1. Don't support the polls. They are evil and unholy and repetitive and ultimately lead nowhere - causing their unholy rebirth to continue to plague our forums.
Correct, it will sink stuff and bumping within 24 hours is not possible so junk disappears if people dont care or reply. If something is truly banal use the mod alert button as we have a 'banality button' to punish pointless posts which has an 85% success rate in preventing repeat offenders.
2. Don't be a bystander. When someone creates a topic and posts an illiterate collection of words, ask them to be considerate of everyone else on the internet. Ask them to carefully consider their words and try expressing them in a manner others can understand.
Can be ok but it is better to use the mod alert button to indicate crap grammar/spelling as it avoids the whole debate about why you need to type properly springing up again and again, and we have a complicated, automated punishment system in place for this which also explains in great detail why spelling/grammar is important. Posting in their threads just bumps it up.
3. Link, Bookmark, and paste repetitive threads! When someone creates a thread to discuss or question something already under discussion, or that has recently been discussed, link the old thread into the new with a note "OP, there is an identical thread here you can discuss this at" and then report the thread as a duplicate. It will get locked/removed - and that's one less piece of clutter!
4. Enforce Rule #1: A lot of threads spin out of control because of how people are treat each other and talking to each other in a thread. Don't wait for one party to become offended enough to report it, hit the report button and get it back on track early!
Yes do these too but dont be overzealous if significant new information/releases have changed the possible responses.
5. Send a PM to Legoburner/Yakface: Dakka has an offtopic board, and it has a "Dakka Poll" section....it needs a "Gaming Polls" section, or to rename Dakka Poll as a gaming poll section, and have this be the place for all of those "What's the best unit in 40k" arguments to go to. Just because a post has words doesn't mean it contains content, as I'm sure someone will show up to point out this thread for shortly.
Never
PM us about dakka's structure, use the nuts and bolts forum instead so that debate can occur once and we dont waste time repeating ourselves. Gaming polls is probably too broad a topic for a dedicated forum, it would need more thought to be effective.
All the things you suggest help out but are quite boring and tedious to do, with the only reward your ability to know you made a tiny difference. Welcome to the first step into the world of the moderator.
There is always a rash of what might be characterised as juvenile polls and threads in the summer holiday season.
This is very correct and should be reaching the end now, just in time for 2 months of newbie students at university/college to post inane stuff too. Dealing with it and the flood of new posters who dont read the rules properly is unavoidable without losing lots of good new posters as well.
Some topics will always be rehashed after a certain amount of time.
True but not always bad - new users will not have seen the older threads, older threads might be slightly outdated or appeal to a different age group of people getting into wargaming. Dakka's poor search engine is a factor here as it is hard to find older threads so that will clean things up a bit when it is improved. Usually though this just means you have been on the forum a lot and it is something that affects all forums. The only 'cure' is oppressive moderation or some of the things suggested by DoP. In a way it is healthy to have these as they show the community continues to grow and get new users instead of stagnation and death.
Part of the problem is that the attitude from the Off-Topic forum is seeping into the useful parts of the forum
Not true, and to a point this can be proved with statistical analysis available to me. The off topic forum is markedly improved in attitude from 6-9 months ago and is one of the forums I lurk the most on dakka.
The other part of the problem, noted by Polonius, is that the administration seems indifferent to promoting quality content.
This is true but it is lack of time over indifference. I am working on a technical solution to this (after the search engine reworking) but nothing would beat a few dedicated users going through the forum and managing a blog style front end to our better content. Such a thing is thankless and tedious though and would have a high burn out rate so we have not asked for volunteers for such a thing.
Articles, well, I gave up on them with my article on Chaos Sorcerers because an illiterate chump kept on screwing it up with his inability to spell, or indeed write at all. Why bother when most of the articles are trash, and whatever you write will be trashed by the next teenager accessing Dakka Dakka without adult supervision?
Here is the history for your article:
http://www.dakkadakka.com/wiki/en/Special:History?topic=How_to_Equip_your_Chaos_sorcerer
The issues you describe are endemic to wikis. They gradually improve over time as the number of legitimate users tends to outnumber the number of trolls. People who perform abusive edits are banned from dakka (including by IP address). You can see even after you have given up the article continues to improve and will continue to improve. The edits from that user were of an unusually poor quality and should have been picked up, but article moderation is extremely tedious and time consuming so mods tend to stick to the areas that they know the best. Overall the articles still need more work but there is some great content in there and most importantly, it sticks around as long as it is useful instead of dropping off to a forgotten forum page.
Haha, I put a similar post up about a year ago.
Dakka has changed a LOT.
Back when I came on board, you didn't speak up unless you had something intelligent to say. That was because you got flamed like crazy for saying dumb gak.
That has never really been true on dakka, it is observer bias more than anything. Look back through any old thread lists and you'll see how much crap there was back then. The only real differences between then and now are that you are older and wiser and have read a lot of stuff on most topics already, we have a much higher rate of posting so you have to deal with more crap at once (as well as more good stuff at once), and back in the very early days there was either no moderation or very little moderation due to lack of interest in a topic or lack of time/capacity on the part of the owner/moderators.
Thats because self moderation is no longer tolerated. Posters are not allowed to call BS on another poster here. As you noted, say something worthwhile or GFTO.
Nowadays even moderators are trolls, so there you have it.
Self moderation is fine so long as you are fairly polite. If you cant be polite you can self moderate with the mod alert button. You always whine a lot in these sorts of threads without ever offering anything constructive, you stay and post, but you've not seemed to like dakka in many years. If you feel so hard done by you are always free to leave or find a different forum. I'm not sure why you still post, I would be eager to hear your positive thoughts on dakka as well for a change as I find it quite mind boggling?
The MODs are like ninjas too, they delete posts in stealth mode. Trying to encourage a healthy, friendly environment is one thing, but protecting the idiots at the expense of the site is only going to be detrimental in the long run. What made Dakka unique was the fact that you got the straight dope on playing well. No one tried to candy coat anything. You were expected to be an adult about giving and taking criticism. Now everyone's feelings are involved and the quality of the content has greatly suffered, IMO.
The 'stealth' stuff is fairly necessary or every mod action devolves into meta-crap and explanations that means nothing gets done. We ban idiots at a rapid rate and the vast, vast majority of users are mostly sorted out after one or two moderator warnings. Warnings are sent at a rate of around 6 per day if I remember correctly. For the past 3 years at least, politeness has always been an enforced rule, usually just from moderator alerts though.
Would be interesting to note the increase of population since the time you're talking about Dash. I suspect it's the whole 'victim of it's own success' problem.
Enjoy this graph. We get more posts per day than any other wargaming forum, including warseer and more gallery images per day than anywhere else including coolminiornot.
This is posts per day:
Traffic is significantly higher (multiple orders of magnitude) though I wont include that in graph form as it is heavily biased by google's changing search algorithms.
We get 40-90 new users every single day who we need to understand the rules and culture before posting.
One feature I liked on another forum was when people reported a post, the post would have a little icon in the corner so that everyone could see that it had been reported for something. I don't know if this public style of post report status would help people see what is and is not acceptable?
This is a good idea but the structure of the database would make it too inefficient to implement right now. We are moving servers in the nearish future which will give more capacity and I'll be able to work on it more then.
Flagging it as reported won't let you know what the moderators' ultimate judgment on the post was though, and that would be the true benchmark for unacceptability.
I agree this is something that needs to be more transparent, but implementing it in a nice way without vastly increasing moderator workload is quite complex.
As a rule, I agree with Reecius about Dakka: the tactics and army list sections have gone to complete hell, but there's a lot of good discussions to be had.
Tactics and army lists are both a shadow of what they were due to the S:N ratio and I'm open to technical suggestions to improve them. They've always been a bit iffy thanks to the heavy posters like Stelek and Gwar, it is really just the pre-Stelek time I remember being especially good.
Yeah, Yak has said that he thinks the atmosphere is much better here now than before.
Us Old Timers just like the way things were, even if it did get downright hostile.
I think it comes down to what sections you read. Historical, N&R, offtopic, P&M blogs and P&M tutorials are my favourite areas and all are better now than any time in the past (except P&M blogs which has been consistently enjoyable for me). If you read
YMDC, army lists and tactics, they are all volatile areas that will wear you down and the higher post rate will just get you there faster I think.
Yeah, they need to allow the gloves to come off in the tactics section a bit more. I guess if Dakka is purely a moneymaking venture now, then it is what it is.
Dakka has never been about the money and never will. Talking to BrotherArgos at B&C makes me feel bad if I even think about it
Yak and I have never taken a cent/penny from dakka and all income is reinvested into
ths site (for example we now have 2 servers, one running a dedicated database backup now so hardware failure in the primary server will mean no lost posts or data). We also need to switch to a new main server in the near future that will be 50% more expensive than our current main server.
The discussion is usually pretty warm in there too. On most of Dakka, really. I don't think I see the excessive moderation you guys are describing.
That is because most (not all) of the people complaining (unlike yourself) have broken the rules at some point and been punished accordingly. 643 users have been punished significantly enough for it to go on their permanent record here (excluding spammer insta-bans), with 5615 moderator comments made about them. Out of 33486 users and 1.9M posts, that is a pretty insignificant rate.
One thing to consider is the demographic of the new posters. When Seer went down and users started migrating to other forums, I'm sure the age of the average Dakka poster dropped (No stats, just a gut hunch here...which could be wrong). I think age is important to remember.
Average active dakka age is 2 years younger than it was 3 years ago (I forget the exact figures, I think it was 26 and now it is 24, there is an old thread with the original average and it was about 6 months ago I last checked but did not post). I actively focus on getting US users above
UK, despite being a Londoner as there are so many young kids into
40k here it would increase the S:N ratio even more. Obviously we have loads of great young ones too, but on average they are a lower quality member and as dakka has grown we have not been able to avoid them signing up.
Regarding the duplication of threads, I always thought that the article system was wasted. It could have been used to collate and archive thread data, such as common rules disputes and questions and common tactics and whatnot, but it's really an invisible part of the site.
This was the original intention of the articles system, but nobody wanted to put in the effort. It would still be easy to switch it over to doing this without much work, but gathering and reformatting is very dull and hard to automate.
I think a good point has been raised - Dakka needs moderators of content. Killkrazy is trolling with mocking replicas of this thread here in Dakka discussion, which presents an example for other posters do to the same, leaving us 3-4 spam posts sprouting up on Dakka discussion; all of which are probably egregious violations of rule #1, but since a moderator started it...its ok? Several other moderators have their....own interesting personalities here, and all moderation is geared towards behaviour with no focus on content.
Remember that moderators and admins put in thousands of hours of work to make dakka suck a bit less, so threads complaining about things are often taken a bit more personally than intended. Moderator cheekiness is tolerated to a point to allow them to blow off steam to prevent burnout. Mods have been punished in the past for going too far though generally not publicly to avoid vultures coming in for the kill.
Kinda ironic that the owner is telling the proles to fix his income source, until you realize what the money trail looks like. Oh, I admit that this place is Yak's and his solely; he bought it. I am not going to sit here and say it should be this, that, or the other. It's not my place. I am a prole here, just like everyone of you. However, if I DO post here, it's going to be with my eyes wide open to what this place is and what it exists for. And it's not to be the best 40k forum on the net.
It is not yak's forum, it is mine and his, we have a 50/50 ownership arrangement. As before, no money has ever been taken out of dakka and simply goes into a dedicated dakka corporate bank account to be used to pay for things like servers, artwork, bandwidth, etc. The only money to ever go out was to repay the initial auction cost to yak. We have a decent stockpile that will allow us to operate for a year or so with no income but costs are always increasing as we get bigger. This has and will always be a hobby website above all else. Running dakka is my primary hobby and we have turned down plenty of multi-thousand dollar sponsorship or buyout offers because of that.
As for what it exists for, our first purpose was to make it suck less (the software used to be horrific). The next was to make it big enough to have plenty of fresh content every day. Then we wanted the best wargaming gallery in the world. Then we were victims of our own success so we had to worry about maintaning stability, and now our objective is increasing quality but not traffic or income.
Treesong- Good point, I think that's why "gallery votes" is listed above post count (as incentive) but unfortunately not many have taken advantage of that (myself included). Would be great to talk about how to increase the vote-to-view ratio (although it does look like it's similar to the lurk-to-post ratio in the rest of the forum, depending on the topic, I think?)
Without forcing people to vote (increasing the dodgy vote quantity) there is very little that can be done. I had not thought about it before, but yes, the rate is almost the same as lurker to post, good spot!
To those I have not replied to, either they have been covered elsewhere or I am getting tired, been typing this for well over an hour and I want to go play dead rising 2.
To summarise:
What has changed:
- Much bigger - the biggest of all wargaming sites by many metrics now.
- More heavily moderated
- S:N ratio is worse due to higher posting rate. Not hugely worse as it is mostly in the eye of the beholder, but even a small increase appears much worse due to the posting rate.
What is not so significant:
- A minority of vocal users here and on other sites who have observer bias or who are unhappy with the inevitable changes a forum goes through over time.
- The self-replicating/reinforcing hate and misery that comes from these sorts of threads popping up from time to time.
- People thinking they find patterns in traffic, posting style or similar where there simply are none beyond natural changes or increased visibilty due to additional traffic
- Moderation trolling - the moderators are almost all the oldest users of dakka. The halycon days people recall are from a time well after most of our mods started using dakka. The stuff you hate from them is literally what dakka used to be like.
- All users of all forums discussing topics that repeat will get burned out. This will change your opinion of given forums regardless of change in quality.
'Solutions'
- Aggressive moderation: Discourages new users from posting and slows posting rate but gives the impression of higher overall quality due to higher S:N ratio. Users who would start poorly but improve, or users who would provide encouraging feedback are usually put off by this.
- Stalinist purge of the unhappy or trollish: Improves overall happiness of the site but causes controversy and makes a whole new generation of people who say 'I remember when so and so used to post here, back when it was much better' and the cycle begins again.
- Highlight more of the good content in an easy to find location. A technical solution to this is in the planning stages and has been for a while, but a set of human editors would be the best option. Yak and I have discussed 'I like this thread' buttons to help content float or sink more easily and they will get implemented at some point.
- Better search engine and/or archiving of repeating threads.
3000
4000 Deamons - Mainly a fantasy army now.
. However, we're about to start an escalation league and many of the things that wouldn't be feasible in an 'Ard Boyz setting are perfectly legitimate options for it.
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