Forum Moderation Tips and Tricks

[deletedprofile.u]

The moderators seem to generally be very reluctant to silence anyone and will usually let you say your piece, but if you've already got a warning and continue on, they might decide it's just too much.

I wouldn't be surprised if your off-topic posts (and mine, tee hee) got split and shipped off to FFA or the Garbage Bin.

I'm a mod of the GE forum but I don't have the power to put any specific users on "Watch" or any other status they can possibly be.

I *do* have the power to place topics into other categories on the forums (which I often use to put troll things into FFA [where they belong  ]).

[DYM]

Yes, we need a forum moderator restructure (FMR).

Edit - Actually I'm not sure we do. grav seems good, Alec M sometimes does a good job... not sure about Luke but overall a pretty solid team... why wasn't the guy banned earlier? Do you guys not have the ability to do that?

[TheFlash]

Do you guys not have the ability to do that?

It's hard to say. I'm not sure what kind of training Jimbo (and/or Spagooda) has been giving to his newly recruited moderators.

The moderation team doesn't communicate very much using the built-in tools.  I wish they did.  I'm not sure how much goes on on alternate channels.
Edit: See next post

Here's what the moderation center looks like:



If there is an issue with a particular user, the moderator can go to Issue a Warning. This interface is a lot easier to use than the Ban interface.  The Ban one makes it fairly easy to accidentally ban the wrong thing, resulting in no one being banned or too many people, or some other wrong action.

The warning one is very straightforward and intended to be used frequently:



The current settings will mute a user when he reaches 40 warning points. (Used to be 60, but that was too high to really be effective....)

Normal moderators can add on 25 warning points per day, per moderator. So a single mad moderator can't just totally silence a user from one day of raging.  But two moderators seeing the same thing or multiple bad days and you could be in Muted territory.

The admin level moderators can just add as many points as they want at any time.

The warning level decreases by 5 points per day. So if you want a 3 day ban, set their level to 50 points or so.

If someone needs to be banned for more than 5 or 10 days, that's when you report to the moderator center asking for one of the admins or Power Mods to use the Ban interface to issue a longer ban such as a month, forever, etc.

[TheFlash]

It looks like some of the above wasn't really set up for all the regular moderators, so I've made some changes to make sure they can all access the screens I shared.

Admins: When you add/remove a person as an individual board moderator, also add/remove them as an alternate membergroup of Normal Moderator so they have access to the Moderation Center.

The Board Top Moderator is separate and only gives the News permission.

And Power Mod is the one that gives them the BANHAMMER but you need to make sure they fully understand that window.

[deletedprofile.u]

I'm not sure if I like this sneaky feature that you've implemented by taking one of my posts in a thread and created its own thread from it 

Interesting nonetheless. 

Yeah when I was first thrown up as GE forum mod by Jimbo all I could do (and all I have been able to do since then [sometime in early 2015]) was alter location of threads and delete posts in any GE forum thread. All you've just shared here looks brand new to me so I'll do some poking around and see what it's all about.

Thank you!! <3

[Jimbo]

I had no idea you guys couldn't do that stuff, my fault on bad communication! It's pretty handy.

[Retrix]

And I had no idea anyone put effort into cutting down on flaming and whatnot. Part of the reason I put off joining the-elite for years was because the community seemed so unfriendly. (Angry today for life reasons, but is as true as my hate for twin galaxies)

This is cool to see, like 2018 is a step in the right direction.