How do we get steam to sort out these trash guides??

[MonkeyEmperor]

Have you seen the Guides section. I can't even. I have tried reporting a couple but zip, zilch or nada from the `Moderators`. I assume there are none as it is just the wild west for tagging utter tripe under every subcategory in order to be high on the rankings. Sigh :/

[Thompson]

I know what you mean, they are terrible and loaded with "jokes". But I don't think I've ever ran to steam guides when I wanna find something out about a game either. There are much better sources out there; official forums, youtube, etc.

[Realty13]

Using the guides as an example is at least one good reason not to implement steam workshop yet. That would be a major mess. I am probably wrong but I would think the moderators can't move or delete things from steam sections like guides or workshop.

[Mardoin69]

Originally posted by Realty13:

Using the guides as an example is at least one good reason not to implement steam workshop yet. That would be a major mess. I am probably wrong but I would think the moderators can't move or delete things from steam sections like guides or workshop.

Steam / moderator's CAN remove postings....including in the 'Guides' section. They just don't unless it's breaking a forum rule. The real problem is....when a guide comes out, bunches of people really like it so, they rate it up and give it stars. So, it moves up in the overall rankings and kind of stays there. After new versions of the game come out, they start becoming outdated and erroneous info. Then someone might post a new guide (more up to date version) yet people fail to rate it up / give it stars so, the old one still sits higher in the rankings. It's kind of a failing system really. About the only thing we can do is put in requests to the Steam client development team for ways it could be improved.

[ElDudorino]

I didn't even know Steam has guides for games. It's definitely not where I would look.

[Shurenai]

As an officer of this 7DTD forum, As far as I know, I have no ability to modify or remove content from the guide section. I've also never seen any reports made against anything in the guide section.. So it's Steam and only Steam that can do anything about it, and they probably aren't particularly fussed about moderating the guides of a million different games unless it breaks rules.. It'd be an overwhelming amount of work to try and know all the things from all the games to know what guides are good or bad and all that good stuff.

[SylenThunder]

Reports go straight to Steam. I've tried reporting a few. People lately are doing it just so that they can get points to use in the shop.

[Razorfish]

Simple, they are all here because they are required for progression of the steam account...
The CORRECT way to do this would be like a "WIKI", and a ranking system for valid contributions, that way all the game info could be consolidated and the trash would sink to the bottom..., instead we have crap like "how to kill a bear"

just some examples of the garbage steam tolerates:

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2920993532
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2929823645
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2926956472


Take these guides out and derate/de-rank the accounts that produced them, that should put a stop to it , once people see they can loose a logarithmic quantity of their account levels.

[Mardoin69]

Originally posted by Shurenai:

As an officer of this 7DTD forum, As far as I know, I have no ability to modify or remove content from the guide section. I've also never seen any reports made against anything in the guide section.. So it's Steam and only Steam that can do anything about it, and they probably aren't particularly fussed about moderating the guides of a million different games unless it breaks rules.. It'd be an overwhelming amount of work to try and know all the things from all the games to know what guides are good or bad and all that good stuff.

Oh snap! Why in the world wouldn't steam let the moderators handle postings in the 'Guides' section too I wonder? Just seems like they should be.....if for no other reason but, to take some of the load off themselves. Didn't know the forum moderator's couldn't. Maybe that's a suggestion everyone needs to start submitting to the Client Devs.

[Razorfish]

maybe they should not have let it get out of hand,
Further more , we are talking about the TOP ranking games, not the 95% of garbage that passes for games.
I think 7DTD could be classed as a reasonably high ranking game... and as such accounts should not be able to farm account points & levels with trash postings,
as for "knowing" what is trash..... there are plenty of examples....

[aY227]

Originally posted by Mardoin69:

Oh snap! Why in the world wouldn't steam let the moderators handle postings in the 'Guides' section too I wonder? Just seems like they should be.....

I think they do allow officers to moderate guides, depending privileges they have - devs should check it.

https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/marketing/community_moderation/adding_moderators#2

Should be at group permission page - officers should ask devs to log into that. Should be xD
Guides are community created contend - same as artwork or workshop - those can be moderated but guides can't? Would be really strange,

[Crater Creator]

Moving to Off Topic as this has more to do with Steam than with the game 7 Days to Die.

[Crater Creator]

For those that are really curious, Steam is a broken patchwork in this area. Yes, we officers have access to a panel with moderator controls on community guides. Yes, we're aware there are bad guides out there. So what's the problem? Unlike reported posts, we don't have a place to see reports on guides. We get no notification when one is reported. There's a place to "Moderate Reported UGC" but that list is empty.

The first guide Razorfish linked to, for example, has been reported 9 times. We can tell by going to the guide and selecting "View All reports". There are over 700 guides, so checking each one this way would take substantial time investment. Moreover, in each of those 9 cases, a member of Steam support cleared the report. And we can all see the guide is still visible. So it's not clear what will actually cross the line in Steam's eyes to warrant taking the guide down.

We do have commands to hide or ban a guide, but the last time we tried it out we got inconsistent results. The reasons provided to hide a guide don't account for things like spam or fishing for points. And even if they did, unlike warning a user for a post they made, there isn't a way to communicate to the user what the problem with their guide was, so they can learn and follow the rules in the future.

So the system is just not fit to task for us to moderate guides. We'll have to leave it up to Steam until they provide something we can practically work with.

[Razorfish]

The big picture here is that these user are totally subverting the steam account ranking system, which is in effect a form of cheating.

So let users decide...., you maybe got 9 reports on the first one , because those are the people who could be bothered, most other just look at the picture & know it is likely garbage...
most of it could be done by a user rating system...
zero ratings, let it stay near the top for a few days, for exposure, but then gradually move it down the ladder, if no ratings.

As regards your comment about oh there is just too many...
let's take your 700 as an example.

so 700 and let's say it takes 10 seconds to visually & quick look them...
700 *10 seconds=7,000 seconds
116.7 minutes ,divided by 60
so approx just under 2 hours... for a single person.

now we are only talking about a quick look, many will pass this visual initial inspection, so it's going to be a lot less time.
then introduce a penalty system as i pointed out above. and most of the crap will self regulate.