New Forum Mod

No, I'm not feeling chewed out. I'm actually taking notes to learn from mistakes of past and current mods so I don't make the same ones. I really want to try and work on helping the community feel more comfortable with the mods. I appreciate everyone telling me their opinions.

Why? Cause I work constantly, go to evening class, my job blocking ffxiah.com so I use my phone or send anything of issue to the main mods? I'm in the background and ive been here 8 years. I didn't quit, leave without notice, and when 1 mod goes, im still here. I may not yap like i used to but i am in the background.

Lest I be misunderstood here, I bear no hostility towards any moderator. I am not really the type of poster to have frequent (or any) run-ins with the mods given that I come here primarily to create, analyze, and disseminate informational content.

Nonetheless, I care about the health of this community. The forum has no value to me if there are not people here with which I can participate in discussion, and bad moderation drives people away from a community that is inevitably dwindling even without such actions. This thread is an opportunity for the community to see if the new mod will rise to the standard expected of them and remind the existing moderation team that they have yet to meet that same bar, let alone rise above it.

I don't want platitudes. I don't want pandering. I want results.

Are you going to give us an Anye liner?

You know, since it's

Nine Pages!!!!!

I learned something today.

Welcome Terraka, nice to meet you!

Going to go "ask some mod" stuff after I'm done reading all this.

*grabs popcorn*

This thread is ALMOST as good as watching the trainwrecks and meltdowns that occur in every P&R thread involving Palestine/Israel.

9 pages is pretty impressive though for just an introduction, the saltiness is strong here!

Terraka bunnymod.

You are about to embark upon the great crusade. The eyes of the world are upon you. The hopes and prayers of liberty-loving people everywhere march with you. In the community of lurkers, posters, debaters and lolpic'rs, you will bring about the destruction of injustice of the forum, the banning of rule breakers on the threads and security for ourselves in a free forum. Your task will not be an easy one. Your enemy is well trained, well equipped and sometimes HELP I AM TRAPPED IN 2006 PLEASE SEND A TIME MACHINE. They will fight with stupidity. But this is the year 2015! Much has happened since the days of Krizz. The past moderators with exceptions have inflicted upon the user-base great WTF moments, in open threads, private messages. This is our home, this is where we share ideas and culture and make new bonds. The tide has turned! The community are marching together to victory!
I have full confidence in your courage and devotion to duty and skill with the keyboard&mouse. We will accept nothing less than full justice! Good luck! And let us be friends in this great community and forum with your undertaking as a new mod.

Last time I will waste time over this one. Welcome to the forum Terraka, from personal experience, the forum is a breeding ground for ignorant hatred, which is something I fought against years ago when no one did anything, and every thread was derailed without fail.

I also expressed my disgust for the negative rating people would get on forum posts, as often it was a group mentality, and good posts would get rated down, just because one guy didn't like another guy. Having a negative rating on a post made those people feel like they shouldn't post at all. I would get rated down for bringing logic and common sense to a discussion .. just because .. you know, they didn't like bad news. The option to rate a post down was removed shortly after, and it's remained that way ever since.

But the forum has improved since then, although it still has its moments .. like this thread. Can we just let it die now? I'm sure people have more important things to do then blast mods for not doing their jobs. If they don't want to do their jobs, and you don't like it, then don't post in the forums. Why spend many hours of your time writing long passages of text like this one .. over a new moderator? Is it really that important to you?

I wish people would post more useful topics, or contribute to guides more. You don't see good discussion in the job guides anymore, as they get derailed also, and it's like players don't want to post current gear sets anymore. Highly praise those who do keep their guides updated, but there are many which are left to rot, and players have to either guess, or ask in this forum at the risk of getting someone's mid-life crisis thrown in their faces.

I wouldn't want to make a guide for this forum as it is, because many members (but not all) in this forum still don't know how to have intelligent conversation and debate. It would just end up a mess like many of the others. So the more mods the better I say, and the mods should have little interaction, as that leads to personal feelings, and those feelings would cloud their judgement.

My guide is always on topic and alive, at the same time I like to post in social, p&r and gaming threads. And therefore I care about moderation, as any user who frequently uses the forums should.

Like I said before I think this thread has been useful, I strongly disagree with you calling it a waste of time.

Seen as you are one of the few who keeps their guides updated (and I use it), I would like to apologize. Although I didn't get anything out of this thread (except a headache), others may have, so it wasn't a complete waste of time, but still a waste of time for me. Now I have wasted my time even further, so that's it for me. Time to do something else with the rest of the day.

A good vent; also within complaints lie suggestions and concerns.

Would it be the people who receives or people who actually do the rating that get's the title?

Because I'm sure I gave more than received.

I disagree.
Take a post from an admin, for some reason even if he just says hi he gets 204 likes.
How were rate down used when they were available(and still are in certain parts)? People often use it based on sympathy therefore I do not believe that kind of ranking to be a truthful standard of a user's standing.

He wouldn't include admin or mods for that type of ranking system. he would have his title set by himself.

That wasn't the point of what I said.

We should also have the ability to create custom titles.

For example:

Asura.Kingnobody
King of Nobody

While I sympathize with your post, Kylos, to some degree, I disagree with the bulk of it.

Mods are forum members and users as well, so the forums need to also be fun and interactive for them, especially to continue being an effective mod.

I've seen many mods on other websites who've developed friendships and still entertained impartial judgment when dealing with unruly members, so it shouldn't be impossible here.

So if the mods can't maintain peace and tranquility to some degree, how are they going to have fun, and be effective members of community, much less leaders, and thus inspire others to be active and participate, much less create guides and provide information for jobs and gearsets?

I do think the should be able to make friends, but they should also be fair in resolving issues, rather than reacting to them, and making things worse.

I think you'll do fine here. Aelius is probably the best mod in the group (Aly has the best avatar though) so if you are learning from him I can feel pretty good about it.

Had to grill you though, like legally obligated.

Rate systems are cancer to any community, see Reddit as the best example I guess.

Every single big and respectable forums do not use a rate system. For the simple reason that you don't need people to gang up on someone to PL them, or the opposite.
Judge each post by its content, do not make yourself blind based on a rank or something. It's really bad.

The only ranking system that is fine on a forum is the one based on post count. And even then, people may still talk ***because someone has a low rank. So overall, ranks are bad.

Forums 101.

No to the up-vote thing. It would be unfair as friends would like every single post one of their friends post (and vice-versa), meaning you get a bunch of posts that would normally get zero up-votes having three or more for no reason. Also it would encourage trolling and/or posting of memes which could then be up-voted by friends, which would only encourage the behaviour.

It could only work if it counted for the OP of threads. So for example, someone makes a guide for a job, and it gets 20 up-votes, then fair enough, up their ranking. But then you might see a bunch of useless threads made (with friends up voting the OP) for the sole purpose of getting a new title.

To be honest, implementing it would take more effort then its worth. We can already see how many posts people have, I'm sure that's enough. What we really need is a way to search for the newest gear sets for jobs. The current search method doesn't work, as you get dozens of old sets that were never deleted or labelled, so it's like looking for a needle in a haystack.

Edit: As a reply to Nightfyre's post below, I don't post in the forums every week, so I don't know anything about the mod drama. Also I have always promoted a better community, like I said, I was doing that many years ago when every thread would be derailed with no one doing anything about it.

I'm surprised you don't see the paradox here.

Imagine if I had stopped posting here during the Krizz debacle and simply stuck to posting on BG. Imagine if Byrth had stopped posting here years ago. Motenten. Prothescar. Sawtelle. Ejiin. Seha. Skudo. Asym. Falkirk. Shall I go on, or do you see the point I'm getting at?

If there is nothing to attract us to these forums, we would take our content elsewhere or stop posting entirely. The forums would wither as more and more users leave. It's not even just top contributors, losing any poster of non-negative (read: degenerate) value is a blow to the community as a whole.

Even as detached from local politics as I am, I'm well aware of several posters that have stopped posting in various threads and/or considered removing themselves from these forums entirely as a direct result of mod behavior in recent months. If you really want people to post more useful content, you should be pushing for everyone on these forums, mods included, to foster an environment in which people want to come and contribute such content.

Please, no. Upvote systems with any sort of weight behind them whatsoever are cancerous and generally promote low-effort post content.

Thank you, everything last night actually opened my eyes to what I was getting myself into, even though I had a slight idea lol.

I don't think it would be a bad thing. It could be something like this. For example, if contributor was a guide maker for blue mage, if the thread reached like from 5k users, the contributor could get a rank maybe called "Blue Mage Expert"

I don't see harm in it. I would see it as that person is knowledgeable about blue.

If the post received that much attention and respect from the community then the user would already be known for it. The title would be entirely artificial and near meaningless in its intended use, plus it might cause others to give their posts undue weight in situations where they may not speak from an informed viewpoint. The inverse is also true; someone without such a title might see their posts discarded out of hand simply because they lack said title.

Therein lies much of the reason I tend to avoid artificial standings of any kind. I would prefer that my posts be judged purely on their own merits, with no outside influences tainting their value.

leila would get a ***ton of upvotes just for posting a spoiler with nothing in it ~