EVE General Discussion

In my opinion the biggest simple improvements to forum moderation would be:

* rephrase any offending statements in an acceptable manner; the recent use of ----snip---- and ----edit---- often leaves posts incomprehensible.

* don't lock derailed threads, remove the derailing posts instead.

* make sure you understand the thread/post before taking any moderation action.
It's extremely frustrating to see a reasonable discussion get locked because the moderator did obviously only skim the "offending" posts, failed to understand sarcasm or context, ...

In short, moderators, please, don't let your actions be determined by laziness or hurry.
Try to teach by example and aim to reduce collateral damage above everything else.

These other forums matter because they are the signs of your failures.

3rd party sites don't become successful "by accident" - they have to overcome several significant disadvantages to become successful (far fewer readers/posters than eve-o initially, no institutional checks & balances on forum mods, no chance of dev/GM replies to any posts, ...) and can only achieve success through eve-o failing to deliver whatever they have to offer.

Sometimes the shortcomings that 3rd party sites try to fix are a a lack of features - e.g. we probably wouldn't have eveger.de if eve-o hadn't taken 9 years to open a German forum section.

But more often than not the issue that drives people away from eve-o seems to be forum moderation:







I didn't dig deep enough to find the rationale for the existence of chatsubo - but at least their (ultimately unsuccessful) attempt at creating an IC forum was also due to gripes with moderation on the eve-o IGS (e.g. linkage).

Bad forum moderation is what drives people to 3rd party sites and by doing so threatens to fracture the eve community.

I think the most impressive negative example of such developments are the Blizzard' battle.net forums.
If I am interested in SC2 I go to teamliquid.net.
If I am generally interested in WoW I go to mmo-champion.com.
If I am interested in WoW PvE & theorycrafting I go elitistjerks.com.
If I am interested in WoW PvP I go to arenajunkies.com.
If I want to recruit for my WoW guild I go to tankspot.com, elitistjerks.com and mmo-champion.com.
If I am interested in Diablo 3 I go to mmo-champion.com or diablofans.com.

Left on the battle.net forums are only the newbies who don't know any better and a couple of MVPs who desperately try to keep the forums alive.

(Also notice how one company [Curse] operates three of the sites I just mentioned - they recognized the business opportunity provided by Blizzard's near complete failure in community management.)

Now, luckily EVE is not in that state just yet - a lot of the relevant eve-related discussion still happens on eve-o itself.
I attribute this (partial) success mostly to the flexibility with which the forum moderators have handled the enforcement of forum rules in the different subforums in the past, accomodating the individual "style" of each one.
Sadly the new ISD moderators seem to lack this crucial sensitivity.

Always enforcing the forum rules down to a t may work fine for the Market Discussions forum (well, unless you start treating IPO/Loan threads as "selling services" or "begging") but you could (for example) never hope to keep the C&P community on eve-o if you would decide to go down that road.

And, as the German/Russian language communities show, once you lost one subcommunity to a 3rd party site it won't come back even if you have fixed the issue that caused them to leave.

The worst aspect of ---snip---, ---edit--- and just removing derailing posts is that I, as a poster, often don't get a single hint this has happened, unless I'm an OCD weirdo who regularly copies down all his posts and compare them, letter by letter, on a regular basis.

Which, again, means that I get absolutely no hints as to what I might be doing wrong, if anything, which means that I'll probably keep posting the way I do until it potentially escalates all the way to forum bans, with nary a clue as to why it got there in the first place.

Other thrid party sites do not have a legal obligation to keep their forums teen rated and suitable for 13 year olds. We do. This means that wht other forums can allow we are not able to permit.

Ok, here is what I will say about the use of 'Jewgold', Jewing' and other terms of that nature. They don't add anything of value to a discussion. The very terminology is offensive to many and completely unnecessary. There are many of our players who are Jewish and they should not be subjected to phrasing which makes them and others feel uncomfortable.

No. CCP do not tolerate religious, racial or sexist messaging which is used to cause discomfort to other players.

That will not change, ever.

As I've told you before Jade, you're in no position to be throwing stones on this issue since the same happened to CCP Sreegs in his former job after he clashed with you on these very forums and the CSM. You're trying to have your cake and eat it: Somebody goes to your employer and tells them embarrassing stories about what you supposedly do on the internet, you yell from every rooftop that its a Goonswarm conspiracy and we as an alliance are collectively to blame. Somebody does the same to Sreegs and you throw your hands up and say 'nothing to do with me or my alliance, could have been anyone, its a big internet out there'.

"As a player who has suffered my fair share of real life harrassment from Goonswarm (and friends) ever since my real name was provided to the community as part of my successful CSM 1 run, I could certainly see the argument for going back in time and reversing this policy.

In retrospect sure, the fact my real name was provided to enemies in Eve allowed some people to search for my online CV, take my pictures, find my employers past and current and begin an organized campaign of harrassment against my real identity. Sites were created specifically to portray me in the worst possible light and links were provided to my place of work along with letters perporting to be from "concerned parents" that a person like me should be playing an online game.

Even today real life photograph is hosted on the goonwiki alongside the accusation I'm putting GHB into children's drinks.

So yes, real life harrassment does certainly arise from the fact that CSM candidates are required to give their real names because some subscribers to this game are completely incapable of keeping their animosity to in-game only behaviour.

At this point I will support your topic to remove people's real life names from the process on the provisio it goes further and makes any unauthorized link to somebody's personal detals, photographs a eula breaching offence punishable by a signifcant ban.

Out of game harrassment/bullying must be completely outlawed in Eve online if this game is to repair its toxic reputation in the wider gaming community

And incidently I would like to call upon the administrators of the goonwiki to remove all reference to my rl photograph and allegations of criminal activity otherwise I will again petition the GM's at CCP to take action in this case. "