[Xelion]

Like, uh, where? It would probably be a piddling sum by any standard.

Hosting, outsourcing, competition marketing, etc - There's no point debating where since I'm not privy to the budget or how its allocated and what takes priority.

How are you able to determine what sum it is and measure it to any standard? We have no information except possibly this...

Between member donations and the old ModDB award for BTRL, we are financially in good standing.

Sounds like an accounting term to me Goober. No red ink aye good to hear.

Why is there no backup service on the internal network?

(Because that'd mean renting a 2nd server from the existing hosting company at probably a significant cost)

Why rent a server that is only used intermittently for backup and restore purposes - It should be part of their internal network. I'm baffled as to why a hosting company wouldn't provide it

[Fury]

I'm baffled as to why a hosting company wouldn't provide it

Some do, some don't. In most cases they cost extra.

[General Battuta]

Like, uh, where? It would probably be a piddling sum by any standard.

Hosting, outsourcing, competition marketing, etc - There's no point debating where since I'm not privy to the budget or how its allocated and what takes priority.

How are you able to determine what sum it is and measure it to any standard? We have no information except possibly this...

I don't think transparent accounting would lead to any particular problems because I don't think money is relevant to most modding activities on HLP. Speaking as a member of an active team the two things we care about are hosting costs (already handled by this money) and, rarely, hiring voice actors.

[Xelion]

I don't think transparent accounting would lead to any particular problems because I don't think money is relevant to most modding activities on HLP.

I can agree with that on the majority Although I must say its fantastic to see prizes being awarded to people for contributing works to FreeSpace

Speaking as a member of an active team the two things we care about are hosting costs (already handled by this money) and, rarely, hiring voice actors.

You've hired voice actors... WOW. Is there a list somewhere?

[MP-Ryan]

Whenever someone decides to make a dick of themselves on a thread or someone reports a thread, I then have to read the entire thread so that I can make an informed comment when it comes to moderation. This happens even if you don't see any resulting action.

Flogging a dead horse here, but why in blazes are administrators doing this?

This mundane stuff is why other communities have lesser administrators - what HLP designates moderators - who deal explicitly with forum use issues.  I was a member of one community where my entire role was forum use and responding to help calls on the game servers.

If you have an administration team composed of people with specialized skillsets, you should not be tying up those skillsets (and their free time) with things that anyone with half an ounce of good judgement should be more than capable of dealing with.

If anything, this comment by kara indicates that HLP needs to evict its administrators from dealing with forum behavioural issues and designate more moderators.  And moderation is pretty bloody simple (no offense to the current moderators), especially if moderators are forbidden from moderating where they are actively arguing with someone.  Hell, if this is such an issue, designate another dozen moderators, leave their decisions supervised somewhat by admins, and put the admins to work only on the things that need their attention.

Hell, even if its just reactive - if it's a matter of the Off-Topic boards and responding to "Report Person" threads, I'd bloody well volunteer, limited as my time sometimes is.  Twenty additional moderators, each with limited time, still ease the admin burden better than no additional moderators with a glut of free time.

[NGTM-1R]

Flogging a dead horse here, but why in blazes are administrators doing this?

You have to remember that HLP has not set up an effective moderation detail; they are not able to issue ROs or bans or political prisonering or to eject someone from a thread in progress. This is actually desired, for some reason.

[Fury]

MP-Ryan, thank you. That has been exactly the point I've been trying to get across.

NGTM-1R, SMF moderation center settings should be tweakable to allow moderators to do more without admin intervention. Global moderators can also be allowed to add and remove people from political prisoners and other similar groups. It's just a question of whether the admins are willing to relinquish day-to-day moderation to moderators instead of handling it themselves.

Seriously though, administrators so far have handled moderation with such involvement that HLP might just as well not have any moderators outside of project boards.

[NGTM-1R]

NGTM-1R, SMF moderation center settings should be tweakable to allow moderators to do more without admin intervention.

Since it was apparently lost, my point was that yes, it can.

But this has never apparently been seen as a desirable thing to do, because it's never been discussed or carried out.

[Goober5000]

That's just karajorma's personal level of attention, though.  He might want to keep doing that, or he might want to re-calibrate.  Speaking personally, whenever I see a moderation report, it's usually the case that Mongoose, Scotty, Black Wolf, or one of the other mods has commented.  With three (or more) pairs of eyes on the same report, a consensus emerges pretty quickly.

I don't feel that HLP lacks an effective moderation detail; we have a fair number of board-specific moderators and global moderators.  (People may not be aware that I was the one who first set up the board-specific moderation in the first place.)  We've got a lot of good people in place.

What we may not be doing effectively, though, is empowering the moderators to take action.  There have been instances where a moderator report has a consensus that a certain action should be taken (such as closing or splitting a thread), but nobody stepped up to take that action.  Recently it was revealed that moderators were not aware that the warning system, to which they have access, is capable of effectively banning someone if their warning level is boosted above 25%.  And moderators may not feel they need to address issues if they know that karajorma will be along in a few hours to investigate the entire issue.

[karajorma]

If anything, this comment by kara indicates that HLP needs to evict its administrators from dealing with forum behavioural issues and designate more moderators.  And moderation is pretty bloody simple (no offense to the current moderators), especially if moderators are forbidden from moderating where they are actively arguing with someone.  Hell, if this is such an issue, designate another dozen moderators, leave their decisions supervised somewhat by admins, and put the admins to work only on the things that need their attention.

If you believe that moderation on a forum like HLP is simple, you haven't tried moderating on a forum like HLP before. Now I'm not against hiring more moderators but right now our moderators are hobbled in what they can actually do due to SMF permissions. Unlike most forums HLP has found it necessary to add a couple of extra punishments. If for instance we banned someone like Darius, then he couldn't access the Blue Planet internal and work on his project might possibly be severely affected. The result is that we have the Hard Light Monkeys group for that. Same goes for political prisoners - A group for people who can act reasonably well on other forums but who can't pass a political discussion without getting into an argument.

The problem is SMF permissions. Moderators currently can't give out those punishments. Nor can they give out proper bans except via the warning system (which is very limited in what it can achieve). Right now we're actually working on giving them that power. But up until now, it's basically been only the admins who can actually give out some the penalties, resulting in moderators who can only say the equivalent of "Wait until your father gets home!" to people who require the specialised punishments. Having more people who can do that won't help in the slightest. And as much as I trust the moderators, If I have to be the one responsible for handing out the ban I'm certainly not going to unless I've read the thread in question myself.

Yes, I'd prefer to have a system where the moderators can do that stuff without involving me. But we currently don't have that system. Like I said, we're already discussing internally how to change that.


To be honest though, I consider this entire thread a great example of one of the biggest problems HLP has when it comes to growth. We have a lot of very opinionated members looking in from the outside telling people how we should be doing our jobs. None of them actually realise the issues involved because we don't discuss that sort of thing in public (and shouldn't because it just gets more opinionated members on their soapboxes about what we should be doing). I consider the situation to be very similar to the SCP's problems in the early days (which still crop up now and then) where everyone and their dog had an opinion on how the source should be updated and kept insisting that the coders fulfil their whims first because it would be easy. Some of them even had programming experience (which generally made them actually worse cause they'd get into big arguments with the coders about WHY it was easy!) The SCP responded this sort of nonsense from coders and non-coders alike by aggressively pointing at the source and saying "You add it then!"

Since the admins and moderators on here obviously don't have that recourse, the result is that whenever changes are suggested we get lots of people complaining that they are bad ideas and no progress even if a good idea comes out of the discussion. I'll point out the licensing thread again as a great example of that. As far as I know, the number of unlicensed assets the community pumps out haven't changed in the slightest as a result.
 I'll also point to the change in the forum guidelines as a perfect example of this nonsense, after pages of discussion, everyone decided to dump writing a new set on Zacam - probably one of our busiest admins and ignored the last set I suggested (which included most of the changes everyone had been complaining about on the thread). So I spend hours of my time trying to please the community by understanding their objections to the last suggested guidelines and the end result is no change at all and a continued use of the old, worse forum guidelines. Great work HLP.

And on this thread we have the same thing, instead of spending my time solving the problem of how to spend less time doing admin stuff instead of moderator stuff by continuing the discussion on the internal and looking at the SMF permissions, I have to spend my time explaining what's wrong with your suggestions on how I can spend less time doing moderator stuff. Moderation has never been as much of a time sink as dealing with the fallout from moderation. If you guys wouldn't spend so much time questioning every single decision the admins make, then we'd have more time for actually doing stuff to make HLP grow.


I'm not saying that people should stop pointing out the problems on HLP, it's good to point out the problems, I don't even mind suggestions on how to solve the problems, but if you feel we should automatically do what the community says we should do to fix them, you're as misguided as the idiot who didn't know C++ telling the SCP that his suggested change is easy.

What we may not be doing effectively, though, is empowering the moderators to take action.  There have been instances where a moderator report has a consensus that a certain action should be taken (such as closing or splitting a thread), but nobody stepped up to take that action.  Recently it was revealed that moderators were not aware that the warning system, to which they have access, is capable of effectively banning someone if their warning level is boosted above 25%.  And moderators may not feel they need to address issues if they know that karajorma will be along in a few hours to investigate the entire issue.

I think one problem that came to light when we made Axem an admin is that we basically give people power and don't give them any idea how to use it. I was tempted to write a tutorial on the moderation system for our global mods and one on the membergroups and other SMF issues but it will have to wait for me to have good internet access again (1st of next month).

[Goober5000]

Moderation has never been as much of a time sink as dealing with the fallout from moderation. If you guys wouldn't spend so much time questioning every single decision the admins make, then we'd have more time for actually doing stuff to make HLP grow.

This is an excellent point.  One of the most annoying trends on HLP recently is when moderation actions themselves get reported.

I think one problem that came to light when we made Axem an admin is that we basically give people power and don't give them any idea how to use it. I was tempted to write a tutorial on the moderation system for our global mods and one on the membergroups and other SMF issues but it will have to wait for me to have good internet access again (1st of next month).

I was mindful of that myself.  I spoke to Axem on IRC and pointed out some functionality in the Administrator Center control panel, but there's a lot more that would be good for him to know.  (In fact, he signed off before I could ask him if he wanted to look at another set of controls.)

The Documentation subforum is a useful resource, but it doesn't cover every single thing it should.

[karajorma]

This is an excellent point.  One of the most annoying trends on HLP recently is when moderation actions themselves get reported.

It's actually one of the reasons why I tend to read every report. I get called in to complain about the judgement anyway and it's definitely more objective to have a "I think what we should do is...." opinion before anything is done than to look at a complaint about the moderation and try to form an objective "What I would have done is...." after someone starts complaining about the moderators actions.

And that's before we get to the point that stupid complaints about moderation are actually one of the leading causes of moderators leaving. If there is a legitimate grievance, okay. But if you've been a dick and you've been punished for it, the take home message is "Don't be a dick next time" not "Why don't I report this and try to get the moderator in trouble."

[Spoon]

Because I wasn't being a dick and I just made a joke? (It had a smilie and everything it was super obvious) Then several days later scotty comes in PMS'ing about how I am the biggest rudest dick HLP has ever seen? And then when the thread is locked karajorma comes in just to get the last word in.
If you guys are going to make drama about nothing and use your moderator powers for that, I would strongely argue you guys are being the dicks about this all.

Also, being called a dick for doing nothing that is being dickish, seems report worthy to me. I got a warning one day for calling phantom hoover a jerk when he was being a jerk. Double standards much? Or is 'jerk' such an incredibly terrible word that it alone warants action? Or are moderators somehow empowered to go around calling people names?

Stupid complaints about stupid moderating. Seems valid to me.
If moderators cannot handle being complained about then I say, by all means leave.  But don't go whining about people wanting to defend themselves.

[karajorma]

I was speaking about being a dick and reporting things in general. You aren't the only person to do that. Funny that you took it so personally.

[MP-Ryan]

kara, I've been an administrator in four separate (and large) gaming groups over the last decade-and-a-half (and the reason I'm not still doing it is because I have less personal time to do it these days and it wasn't fair to those communities).  No, I have not done moderation on HLP, but I know a thing or two about enforcing forum rules and dealing with misbehaviour... and using an admin panel (or I did 10 years ago ).

Certainly, it appears there are some technical challenges with the system, but I see no reason why you cannot do what many, many communities do and give your moderators access to the administration systems, but write policy that limits them on which of those systems they are allowed to use.  This isn't rocket science.

You fellows are great at explaining how difficult the job is because we don't understand, but frankly you have a number of community members that understand very well and think many of the barriers you're throwing up are self-imposed.

There is absolutely no reason why moderators like Scotty, Mongoose, The E, and Black Wolf (to pick 4) should not be trusted enough to grant them access to the systems they need, even if it comes with access to other systems, so long as you clearly define their roles and responsibilities.  To choose an example of my own - I was a moderator/administrator of one gaming site for which I was responsible for forum moderation, and a few things on our gaming servers and ladder system.  I did not need access to anything in the admin control panel except those features - but instead of throwing up barriers and micromanaging, the owner of the site/ladder gave me full access to the panel so I could get at the tools I needed, with clear instructions as to what areas I was expected to use and what I was to stay out of.  That's trust and responsibility, and there is no reason why, if you trust your team, you should not be able to do the same things here.

The fact that you look at feedback - from people who know a thing or two about what they're saying - as a nuisance rather than suggestions that can be tweaked to the community's needs is a telling demonstration that the administrator team is more interested in knowing what they know than looking at ways to streamline operations to make everyone's job less onerous when those ideas come from elsewhere.

Using the guideline example - a number of us subsequently asked Zacam how things were going, and you're righht, he's busy - so again, why is he doing it?  Why isn't the workload being spread out?  You have a huge number of relatively responsible forum members here, why aren't you tapping into them?  You are massively under-utilizing the resources available to you, given how many of the members of this community are fairly active and care about it, out of what looks at this end like paranoia about spreading out the workload and responsibilities.  If you gave more people a hand in running the place, you would simultaneously find them MORE engaged and yourselves with LESS workload.

This is immensely frustrating for everyone.  I hear you that there are technical challenges - what a number of us are saying is that there are ways to work around those challenges that would be beneficial overall if you were willing to consider alternatives to your traditional way of thinking when it comes to the administration and moderation challenges on HLP.

[Spoon]

Oh look, the typical Karajorma scumbag way of going about these discussions. This act of your has gotten old so long ago.

Yes so 'funny' I took it personally when you oh so subtly described http://www.hard-light.net/forums/index.php?topic=86804.0 this thread. And then when I call you out on it you go "oh so funny you took it personally but I didn't directly named you did I? I of course mean 'in general'." You are such a weasel. You always type things in such a way that you are implying a lot of things but never directly say them and then can just go "but I didn't say that" after.

But I'm just dying to hear your very wise words of wisdom on the matter of moderators just going about insulting people. Apparantly you seem fine with maintaining that double standard, seeing as you gave me a warning once for calling phantom hoover a jerk when I perceive him being jerkish. But I don't see you giving scotty a warning for him calling me a dick when he perceived me being a 'dick'.

Also first its being promoted that reports should be used. Now that reports are being used its being apparantly found annoying. Could you guys make up your mind already?

[Spoon]

There is absolutely no reason why moderators like Scotty, Mongoose, The E, and Black Wolf (to pick 4) should not be trusted enough to grant them access to the systems they need, even if it comes with access to other systems, so long as you clearly define their roles and responsibilities.  To choose an example of my own - I was a moderator/administrator of one gaming site for which I was responsible for forum moderation, and a few things on our gaming servers and ladder system.  I did not need access to anything in the admin control panel except those features - but instead of throwing up barriers and micromanaging, the owner of the site/ladder gave me full access to the panel so I could get at the tools I needed, with clear instructions as to what areas I was expected to use and what I was to stay out of.  That's trust and responsibility, and there is no reason why, if you trust your team, you should not be able to do the same things here.

The fact that you look at feedback - from people who know a thing or two about what they're saying - as a nuisance rather than suggestions that can be tweaked to the community's needs is a telling demonstration that the administrator team is more interested in knowing what they know than looking at ways to streamline operations to make everyone's job less onerous when those ideas come from elsewhere.

Because goober thinks hlp as a hierarchy where giving someone a moderator/admin position is some kind of promotion to a position of power within this system.
It's not about sensibility but about the idea that giving too many people admin powers would dilute the value of the administrator position. There will be less peons to rule over on this forum about spaceships.

[MP-Ryan]

Oh look, the typical Karajorma scumbag way of going about these discussions. This act of your has gotten old so long ago.

Yes so 'funny' I took it personally when you oh so subtly described http://www.hard-light.net/forums/index.php?topic=86804.0 this thread. And then when I call you out on it you go "oh so funny you took it personally but I didn't directly named you did I? I of course mean 'in general'." You are such a weasel. You always type things in such a way that you are implying a lot of things but never directly say them and then can just go "but I didn't say that" after.

But I'm just dying to hear your very wise words of wisdom on the matter of moderators just going about insulting people. Apparantly you seem fine with maintaining that double standard, seeing as you gave me a warning once for calling phantom hoover a jerk when I perceive him being jerkish. But I don't see you giving scotty a warning for him calling me a dick when he perceived me being a 'dick'.

Also first its being promoted that reports should be used. Now that reports are being used its being apparantly found annoying. Could you guys make up your mind already?

This isn't helpful, but it is illustrative of what happens when frustration boils over.

Moderation and administrative actions are generally going to be criticized.  That's part of the job description.  Frankly, if you're not being criticized then you're not doing your job.  Anyone who doesn't like that reality should probably not be a moderator (this is a play off what I've told new officers in my job, but hey, it's relevant).

On the other hand, those actions should be perceived as reasonable and non-hypocritical.  I have to say, I see a claim like Spoon has been warned for calling PH a jerk, and I think "what in the ever-loving hell is the point?"

I get that HLP tries to foster respect and keep personal attacks out of it, but you have a passionate membership who generally are here long term... which means that, unless it's devolving into a flamefest, little spats are exactly that and are probably better ignored.  The reason why the admin/mod team takes the flak that kara and spoon are both complaining about from different angles is because the community at large often has trouble with those decisions... and instead of listening to the community at large, or more involvement of the community at large in actively running the place, we've seen a more insular admin/moderation team that if anything is trying to decentralize the decisions and present a united us-vs-them front.

Nothing against any of the admins/mods personally - I wuv you all - but you guys need to drop the barriers between your 'official' actions and your regular participation, and the policing needs to be more community-directed... meaning the community itself needs to be more involved.  The best way that my experiences suggest doing that is by engaging much larger numbers of moderators who make judgement calls and are maybe even occasionally wrong active in the broader community as a whole.

If anything, HLP is the perfect example of a community that should absolutely not have a hierarchy of membership and distinction between admins/mods and everyone else.  When it comes to the non-technical aspects of the community, isn't the moderation really just a social smack to tell people to quit being douches at the end of the day?  It need not be filled with drama.

[General Battuta]

Moderation has never been as much of a time sink as dealing with the fallout from moderation. If you guys wouldn't spend so much time questioning every single decision the admins make, then we'd have more time for actually doing stuff to make HLP grow.

This is an excellent point.  One of the most annoying trends on HLP recently is when moderation actions themselves get reported.

You asked for more reports and promised more communication; since you didn't step up on the communication front you leave it to users to reach out and try to figure out why actions were taken. :shrug:

I've resigned myself to the fact that HLP's moderation is generally bad to awful (this isn't the same as saying the moderators and admins are bad to awful) and that a lot of subpar decisions are going to be made. As long as I can keep doing my creative work unimpaired and occasionally get poor calls corrected, I don't feel the need to act too strongly on this, but it is a shame.

[The E]

But when we asked for more reports, we didn't ask for posts to get reported because you wanted to get technical troubleshooting done.