We need more mods, paid or not doesn't matter

[Hamsterpeek]

I'm in the steam discussion for many years, having many thousands of comments, helping thousands of people, doing positive work for the community. I love it helping people, do it whenever I've a bit of time.

But in all these yeras and all the experience I gained in that years I noticed one thing:
This forum isn't moderated enough.

We've just very few moderator and they get spammed with profile comments because many people behave wrong. In some subforums are tons of people who bait, troll and provocate on daily basis and some of them even try to bait negative comments from helpful people out and report them. I saw many very new behaving people banned in the past months. People who always are nice, are always helpful and spend so much time with exactly that.

On the other side I see many people who copy paste the same baiting and provocating comment over and over. They get banned less and when they get banned they simply log on another account and do it further.

What I really miss here are two things:
- The correct decision making from mods: The current mods are not deep enough in the community to know what's going on. Especially in bigger communityhubs like csgo it's necessary to have active community member as mods because the community hub is so big and it's a big family. A family with many white sheeps and also many black sheeps. So we figured out that mods only ban depending on one comment they read, they never read the post history, never read the context. That's a huge problem and disrespectful to all nice community member. Most of the time those bans get lifted after making a support ticket because then mods really start to read through the thread and notice "oh he's right".
- The amount of mods in general. As you noticed I focus on the csgo forum. In that forum we've many people who are able and willing to be a community mod and they would most likely do it even for free.

So the question is how is it possible that valve completely ignore the community, the issues in the community and find no ways to fix it? The baiter and trolls are a huge problem, but many other things too. For example how many people ignore the sticky threads? How many people beg? How many people try to scam people? With simple algorythms it would be possible to stop all that. Just add a forum filter: Whenver someone is for example writing this in a new thread:
"I got ban for nothing"
or
"can you give me skins"
the forum automatically pop ups a notification that threads aren't allowed for that topic including links to faqs, rules and guidelines.

I really like the forum, I like to spend my time here, meet nice people and stuff. Really. But the negative points are really bad and it even gets worse because they're easy to fix. Just give more people community mod rights and improve the forum algorythms.

Sorry for the long text but that was something I wanted to write down for quite some time. I scratch my head so often whenever really bad people get reported but don't get banned even after days and then I read from other very helpful persons that they got banned for such tiny things while they behave so great all the time.

In fact the forum gets overrunned by trolls and baiter and the nice behaving people either get banned or leave the forum. For some people it's too hard to just be nice to other people and that's sad for all other persons. :(

Have a great weekend whoever spend his time reading through the whole thread and maybe valve can improve some things so the forum gets friendlier again!

[TehSpoopyKitteh]

It is a hard decision to make and it often involves an outside perspective. Being a moderator is a difficult task because often times you are only told part of the story.

[м]

the main problem is that it's not so easy for valve to find reliable new moderators.

sure, many people are interested, but maybe they are not qualified in valve's view.

the moderators we have do a good job, but as you said, they are at limit.
it's the same for the admins. i already feel bad when i write on an admins or mods profile with problems, so i try to avoid it when i can.

so yeah, i agree with you, but where can they get new reliable moderators, if there are none?
if they pick the wrong people without "observing" them first, they might cause more new trouble than they do good in the end.

[Hamsterpeek]

Teh Spoopy Kitteh님이 먼저 게시:

It is a hard decision to make and it often involves an oputside perspective. Being a moderator is a difficult task.

Yes and no. We have forum rules and mods have to judge depending on the rules. It's also right that personal opinions should be ignored as a mod.

But I also though further than that. Decisions have to be objective and based on the posthistory and even sometimes just by very toxic comments it's reason enough to punish people.

I saw so many people using heavy insults including racism and beeing homophobic without getting banned and posts didn't get removed. I really wish mods who not only ban those people and delte those posts but also write a text that such things are a no go on steam as a reminder.

But the forum looks like a free for all deatchmatch server where everyone can join and spread their negativity and mods kinda roll dices who will get banned (roll dices = not knowing the context of texts and banning people for too tiny things while heavy things won't get punished).

[Hamsterpeek]

M님이 먼저 게시:

the main problem is that it's not so easy for valve to find reliable new moderators.

sure, many people are interested, but maybe they are not qualified in valve's view.

the moderators we have do a good job, but as you said, they are at limit.
it's the same for the admins. i already feel bad when i write on an admins or mods profile with problems, so i try to avoid it when i can.

so yeah, i agree with you, but where can they get new reliable moderators, if there are none?
if they pick the wrong people without "observing" them first, they might cause more new trouble than they do good in the end.

I can completely agree with your comment! I also feel bad whenever I write on a mods profile or report someone. But sometimes I'm also frustrated because I see someone beeing rude for days in a thread, people say they reported him and nothing happend.

Mods and admins do a great job but they have to do too much. They need help (= more mods).

In my mind I've a list with ~10 possible mods who've the ability to be a mod (yet alone in the csgo hub). I don't even have me in mind. Yet I kinda feel helpless against the wave of negative behaving people and it's not alway that easy to ignore it and also takes so much time to report them while the goal many have is just having nice discussions.

So I hope really that valve has a list with possible mods and will give mod right to some people in the near future (and maybe also improve the "spam filter" so non sense threads can't get created). But the thing is that I heard that valve don't plan with new unpaid mods. :(

And so more and more helpful people will leave the community...

[TehSpoopyKitteh]

M님이 먼저 게시:

the main problem is that it's not so easy for valve to find reliable new moderators.

sure, many people are interested, but maybe they are not qualified in valve's view.

the moderators we have do a good job, but as you said, they are at limit.
it's the same for the admins. i already feel bad when i write on an admins or mods profile with problems, so i try to avoid it when i can.

so yeah, i agree with you, but where can they get new reliable moderators, if there are none?
if they pick the wrong people without "observing" them first, they might cause more new trouble than they do good in the end.

Reliability is always negated by bias and first hand experience therein. I know that if I were a mod, I would immediately ban the people who trolled me in the past. The temptation to abuse that power is way too much for any one person to handle at times. I almost feel like the mods are stretched thin at times with so much data to absorb in so little time for each case they have to handle.

If we see an increase in moderators, it means some policies will be needed to overwatch the process on both sides of an issue. The current mods are a bunch of wonderful yet rare and extraordinary people who have the patients of a saint. Given my disposition at times, I am grateful for that patients. It is hard to find people like that.

[м]

Teh Spoopy Kitteh님이 먼저 게시:

I konw that if I were a mod, I would immediately ban the people who trolled me in the past. The temptation to abuse that power is way too much for any one person to handle at times.

haha, at least you are honest!

but well, that's the point, they have to keep the forums clean, but at the same time they need to stay calm in every situation, be fair and handle everyone equal.

that's surely a very very hard task to do.

Ray님이 먼저 게시:

And so more and more helpful people will leave the community...

maybe you are right, maybe it's rather a come+go, some nice people leave, new ones appear.
i can't tell which is more true.

i thought as well if it's not possible to just add unpaid or volunteer moderators. but are these people really motivated or qualified enough to do a good job? i don't know about that.

we already got 2-3 people in the forums that act like moderators, sometimes nice, sometimes rude, i guess that would be the same case if some people get some "powers" out of a sudden.

if people never did this before it's probably hard to find an even balance.


//

and as sidenote, some websites got this thing with volunteers, a good example is the alienwarearena forum. people of a certain rank can lock threads for example, but even this small "power" has been abused a lot, people just lock what they don't like.. so people report it and admins or moderators have to unlock stuff again.

i'm afraid it could be similar here.

[Hamsterpeek]

Teh Spoopy Kitteh님이 먼저 게시:

M님이 먼저 게시:

the main problem is that it's not so easy for valve to find reliable new moderators.

sure, many people are interested, but maybe they are not qualified in valve's view.

the moderators we have do a good job, but as you said, they are at limit.
it's the same for the admins. i already feel bad when i write on an admins or mods profile with problems, so i try to avoid it when i can.

so yeah, i agree with you, but where can they get new reliable moderators, if there are none?
if they pick the wrong people without "observing" them first, they might cause more new trouble than they do good in the end.

Reliability is always negated by bias and first hand experience therein. I konw that if I were a mod, I would immediately ban the people who trolled me in the past. The temptation to abuse that power is way too much for any one person to handle at times. I almost feel like the mods are stretched thin at times with so much data to absorb in so little time for each case they have to handle.

If we see an increase in moderators, it means some policies will be needed to overwatch the process on both sides of an issue. The current paid mods are a bunch of wonderful yet rare and extraordinary people who have the patients of a saint. Given my disposition at times, I am grateful for that patients. It is hard to find people like that.

Professional discretion including not beeing biased is important yet a thing people grow into when they get mod rights. I respect you for beeing so honest and say you'd ban people who trolled you. But the question is: Did they deserve it? Think about it: Trolling isn't allowed so maybe your (in your opinion) biased perspective your punished would be correct. As I said I've also some people in my head who would get a a punishment for the first negative thing they do but is this really bad or do we both just have experience in the forum and know which persons behave bad?

So beeing a little bit biased isn't the worst thing. Especially in the csgo hub it really helps when you know the community and the user by name. I don't like everyone there and I disagree with many but that's no reason to punish someone, right? But when someone is - like you say - is trolling - which is bad behavior, then it would make sense to punish the person.

Someone who isn't part of the specific community isn't biased but he also has no experience in terms of the long life behavior of the active community member. For example one person got banned some days ago who is probably one of the friendliest and best member in the whole community. He just got banned for a little mistake (naming and shaming but not about something bad). A mod saw that he was doing that and banned the person. No context. An active community member who is a mod would act different. He'd know that the person is a nice person, is always friendly and would either write the person that he should edit the names out or simply edit the comment himself with the info that this isn't allowed, right?

That's just one example. Yes. The mods do a great job but the distance between mods and community is too far. Without meaning it negative they are not part of the community. And that reduce the humanity to a maximum since the mods only react to reported comments. :/

[Colt ☶]

Teh Spoopy Kitteh님이 먼저 게시:

The current paid mods are a bunch of wonderful yet rare and extraordinary people who have the patients of a saint.

You made my day

[TehSpoopyKitteh]

Colt ☶님이 먼저 게시:

Teh Spoopy Kitteh님이 먼저 게시:

The current paid mods are a bunch of wonderful yet rare and extraordinary people who have the patients of a saint.

You made my day :sadelf:

Don’t get me started on you mate Y’all work hard as hell.

[jin]

Teh Spoopy Kitteh님이 먼저 게시:

I konw that if I were a mod, I would immediately ban the people who trolled me in the past.

You don't fit to be a moderator in any way.

[jin]

We need more volunteer mods that know how the forum works. Not paid mods.

[Satoru]

There are already paid moderators. Report posts and they will be addressed

[AustrAlien2010]

[opinion]

[ShelLuser]

Can't say I agree. You claim that the current mods don't make the right decisions but how would you know considering that you don't have inside knowledge about to the way they work? As such your post contains a ton of assumptions and presumptions and that's a poor way to start a discussion I think.

Sure, I see people trolling. As long as it's not against the rules then I don't see why a mod should step in. Just because you don't like a post doesn't automatically mean it's also against the rules, and that's something too many people seem to ignore these days. This isn't only about you.

And that brings me to the most important aspect: if those posts bother you so much then why not ignore them? Block the author, and be done with it. Easy!

[.#𝚌𝚊𝚞𝚜𝚝𝚒𝚌]

Satoru님이 먼저 게시:

There are already paid moderators. Report posts and they will be addressed

Report Buttons only work for simple stuff.

But these mods aren´t in the forums at all.
In many cases only going for reports doesn´t work because you need the knowledge.
You can see that in cases where nice forum regulars get banned due to little incidents and trolls are free to act with their 5th account evading all their bans.

I would also not call them moderators at all. Because moderation for me also means "leading" and being present.

Just closing topics and working in the dark -> that could also do a programm.