
They have good enough judgement to dissolve a situation. Perceived or no. It's a privileged to post here, not a right.

I would argue there are worse users than Flion and Sev out there but I trust the judgement of the admin team.

:(

Remember that you are you always free to report the posts of disruptive users, and you can also send a PM to any member of the staff. Pretty much every PM voicing a concern about a user is copy/pasted into a new thread on our private section of the forum for discussion. We look into every complaint.

Obviously it's a privelage. No one is arguing the moderators lack of right to moderate. A problem doesn't arise until that moderation goes beyond fair, consistent, and balance and into aggressive removal of information and voices without regard to the implications.

The "shoot first, ask questions later" approach is NOT a good moderation technique. Topic banning people that are contributing to a 100 page thread without warning them, or even poking your head into the thread to say what the problem arises from is LAZY and destroys people's desire to participate in the community. Deleting posts and entire threads is one step further.

It's a privilege to post here, but its the community of people that makes up this forum, and without those people, it's nothing.

That's because most of the old school feuds don't happen anymore due to moderation.
It happened a lot more before you started posting here methinks.

You sure it's shoot first ask questions later?
You know moderators are human and can err just as much as you can.
If there's an argument that can be taken down a notch just by deleting a few posts and they have the judgement to do so that's their "right". If you get your posts deleted all the time I'd say you might want to *** your posting style. I can be just as controversial as you if not more at times and I've had my posts deleted for such things as well, getting upset about defending your e-pride only goes so far.

I think it's almost imperative that you wrote this when you did so that some people will finally understand a "typical" day for the Admins and Mods.
While I don't post on the forums all that often it isn't hard to see some of the points you were touching on, at all. But after reading this I am glad that some of the issues are being addressed.

I dont come around these parts to often so what i say you can take with a grain of salt. It seems to me though the people forget that this site is a privilege they dont have to keep this site up but they do for us. People are complaining about the topic-bans thread nuking etc. but do you really have room to complain? That being said i think people should realize that its a privilege to use this site. Also i've havent personally experienced any of these problems first hand so what do i know about whats going on lol

In that case I don't understand what's the point of complaining about something that doesn't happen anymore.

It's a "privilege" for us to use forums, which we provide the useful information for, and which the owners of the site profit off of via advertisements.

Just to be clear.

I didn't say it didn't happen anymore. Just that it used to happen a lot more often. :D

They make no profit from this site at all last time i heard. They are running this site for free with nothing in return

Just want to say that I appreciate the work you, Scragg, Krizz, Anye, and Alyria (sorry if I forgot anyone ; ;) put into this site each and every day and believe the site is better for it without a second thought.

I look forward to logging in here every time I have some time to spare and love this site and know that you all have put countless hours of work into this, and I think we all appreciate it and are thankful that all of you stay with us each and every year.

And to be clear from all of this, I'm not arguing that the specific mod in question be removed. Frankly I don't care.

I just want a warning system to be put in place before topic bans, post deletions, and temp/perma bans.

People should at least get the respect of saying "hey knock it off" before they're banned/removed from a thread. That one little change would bring people back to the site.


Guess I'm the only person that sees the advertisements at the top and side of my screens.

They run it for free but they get money from allowing advertisements, there was a time when ads were taken down because Google pulled their affiliation with the website since we were all naughty, swore too much and were very vulgar.

I'm not sure about the other users on this site, but I used to go through the forums to see if there is any good information and/or ideas out there. Now I'm just hesitant to read anything regarding ffxi, because many OP's are just replied with "Level this JOB not yours" or "you didn't know? you're dumb". So I haven't been reading any posts for a few months now. Just using the site for AH and recipe needs.

Krizz, personally I think you're doing a great job, and its good to know you guys are working on making this ffxi forum useful again.

I guess one point of disagreement between users and the admins is the actual impact of a topic ban. To us, being removed from a single topic -- even if it's one of those epic threads -- is just not that big of a deal.

We can't treat a topic ban from a 5000+ page thread any differently than we treat one from a 2-page thread just because people really want to post there. In fact, we discourage (but can't prevent) such threads from even forming in the first place, because they're a nightmare to police due to limited moderation tools available.

If we can't use topic bans because certain threads basically turn it into a perceived perma ban anyway, then we need to rethink the existence of such threads. Not our policies.

Similarly, the removal of a single post or picture does not, in our eyes, rise to the level of a permanent administrative action that requires the usual warning, account note, PM, etc procedure. It's one post. It's not permanently debilitating, and it pretty much gets the message across. The mods are supposed to let you know why they removed a post. If they aren't doing that consistently, we'll examine why and address the issue. But we're not going to bog ourselves down in bureaucracy for such a simple action when quite typically, speed is of the essence.

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I really hope my post did not sound like I was dismissing complaints or concerns by users about the moderators.

Yes, I am inclined to take their side. It would be unreasonable to expect anything different. But I do not rubber-stamp all of their decisions. I frequently reverse judgement calls or disagree in the moderator channel -- you guys just never see it, because by very definition they never end up affecting you.

There are multiple occasions where user complaints have resulted in behind-the-scenes talks and major changes in rules, procedures, and moderator actions. But I'm not going to haul my mods out in public and lambast them to make everyone feel better. If you want moderation at all, you can't expect that, or nobody would sign up for the job at all.

We have already taken a number of complaints to heart and are working on them. I can't explain what they are, but hopefully there should be some improvement soon.

I was under the impression that the ads payed for the site...I love it when people perceive a profit when I'm pretty sure the ads are for operational fees.

I got topic banned once for posting ponies :(
But it was my fault; as it was irrelevant to the subject at hand.

That is all.

Appreciate the time/consideration.

In fairness, from what I see, 90% of the people being topicbanned are not contributing anything worthwhile to whatever thread they're being banned from. They are doing nothing but attacking other users and causing unrelated arguments as to whatever the actual topic was.