Why are the mods here like this?

AckwelFoley

Carl.Gustav wrote: »

Indeed so you come here, most other people don't though.

If whoever runs the site is fine with that and aren't looking for more visitors

then there isn't an issue.

most other? boards.ie moderate the forums to cater for existing members. I regard moderation as a service, one which improves my experience on this site.

There are alot of new members joining every day and the member community is growing.

dr.bollocko

I guess the place is modded tightly in comparison with many discussion sites. However that's the wonder of choice. There are many alternatives available and I use many of them myself from time to time. That said the more hands on moderatorial approach used on boards is more often a positive than it is a negative from my POV.
Some people choose to post here because of the mods. Some despite the mods. Some people don't give a feck who the mods are or what they do. Perhaps the more loosely moderated forums on boards might suit you better. Or maybe the conduct expected of people who post here is not something you want to partake in. Either way, realistically, I wouldn't expect and kind of drastic changes in how boards works. It's been here a while and is changing all the time however think evolution rather than revolution.
However usually I find that people stop posting or continue to post based on whether they click with people and the culture here and not because the mods are frequently all up in their grill.

stovelid

I actually find it very annoying when mods discuss the mod gig archly on-thread, especially with each other.

I wouldn't agree, however, that there is an mod conspiracy or that parts of boards don't need a strict hand as they clearly do. From what I can see ( at least in the forums I frequent) the mods do a good job.

Wibbs

stovelid wrote: »

I actually find it very annoying when mods discuss the mod gig archly on-thread, especially with each other.

Ditto.

I wouldn't agree, however, that there is an mod conspiracy or that parts of boards don't need a strict hand as they clearly do. From what I can see ( at least in the forums I frequent) the mods do a good job.

Ditto again. Most are really good peeps. Just users in their communities, who like, have an interest in and want to help grow that community and with extra options that can help that. And that's all they should be. It's not a rank or a medal, nor again should be. Mods are here to serve the user experience. Fullstop or Period if one is of an American hue. A couple Ive dealt with over the years I personally think are/were banhammer junkies with notions about themselves and their importance and are/were dug in like ticks by dint of time served, rather than actual quality over time, but they're very much in the minority IME and IMHO. Which considering the amount of mods on this site is pretty bloody good going.

Carl.Gustav

snyper wrote: »

I regard moderation as a service, one which improves my experience on this site.

It's a fine line, aparantly others experiences would be improved if references to molesting children was moderated.

Wibbs

Carl.Gustav wrote: »

It's a fine line,

And judging by the sites growth a middle has been reached in the majority of cases. Don't get me wrong, I will usually call BS on the "well we're popular, so there" line of thinking. Most times all it means is that critical mass has been reached and people pile on after. Just as much luck as judgement in most cases. But I have to say, having seen it on both sides, having had some issues with some of the guff that can go on that I didn't agree with, I still have faith in the general tenet of this place and still have faith in the vast majority of users, mods, admins and company guys and gals.

aparantly others experiences would be improved if references to molesting children was moderated.

Yea I see what you did there.

Dudess

Fionn MacCool wrote: »

I just find it incredibly sad and pathetic that anyone would feel the need to 'sign off' their posts with yet another reminded that they're a mod.

It would be - if it existed.

I find it's far more some posters who draw attention to mods being mods, rather than mods doing so themselves. I agree with Wibbs that there has been the occasional mod who got silly notions about themselves (and given the amount of mods site-wide, that's surely inevitable) but other than that, they just seem to do what they're charged with.

K-9

Carl.Gustav wrote: »

If whoever runs the site is fine with that and aren't looking for more visitors

then there isn't an issue.

Thing is, they are looking for more visitors and the site is growing year on year.

The site seems to be an issue for you, yet it is a very popular Irish one.

DeVore

Fionn MacCool wrote: »

It doesn't really matter if I can provide examples. If you reckon it doesn't happen that's great, I just wanted opinions on if it did happen. Now I can refer to this thread if it ever does!


You could post in the Help board.

Sorry but it DOES matter.

Reread the subject line of the thread you started.

IMHO, you should apologise but I won't hold my breath.

DeV.

Beruthiel

Fionn MacCool wrote: »

Ending posts with /MOD YEH IM A MOD BTW DID I MENTION IM A MOD!!

Either link me to examples of what you are talking about or I will consider this nothing more than a rant with no substance.

As of this morning, we are on our 410,693 member.
If this place didn't have Mods, the site would be an utter mess.
Mods do sterling work in keeping the site a pleasure to use.

seamus

Fionn, just to give you a little idea of scale and background;

When you look in terms of traffic - boards.ie has nearly 100,000 people visit the site every day. That kind of sustained (and growing) traffic is testament to the quality of the information on the site, which in turn points to quality moderation. You can look at some other major sites, huge ones, and they're practically unreadable because 90% of their contents are people posting images or "lol" or other irreverant stuff. That does happen here too, but it's much more tightly controlled and largely frowned upon by the members. This provides much higher readability and active moderation is essential to that - new visitors know that things are being looked after and that they're not at the mercy of the wolves.
I've posted as a newbie on many other forums, and it's easily 50:50 as to whether you'll get a helpful response or a tirade of abuse. Boards.ie is firmly in the former 50% and that's all down to the moderation.

Background - why do we make moderators so visible? Well, when you've 100,000 people looking at the site every day, you want to direct as few of them as possible to the help desk. Even if 0.1% of visitors had a problem every day, that would be 100 new threads on the helpdesk every day, which would require 2-3 people working full time to address. Or 10-20 part-time administrators, doing nothing else but helpdesk. Instead, we want visitors to figure out themselves what went wrong, or at the very least go directly to the source. If you've a problem with a moderation decision, posting on the helpdesk simply means that the admin has to PM the mod in question. So why not just get the users to PM the mods directly and cut out the middleman?

No, it wasn't always like that of course. Boards.ie was small too at one stage. It was recognised early on that moderators having a tag under their name is useful. When someone is being told to "Please stay on-topic" on a thread, it's useful for them to see that the person saying it is a moderator, otherwise they're likely to respond with, "Fnck off and mind your own business".

As boards grew, there were 20 or 30 moderators, but they only moderated particular forums. So when a thread started in AH where you had 10 moderators posting on it, non-mods started feeling a bit oppressed - "I can't argue with the mods, they'll just ban me". So it was recognised that we needed to make it clear to people that moderators only moderated certain fora, and not the entire site. Hence the tags in our profiles saying "Mod: After Hours". This is still a battle we're fighting today, though most people seem to understand the setup now.

As I posted above, further growth in the site meant that threads could go from 0 to 100 posts in a matter of minutes, which made moderator directions on-thread easy to miss, so Wibbs came up with the idea above, which most of us have adopted.

Wibbs

seamus wrote: »

You can look at some other major sites, huge ones, and they're practically unreadable because 90% of their contents are people posting images or "lol" or other irreverant stuff.

This. The anything goes brigade miss this entirely. "Freedom of speech" BS. Yea great except all it does is drag every single topic down to the ground. You can get away with that freedom on small single focus sites. On big general ones? Forget about it. You even see that here. You rarely see moderation on the small forums with a narrow focus. Somwhere like AH it goes up considerably.

I've posted as a newbie on many other forums, and it's easily 50:50 as to whether you'll get a helpful response or a tirade of abuse. Boards.ie is firmly in the former 50% and that's all down to the moderation.

+1 and watch other big forums around the world follow the Boards way rather than the 4chan way. The Wild West phase of the web is passing.

sceptre

irish-stew wrote: »

I can honestly say I have hardly ever seen any mod on boards sign off their posts stating that they are a mod.

I frequently put a /mod at the end of posts that are made in a moderator capacity. The reason I do that is that Politics (in particular) attracts a lot of new users who don't know who the forum mods are. Obviously the "Mod: Politics" is there on the left of the post but it's a bit much to expect new users to read the user tags every time they read a post just in case. I started doing it to distinguish the mod posts from the non-mod posts.

The /mod is there purely to let them know that it's a request there for a reason and it'd be appreciated if they took heed of it. It also tends to avoid extra yellow and red cards being issued. Lately I've been putting some of the mod notices in bold as well as it's more obvious to people in fast-moving threads. Where I put the post in bold or add the /mod line, it's for the benefit of the people posting, nothing more.

Mint Sauce

sceptre wrote: »

I frequently put a /mod at the end of posts that are made in a moderator capacity. The reason I do that is that Politics (in particular) attracts a lot of new users who don't know who the forum mods are. Obviously the "Mod: Politics" is there on the left of the post but it's a bit much to expect new users to read the user tags every time they read a post just in case. I started doing it to distinguish the mod posts from the non-mod posts.

The /mod is there purely to let them know that it's a request there for a reason and it'd be appreciated if they took heed of it. It also tends to avoid extra yellow and red cards being issued. Lately I've been putting some of the mod notices in bold as well as it's more obvious to people in fast-moving threads. Where I put the post in bold or add the /mod line, it's for the benefit of the people posting, nothing more.

I would do that my self, mod post/warning/edit, but only on a post/theard where there has a been a breech of charter, all the rest of the day I'm a normal poster, weather that be in my own forum, AH, etc etc, and the only thing that identifys me is under my username.

Fionn MacCool

lol, that didn't take long http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/showpost.php?p=69493075&postcount=105

But of course this never happens does it :rolleyes:

Regardless of whether a moderator is right to intervene (personally I see it as compeltely unneccessary and pathetic that a mod thinks he has to announce himself *in case* someone breaks the rules, rather than when they actually do), all the moderators here have user titles so what is the need to sign off posts with it? Again, I'm not saying it shouldn't be allowed, just that it is incredibly sad.

edit: as if to prove my point, that mod has now banned me from the forum for calling him out on it. Banned for person attacks, despite there being none - or at least none any worse than this moderator calling us "children".

28064212

Would you have preferred he just banned you or gave you an infraction straight away? It was a very simple warning, and he added "mod" to clarify that it was a moderator instruction, not him in a user capacity. What's the problem? Do you really think he added mod to make himself feel all-powerful? Without the 'mod' clarification, it can easily be read as just another post, not a warning.

-Chris-

TBH you'll get banned from nearly every forum here for arguing with a mod instruction on-thread.

All that post proves is that this mod uses the sign off "Mod" to show they're issuing an instruction (which you questioned) rather than using the non-bold/bold system.

Hardly lording it over you or being pretentious in any way. I'm struggling to see your point?

28064212

Fionn MacCool wrote: »

edit: as if to prove my point, that mod has now banned me from the forum for calling him out on it. Banned for person attacks, despite there being none - or at least none any worse than this moderator calling us "children".

Banned for questioning mod decisions on-thread actually, will get you a ban on any forum on boards

Fionn MacCool

I didn't argue, I literally asked which part of the charter we had violated.

Fionn MacCool

28064212 wrote: »

Without the 'mod' clarification, it can easily be read as just another post, not a warning.

Except it was posted by a moderator, so it clearly was a warning.

Insect Overlord

Fionn MacCool wrote: »

I didn't argue, I literally asked which part of the charter we had violated.

Were the "pray tell" and "precious charter" comments really necessary? They came across as really sarcastic/patronising. That kind of tone is rarely constructive, whether you're talking to moderators or anyone else.

Fionn MacCool

Insect Overlord wrote: »

Were the "pray tell" and "precious charter" comments really necessary? They came across as really sarcastic/patronising. That kind of tone is rarely constructive, whether you're talking to moderators or anyone else.

Having just been called a child by the moderator, I didn't think patronising was an offence.

-Chris-

Fionn MacCool wrote: »

I didn't argue, I literally asked which part of the charter we had violated.

Except you asked it like a smarmy little git (just an opinion based on the wording you used, it can be hard to tell tone on an forum), and he was inclined therefore to believe you were being belligerent rather than curious.

Fionn MacCool

-Chris- wrote: »

Except you asked it like a smarmy little git (just an opinion based on the wording you used, it can be hard to tell tone on an forum), and he was inclined therefore to believe you were being belligerent rather than curious.

No more smarmy a git than I'd had to put up with.

28064212

Fionn MacCool wrote: »

Except it was posted by a moderator, so it clearly was a warning.

No, it's not clear. It wouldn't have been clear whether he was posting in his personal capacity or whether it was an instruction. He could have easily been joking around, or posting his personal opinion without it being a mod instruction.

Or do you think that mods are only allowed post as mods?

-Chris-

Fionn MacCool wrote: »

No more smarmy a git than I'd had to put up with.

I'd disagree, I'd regularly say something like "drop the handbags" to stop sniping between posters.
It's a little more tongue-in-cheek than a direct order/request, so it normally gets accepted better by the posters.

I think it's a good tactic.

Fionn MacCool

-Chris- wrote: »

I'd disagree, I'd regularly say something like "drop the handbags" to stop sniping between posters.
It's a little more tongue-in-cheek than a direct order/request, so it normally gets accepted better by the posters.

I think it's a good tactic.

You're telling me calling posters "children" (while singing off your post with "Mod.", therefore "posting in his mod capacity") is "tongue in cheek" and a "good tactic", but "pray tell" and "precious charter" is being a smarmy git?

Because that smacks of hypocrisy tbh

-Chris-

Fionn MacCool wrote: »

You're telling me calling posters "children" (while singing off your post with "Mod.", therefore "posting in his mod capacity") is "tongue in cheek" and a "good tactic", but "pray tell" and "precious charter" is being a smarmy git?

Because that smacks of hypocrisy tbh

What wording would you have liked him to use?

Fionn MacCool

-Chris- wrote: »

What wording would you have liked him to use?

I don't have a problem with the wording he used, only the massive hypocrisy from him and the blatant cronyism here. It's ok for a mod to do it but if a user does it it's a "justified" ban? Absolute joke.

-Chris-

Fionn MacCool wrote: »

I don't have a problem with the wording he used, only the massive hypocrisy from him and the blatant cronyism here. It's ok for a mod to do it but if a user does it it's a "justified" ban? Absolute joke.

But you have an issue with how he posted the warning and the fact that he signed off with "Mod".

What way would you have liked him to issue the instruction?