Community News: New Forum Guidelines

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kussekurt wrote:

Maybe you should tone down the new guidelines, just a little bit.
It seems a bit uptight atm - Keep the forum sober, but dont kill it off please?

this please

Half the forum regulars have either left or been put on probation

I get the need to keep order but right now your basically sending everyone over to reddit

Without wanting to play the devil's advocat:

Who are those regulars and what is their contribution? This is a company-owned forum. It's purpose is quite clear. This is no forum meant to be a place for serious religious, political and what not discussions. This is no forum to bash POE, GGG or other players. It is no fanbase-forum. Potential customers, customers with questions around the game or the need for information are the target-group. And if they got scared away too heavily because of the tone set by some regulars here, GGG's reaction was quite understandable. Does that mean that i like hard forum rules? Not really. I believe that if they get implemented, some things BEFORE went brutally wrong. I believe that some permabans to some notorious trolls would have solved a lot of problems that occured. GGG was a little bit too kind. Now it is a little bit too hard. But what can they do? Let others overtake their forum? Let new players be scared away because of "l2p"- or "got to D3 then"-one-liners? I encountered forum-changes like this before in other forums. And mostly they were hated by some, but in the end lead to a more serious, more business-orientated presentation.

Again: I don't like the changes. But to some point i totally get them. Is it "over the top"? Yes. This needs to be adjusted. But still: The intention of this forum should always be better than enabling some to spam whatever they want - even at the cost of the companys resume. And i very often was shocked how much damage GGG allowed to be done.

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ghamadvar wrote:

Without wanting to play the devil's advocat:

Who are those regulars and what is their contribution? This is a company-owned forum. It's purpose is quite clear. This is no forum meant to be a place for serious religious, political and what not discussions. This is no forum to bash POE, GGG or other players. It is no fanbase-forum. Potential customers, customers with questions around the game or the need for information are the target-group. And if they got scared away too heavily because of the tone set by some regulars here, GGG's reaction was quite understandable. Does that mean that i like hard forum rules? Not really. I believe that if they get implemented, some things BEFORE went brutally wrong. I believe that some permabans to some notorious trolls would have solved a lot of problems that occured. GGG was a little bit too kind. Now it is a little bit too hard. But what can they do? Let others overtake their forum? Let new players be scared away because of "l2p"- or "got to D3 then"-one-liners? I encountered forum-changes like this before in other forums. And mostly they were hated by some, but in the end lead to a more serious, more business-orientated presentation.

Again: I don't like the changes. But to some point i totally get them. Is it "over the top"? Yes. This needs to be adjusted. But still: The intention of this forum should always be better than enabling some to spam whatever they want - even at the cost of the companys resume. And i very often was shocked how much damage GGG allowed to be done.

It's not like i don't get their intentions, but even good intentions can lead to bad things, as here with these ridiculous rules.
I got put on probation for 24h after i called someone a "passive-aggressive troll" after i argued in several posts with him in a serious and friendly fashion, yet he (or she) neither read or reacted to anything i said, just repeating the same argument over and over again. That's exactly the kind of moderation that is killing forums. Either you do it right and ban the troll for trolling (as in: the obvious attempt to set people off) or you do NOTHING AT ALL. It's not like i called him "dickhead", "idiot" oder anything, i just stated the obvious - he/she is trolling, and that i didn't want to be part of that. If you protect trolls with your rules, your rules are bullshit and nothing else.

The forum moderation was very bad regarding trolls before already, but now they're not only ignoring them but also PROTECTING them. I've seen this kinda stuff before, left a forum because of exactly this kind of moderation where i had like 7k posts in almost 7 years. From what i've heard, the forum is slowly dying because there's nothing left but a circlejerk.

As i said, this forum won't die as long as there are people playing PoE, but with these rules it sure as hell SHOULD die. If you want to see how to run a good forum, check out civfanatics.com...

Idk why this is so hard anyway. Moderation should enforce rules it actually CAN enforce and keep their hands off all the nonsense people are throwing at each others head every second here in this forum (ah, right, not anymore because they get BANNED FOR CALLING A TROLL A TROLL, lol). It's easy:

- very few rules: no racism and all those other forms of belittling for religion/gender etc, no harsh curse words, no spamming, no shaming/blaming, AND ESPECIALLY NO NEGATIVE TROLLING. If someone's only goal is to set off people, he or she should visit 4chan. There's no place for such behavior in "serious" forums.
- IF someone really oversteps these very simple boundaries, MAKE IT COUNT. 7 days ban the first time, 3 months 2nd time, permabanned account the third time.

No "Probation" bullshit where people can still read, have them gone for good. No (partially) deleted posts, unless someone does some of these things that could be punished by the law etc. Not only "private messages" explaining why and what, but also make it public. Keep a low profile as moderators as much as possible.

Idk why forums chose to take very complicated approaches over and over again. Keep it simple. The less moderation, the better. And get rid of harmful users as quickly as possible.

Yes, this forum is now a hugbox circlejerk.

There's a reason so many people are / have already went over to reddit or imageboards and don't come here.

Also waiting for this post to be deleted for "non constructive criticism", because pointing out flaws or calling something bad without giving them a hundred solutions is not constructive.

Awesomely awesome, Bex. Thank you very much!

Should have reviewed this in detail sooner.

My coincidentally constructive criticism is: It is a huge mistake to prohibit non-constructive cricism. Constructive criticism involves reasons and explanations and such. Your average person may have an opinion, but they lack the understanding or vocabulary to defend that opinion. Not only does this effectively delete large swaths of feedback, forcing a person to construct their own rationale or explanation often corrupts feedback; for example, if I just asked players "what do you think about the socket system?" I would get a LOT more "it sucks" than if I asked them "what do you think about the socket system, and what could be done to fix it?"

I'm not just saying this. There is a wealth of psychological research and focus group industry experience leading to the above conclusions. Search Malcolm Gladwell on YouTube if you want the Cliff's Notes version.

A post of "desync sucks balls" may not be the most impressive post in the world, but it is valid feedback which should not be so casually discarded.

But you guys might want to work on a "merge threads" tool or something. Also good would be a "like this post" function to replace "+1" posts - counting +1s is still important, but the feature would save a lot of space.

So, don't call someone a troll; use the Report button, and tell Support in what way(s) the other poster is being a troll (or otherwise violating forum guidelines). It's safer, more likely to be effective, and you dun feed the troll with an extension of the argument, and the attention they prolly crave. =^[.]^=

You are only promoting "Temp Ban Ping Pong" get as many users probated as possible.

This isn't any better than provocating till somebody explodes.

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Hilbert wrote:

You are only promoting "Temp Ban Ping Pong" get as many users probated as possible.

This isn't any better than provocating till somebody explodes.

I just checked and "Temp Ban Ping Pong" isn't one of Hilbert's problems.