Forum adverts like this one are shown to any user who is not logged in. Join us by filling out a tiny 3 field form and you will get your own, free, dakka user account which gives a good range of benefits to you: No adverts like this in the forums anymore. Times and dates in your local timezone. Full tracking of what you have read so you can skip to your first unread post, easily see what has changed since you last logged in, and easily see what is new at a glance. Email notifications for threads you want to watch closely. Being a part of the oldest wargaming community on the net. If you are already a member then feel free to login now.

Exactly, that's why people calling for posts to be deleted simply because they disagree with the content is not a road we should go down.

I think the mods here have been very understanding in the corona thread, and have not taken action in cases I would have,

I've been the victim of some abusive, dictatorial moderation. Anyone who's been on rpg.net will understand. Also some other forums that allowed extremist views in ONE direction.

I saw some posts i the corona thread I was sure would get modded but mostly they didn't.

So I'm not really having much problem here.

 queen_annes_revenge wrote:
Exactly, that's why people calling for posts to be deleted simply because they disagree with the content is not a road we should go down.

That's a big umbrella to hide behind.

Posts that are harmful, contemptuous, or off topic according to the rules shouldn't be protected just because 'sometimes people disagree.'

How do we decide what is harmful or contemptuous?

 hotsauceman1 wrote:
How do we decide what is harmful or contemptuous?

Context. As we do with humor .
And awareness Of perspective.

I find the easiest thing to do is pretend human beings are reading your posts. When you do that, you tend to consider the impact of your chosen words on other “people” that might read them.

If, When typing a post, you reflect on other “people” reading your post, that someone might justly determine your post is “jerky” or “asinine”, or “deliberately offensive” , then you can consider the pros and cons of proceeding. If you choose to proceed, just be aware that your comments might have consequences, and that the further you go past the point of good taste, the more likely the consequences are to be negative and/or severe.

If you aren’t sure, determine a risk vs reward scenario in your head, and experiment. You’ll likely find a “risky but usually ok” point fairly quickly, at which you can make fairly accurate assessments of the probable future outcomes of given actions.

Also, recognize that this is not a public place, but a very open but still private club. Provide interesting content, join conversations in a constructive manner. Don’t be an donkey-cave. You know, normal stuff.

Just to be clear, we generally try to save removing posts as a last resort, so we wouldn't be doing that in a widespread manner. Ideally, now that some of the political things have passed, we can keep the coronavirus thread less focused on that side of things (which we generally don't allow here, so we don't have to make these kinds of judgement calls and, more importantly, all the drama that goes with it )

 RiTides wrote:
Just to be clear, we generally try to save removing posts as a last resort, so we wouldn't be doing that in a widespread manner. Ideally, now that some of the political things have passed, we can keep the coronavirus thread less focused on that side of things (which we generally don't allow here, so we don't have to make these kinds of judgement calls and, more importantly, all the drama that goes with it )

You must be pretty naive, between bolsonaro, trump the Germans and austrians and south tyroleans opening borders torwards each other , a tracing APP with privacy concerns i doubt the storms over and out and that is just the harmless Part of exemple with imediate political tint.

Not even mentioning italy,syria etc .

 hotsauceman1 wrote:
How do we decide what is harmful or contemptuous?

The whole point of the moderation process is that there's a double-check of the criteria for insulting, harmful or contemptuous. A user reports a post and a mod has to agree with them that the post is bad enough to warrant deletion. Seems like a pretty robust and sensible system.

To answer your question directly and in the most literal sense, it's the moderator who gets to decide. Kind of goes with the role.

Slipspace wrote:

 hotsauceman1 wrote:
How do we decide what is harmful or contemptuous?

The whole point of the moderation process is that there's a double-check of the criteria for insulting, harmful or contemptuous. A user reports a post and a mod has to agree with them that the post is bad enough to warrant deletion. Seems like a pretty robust and sensible system.

To answer your question directly and in the most literal sense, it's the moderator who gets to decide. Kind of goes with the role.

It's not a sensible system because it concentrates power into a single individual with biases, and those biases are known.

 BaconCatBug wrote:

Slipspace wrote:

 hotsauceman1 wrote:
How do we decide what is harmful or contemptuous?

The whole point of the moderation process is that there's a double-check of the criteria for insulting, harmful or contemptuous. A user reports a post and a mod has to agree with them that the post is bad enough to warrant deletion. Seems like a pretty robust and sensible system.

To answer your question directly and in the most literal sense, it's the moderator who gets to decide. Kind of goes with the role.

It's not a sensible system because it concentrates power into a single individual with biases, and those biases are known.

hello insominia my old friend it's not good to head from you again...

I haven't seen much bias on this board. Given human nature there's likely to be some but I haven't seen it. Admittedly my ability to see fine or small level bias may be impaired having seen the huge bias on other sites, like rpg.net which makes bias part of the rules.

But this place, while given human nature i'm sure these is some bias, keeps it low key enough that I'm really not seeing it.

 BaconCatBug wrote:
It's not a sensible system because it concentrates power into a single individual with biases, and those biases are known.

No, it doesn't. All moderator actions are logged and visible to the rest of the mod team, and to the site's admins. Those actions have to remain within the bounds set by the admins, and we have rather frequent discussions amongst the team where edge cases arise.

If a single individual starts acting outside those bounds, corrections can be made. If a moderator was consistently working outside what is expected due to personal bias, they wouldn't be retained as a moderator.

So when a user complains of a mod 'singling them out' it generally comes down to nothing more sinister than that user and the mod on question tending to frequent the same parts of the site, or simply being online at similar times.


(Multiple edits due to typing (badly) on phone...)

You also always have the option to involve a second mod who you think is less biased, like I did in my case.

 BaconCatBug wrote:

Slipspace wrote:

 hotsauceman1 wrote:
How do we decide what is harmful or contemptuous?

The whole point of the moderation process is that there's a double-check of the criteria for insulting, harmful or contemptuous. A user reports a post and a mod has to agree with them that the post is bad enough to warrant deletion. Seems like a pretty robust and sensible system.

To answer your question directly and in the most literal sense, it's the moderator who gets to decide. Kind of goes with the role.

It's not a sensible system because it concentrates power into a single individual with biases, and those biases are known.

So you have a sensible solution I assume? I've not detected any extreme bias on this site form the moderators and every single interaction I've had with them in their moderator capacity has been more professional than I'd expect from a bunch of volunteers. We're talking about a forum for discussing toy soldiers here and it seems from the replies there are already processes in place to account for Mod bias, which seems more than reasonable for such a place.

If you have just come into this thread to bash mods, you have totally missed the point of this thread.

Don't complain, make suggestions for what you want in regards to moderation, just complaining is actual useless, you need to consider how you want specific issues you have and how you want them to be dealt with.

My example:

Personally I want suspension for certain problem members that consistently derail specific threads in the N&R section, mainly because at this point I do not believe what they do is firstly beneficial to the discussion and secondly I absolutely believe it is trolling. That is my issue and my suggested way it should be handled to the mods.

My problem is aired, and my suggestion for how I want it to be dealt with personally is also suggested, with the opportunity for the mods to reply and explain their actions. Some debate happened also, and fundamentally I adhere to their rules, whether I like the result or not.

A poor example of the above

There's too many off topic posts in the N&R section, do your jobs better.

This approach is just complaining, and is absolutely not constructive. If you complain without contributing other than to complain, you are taking this thread and it's purpose off topic, and in MY OPINION you are part of the problem on this forum that I would like to personally see eradicated, it's childish and is how people conduct themselves on twitter which is the absolute most toxic place on the internet.

If you haven't got anything constructive to say, and are incapable of saying it in a polite manner, this is not the thread for you, maybe start your own thread?

Slipspace wrote:

 BaconCatBug wrote:

Slipspace wrote:

 hotsauceman1 wrote:
How do we decide what is harmful or contemptuous?

The whole point of the moderation process is that there's a double-check of the criteria for insulting, harmful or contemptuous. A user reports a post and a mod has to agree with them that the post is bad enough to warrant deletion. Seems like a pretty robust and sensible system.

To answer your question directly and in the most literal sense, it's the moderator who gets to decide. Kind of goes with the role.

It's not a sensible system because it concentrates power into a single individual with biases, and those biases are known.

So you have a sensible solution I assume? I've not detected any extreme bias on this site form the moderators and every single interaction I've had with them in their moderator capacity has been more professional than I'd expect from a bunch of volunteers. We're talking about a forum for discussing toy soldiers here and it seems from the replies there are already processes in place to account for Mod bias, which seems more than reasonable for such a place.

Public Mod Logs and actual explanations (i.e. cite exactly which rule and why).

I don't think mod logs of the mod discussions are valuable to the population - its not like a formal hearing with strict codes of practice and such; its a conversation between volunteers. In my experience they can drift, get silly, ramble on or even go nowhere all on their own.


I would say that I've always felt that public resolutions are a valuable thing for moderation. I recall the old Relic News forum used to publicly post (in a locked section) when a user got suspended (and its duration) or banned and the reason for it. They never went into fine detail, just a simple. "User banned for X for doing Y "

I don't recall if it ever showed warnings, just actions taken (suspension/ban). They also only showed if a person got banned for sneaking back in with a new account once - thereafter never showing it again for that user (to avoid someone using it to attention seek).


I think it helped display what was not tolerated and also showed that the moderators do take action in serious cases. It's about the only forum I've known to do that, though I've tried to sometimes encourage similar on other sites I've moderated- though often many mods don't like it.


Personally I think that suspensions/bans are already public (its noted on the users profile); however its also invisible because unless you're watching a user you can easily miss that they've been suspended/removed.

The issues I see with making that sort of information public are that, for one, some users take their warnings and suspensions as some wierd badge of honor. We've had users in the past who kept a count of their warnings or suspensions in their sig, as if it was something to be proud of. So having 'official' recognition in public could well beat serve to egg on inappropriate behavior.

The flip side of that is that, for others, having it publicly displayed when they are suspended is going to be embarrassing... And contrary to what certain YouTube parenting videos would have you believe, humiliation is a poor motivator, and is likely to lead to worse behavior in the long run.

Ultimately, the aim of our moderation process is to discourage, rather than punish. And that, IMO, works better when it's kept private rather than drawing unnecessary attention to it.

Making discussions public is something I have direct experience of not working well. There often needs to be a "safe place" where issues can be discussed away from the user, without them involved, and that can sometimes lead to discussions about actions that end up not being taken, sometimes even quickly shot down, that can then generate their own drama.

I would hope that any warning or suspension comes with an associated reason that the user can then refer to if they want to take the matter further but I don't think making those discussions public is helpful.

insaniak I agree that displaying punishments can backfire. That said I think there's two key elements to consider

1) Punishments are already publicly displayed on a users profile. It's already within the public domain on the forum when a person is suspended/banned. However the system, if I recall, only shows a ban not a suspension or a ban. Furthermore whilst its public its not displayed for the whole forum to see unless you go looking for it.

2) Public display that moderators are acting and that suspensions/bans do happen can be a resource for displaying that moderators are "working". That moderation is happening and that there are actions taken place in the most serious of cases.

I think when you have a user start to display or use publicity of their own punishments as a badge of honour that's disruptive ,but I think it also shows to the mods that the user in question either needs different handling or that they are clearly not going to improve their behaviour - ergo putting them quickly onto the "one strike you're out" situation.
For me the whole public display of actions taken is more about presenting information that's already there on the site in an upfront manner. It's also useful if someone you like gets banned because you then know to reach out to them elsewhere rather than spend weeks thinking they are just not around then finding out they were banned ages ago.



I fully agree that moderators need to have private discussions regarding things and that they don't need to be public and that having them public would defeat the point of them (to the point where chances are mods would end up chatting in private messages and then only displaying the choice of those discussions anyway). A safespace also means that if any private information about a user surfaces the mods can talk about it without it leaking out to the general forum population.

Voss wrote:

 queen_annes_revenge wrote:
Exactly, that's why people calling for posts to be deleted simply because they disagree with the content is not a road we should go down.

That's a big umbrella to hide behind.

Posts that are harmful, contemptuous, or off topic according to the rules shouldn't be protected just because 'sometimes people disagree.'

I agree. I never said those that break the rules should be protected. But often that can be used by some people as a way to just get things removed that aren't really an issue, just because they don't like them.

 Overread wrote:

1) Punishments are already publicly displayed on a users profile. It's already within the public domain on the forum when a person is suspended/banned. However the system, if I recall, only shows a ban not a suspension or a ban. Furthermore whilst its public its not displayed for the whole forum to see unless you go looking for it.

This isn't actually visible, so far as I'm aware. And we don't actually have any distinction in the system between a 'suspension' and a 'ban'... The system just has a single 'user is suspended until [date]' type toggle, and for a permanent suspension we set that to a 100 years or so in the future.

So if we're still around next century, we may see a return of some familiar faces. Hopefully they'll have mellowed slightly by then...

2) Public display that moderators are acting and that suspensions/bans do happen can be a resource for displaying that moderators are "working". That moderation is happening and that there are actions taken place in the most serious of cases.

Yup, from that angle I can certainly see it as a positive thing. I think the issues I mentioned before, and the potential for people to try to 'game' the system, make it seriously problematic, though.

Appreciate the feedback, though, and it will likely spawn some discussion amongst the mods!

I have noticed over the years that posters who get into trouble a lot tend to see the whole concept of moderation as some kind of legal system where they can demand appeals and even try to “bring charges” against other users (and of course, especially against mods).

This is a category mistake,

What’s actually going on is something entirely different. What we want is discussion of toy soldiers, related topics, and to some extent unrelated topics. The only point of the rules is to facilitate that goal. Suspending people’s accounts is presumptively contrary to that goal, as is deleting users’ posts. As far as possible, it’s best to avoid such harsh actions.

Having a kind of “public punishment” function seems to have more in common with the mistaken “legal paradigm” and less in common with the accurate paradigm of wanting as many people as possible to contribute to as many conversations as possible.

I have been on forums with a sub-forum dedicated to that and i never really saw the point.

Just wanted to pop in and say that I actually really appreciate the moderation here, Dakka is one of the less insane places on the internet as surprising as that often is to people, there's little of the lawlessness and raw atrociousness of conduct of some groups that sees the worst elements of the playerbase run wild, and none of the extreme overmoderation some communities have seen that strangled off posting. This community is overall pretty rad, and the people running it have a good handle on what they do. We all bump up against the edges at times, but Dakka handles it well.

On the subject of displaying punishments, as a regular user, I don't like the idea much, it just seems like a way to stigmatize people for no good reason on a forum that's fundamentally about plastic monsters and toy soldiers. On other boards where I've seen that, or where they have things like subforums that detail bans and reasons, it often just serves as something for other users to chuck around and derail threads with.

The only time that I would consider appropriate for 'displaying punishments' is when it is individuals with a particular style of baiting/"arguing".

It should not be up to the rest of the forum to let newer posters know that certain individuals are only interested in arguing, not actually discussing things.

There’s a fairly well known site that likes to air its moderation actions out in the open, and it’s a terrible way to do things. Though that may be because the staff there are genuinely horrible people. They’re the sort of people who ban you for liking/hating what they hate/like. As petty as that.

Basically what usually happened was, the person who’d been suspended was made to come into the suspension thread and publicly prostrate themselves before the staff and repent for their mistakes, usually accompanied by a grovelling apology. You weren’t allowed back in until you did so, and trying to defend yourself would earn you an instant permanent ban. And yes, the rules were ‘whatever was convenient for the mod at the time’.

Actually now that I compare the two, Dakka doesn't seem so bad. There’s only one mod here I openly dislike, as opposed to the whole staff.

But I suppose what I’m saying is, keep your moderation in private.

There's a difference between a public notice


"Future War Cultist suspended for 2 weeks for swearing at members and moderators"


What you describe above which sounds like they want public apologies, but also seem to have very variable to no standards of moderation. Once you are or have the perception of, banning for frivolous things then the whole moderation system - no matter how you run it - is going to become a mess; which will result in a messy argumentative and hostile forum often one where people are unsure what to do or say since everything is open to being taken as rule breaching by moderators with no standards.

 insaniak wrote:
And we don't actually have any distinction in the system between a 'suspension' and a 'ban'...

But what about a bane?

 A Town Called Malus wrote:

 insaniak wrote:
And we don't actually have any distinction in the system between a 'suspension' and a 'ban'...

But what about a bane?

Why on earth is you name not a town called malleus, missed an absolute corker there.

Ready to accept my suspension for being completely off topic by the way... Live by the Sword and all that.