Warnings and etc

[BloodShot]

People understand right and wrong, and they know when they are being sh*tty.  No clarification is necessary as it is ultimately futile.

So true.

[Furzball]

@ Hermoor
aww and I was LMAO at that. Epic!

[obesebear]

I told you your continued whining and complaining and immaturity wouldn't go unpunished.  Just because I called a truce doesn't mean I'm suddenly going to tolerate your sh*t.  Bans for mocking/disrespecting other members has precedence, so don't think you're the first.  And yes I do fully expect you to continue coming here whining and complaining.

In case there is any confusion.  The ban is for your avatar.  Blatant disrespect to any member is a severe warning.  Continued disrespect after being told to quit by a moderator(s) is bannable.  Goodbye.

Also, for anyone wondering what he is talking about.  Matron Orlha made another account and badmouthed myself and KM.  So it was deleted and he was banned again.

[Bosola]

Ok here is my problem with all this. People complain that forum descriptions are too ambiguous, yet I do not see anyone offering up better wording. You say that this is your community? Well maybe it is time that you help us make it better. (Note: This is a generalization, some people actually do have input)

Good point. I'll see what I can draft tonight.

[Mako]

I told you your continued whining and complaining and immaturity wouldn't go unpunished.  Just because I called a truce doesn't mean I'm suddenly going to tolerate your sh*t.  Bans for mocking/disrespecting other members has precedence, so don't think you're the first.  And yes I do fully expect you to continue coming here whining and complaining.

In case there is any confusion.  The ban is for your avatar.  Blatant disrespect to any member is a severe warning.  Continued disrespect after being told to quit by a moderator(s) is bannable.  Goodbye.

Also, for anyone wondering what he is talking about.  Matron Orlha made another account and badmouthed myself and KM.  So it was deleted and he was banned again.

Well I am hardly in a position for a "draft" of new and interesting rules but...This rule would have helped in this situation...

Users may not argue a moderators decision publicly. Any and all complaints directed at a moderator must first address the moderator in question via PM. If the problem can not be resolved, then the moderator and user must send their positions to the forums global moderator. The forum global moderator will make or change any and/or all final decisions.

Might have avoided any problem, then again it might not have. Aether way your bases would have been covered.

[Giullio]

Ahhh... so much energy wasted in this topic...

[obesebear]

Users may not argue a moderators decision publicly. Any and all complaints directed at a moderator must first address the moderator in question via PM. If the problem can not be resolved, then the moderator and user must send their positions to the forums global moderator. The forum global moderator will make or change any and/or all final decisions.

I like the part about arguing publicly since it is very hard for people to maintain their cool.  Were this in place, maybe Furzball and some others would still be around.  I think the publicity just causes both sides to further stand their ground so ultimately nothing is really accomplished.  As far as global moderators go, we all are: myself, sl1982, halkun, alhexx.  I'm just the only active one who gets the tag.

As far as the site is concerned, Programming Feedback should be eliminated since we now allow questions in the program's thread.  And there's Tech Support (maybe renamed Troubleshooting) for any other problems.   Also, instead of the site's own search engine I think we would benefit from implementing google to take care of that for us.  That may also help get rid of the "your last search was less than 30 seconds ago" problem.

[Kudistos Megistos]

Shoot first ask later is how I've been trained and lived my life for years.

We're not in downtown Baghdad. That may be a fine policy when your life is at stake, but over here the worst possible thing that could arise from failing to act quickly enough is that a thread might be on the wrong board for a couple of hours. The two situations aren't really comparable.

Users may not argue a moderators decision publicly. Any and all complaints directed at a moderator must first address the moderator in question via PM. If the problem can not be resolved, then the moderator and user must send their positions to the forums global moderator. The forum global moderator will make or change any and/or all final decisions.

When you solve one problem, you often create two more. In this case, making it impossible to publicly question a moderator's decision would greatly reduce transparency. Users need to know what's going on if they are to feel comfortable on the forums; keeping everyone in the dark about why Tommy Atkins or Joe Bloggs got banned creates an Orwellian atmosphere. Decisions made behind doors always feel very shady to me.

Furthermore, by having everything in the open, it forces everyone to either play nice or lose the respect of all the forum's members. You wouldn't have a court case behind closed doors, would you? No, because power could be abused and no-one would know. By making these things public, we can see who's doing what and everyone will be encouraged to behave fairly.

As far as the site is concerned, Programming Feedback should be eliminated since we now allow questions in the program's thread.

I have no strong objection to this, but what would we do with all the threads? Things are already very messy after the last change. Would all the threads be moved to the "projects" board. (obviously, it would be absurd to just get rid of them; all that valuable knowledge would be lost)

That may also help get rid of the "your last search was less than 30 seconds ago" problem.

I fucking hate that. The sooner the search problem is dealt with, the better.

It's also pretty hard for people to hold back the temptation to create a new thread instead of using the search function when said search function is almost unusable.

[Bosola]

when said search function is almost unusable.

Ideally, we'd embed a Google search function into the site. The problem is that whilst SMF's search engine can use different metrics to decide what's relevant, none of them are too much good for our purposes. You can make SMF prioritize long threads, but some tech threads are only a couple of pages. You can force exact keyword matches, but someone researching a field won't know what keywords they're looking for. You can emphasise stickies, but we only sticky threads about forum rules. We can make subjects more important, but that's no good if - again - we don't know what keywords we want.

The only metric I can see which would help is the 'match first message' function. Most technical threads are clear about their purposes in the very first thread. They don't tend to wander or digress, but rather stick to a narrowly defined subject ("Field action opcodes", or "The world map layout"). Because these threads stick to a particular purpose, adding extra weight to 'prioritize matching whole threads' might help a little too.

Just some thoughts.

EDIT: And another thing. You guys are aware you can autoban anyone who joins with a particular username, right? For names like 'Seifer', this would have been bad (lots of Seifer fans in the FF world). Various manglings of Norse gods, on the other hand, won't get many false positives. Or, at the very least, Herm will at least spell the names of his idols correctly for a change.

[Kudistos Megistos]

Various manglings of Norse gods, on the other hand, won't get many false positives. Or, at the very least, Herm will at least spell the names of his idols correctly for a change.

The problem is that we'd have to have over 9000 different ban words for each of the over 9000 characters in Norse mythology if we are to account for all the different ways he could misspell them.

[Bosola]

That's a sacrifice I'm willing to make.

[Bosola]

But back to the topic at hand.

Ok here is my problem with all this. People complain that forum descriptions are too ambiguous, yet I do not see anyone offering up better wording. You say that this is your community? Well maybe it is time that you help us make it better. (Note: This is a generalization, some people actually do have input)

I think we can only organize topics once we understand

1. What our topics are, and
2. How they feed into each other

Now, I think the following demonstrates the 'genealogy of knowledge' on QHIMM - the ways that one sort of knowledge begets another, and therefore where threads are likely to cross topics. Objects above are 'parents' to, or 'lead to' objects linked below them:

So, we start by reverse engineering the PC and PSX builds. From this, we learn about file formats and how the data they hold is processed. This knowledge leads to, respectively, Extractors and Mechanics Documentation. Extractors soon become editors. All QHIMM members need to do now is create ideas for Mod Projects.

Once we have these ideas, we can apply our mechanics knowledge and editors to create Mods. People play them, and submit bug reports, telling us about their Technical Problems. Meanwhile, non-modders visit our forums wanting to get the PC build up and running. Because their bug reports usually concern our patches for the PC version, Technical Problems and PC Build Tech Support are effectively twinned.

If we can agree to this, or something similar, we can recognize how and when topics will merge and fork. Understanding this is key.

[Mako]

That's a sacrifice I'm willing to make.

This does not need to happen...If you to go thought the pain of adding all the "badwords" you might as well install a no proxy mod for SMF which works really well preventing any of the above problems.

Don't know what to do about SMF's search system, it sucks...

[Tenko Kuugen]

I cannot take anyone's complaints seriously if they run anything on gaia.
That's like working at mcdonalds to the fullest of your abilities and complaining your application to be a nuclear physics scientiest was rejected.
I thought Furz was a pretty okay person, there goes my respect.

[sl1982]

He was an okay person. He had right to question why he received a warning. What he didnt have a right to do was make derogatory remarks and general disrespect towards others. Had he kept his cool and acted civil in the matter he would have still been here today.

[Kudistos Megistos]

>double posting

Mods, ban him!

As for the problem of how to deal with the ambiguous nature of board descriptions, the only solution is to realise that there will always be grey areas and use common sense in enforcing the rules.

No matter how clear the rules and board descriptions are, there will be threads that a reasonable and informed person won't be able to decide on a board for. There will be threads that one reasonable and informed person will think belongs in one board and another reasonable and informed person thinks belongs in another. There's nothing we can do about this. In these cases, it is unreasonable to discipline anyone.

Furthermore, people should think about why these rules exist. Surely, they are there so that the forums will be easier to use for everyone? They're not some retard filter and they're not there just so that we can punish people for breaking them. If there is a situation where it isn't clear what users or mods should do, then the rules are not fulfilling their purpose. In fact, they're doing the opposite of what they are designed to do by making things confusing and starting arguments

Personally, I think the most important question to ask, when deciding whether or not to punish someone for putting something on what one thinks is the wrong board, is "is this person being a dick?" "is it possible that a reasonable person could have looked at the rules and, bearing said rules in mind, have decided that this was the right board to post the thread in?". If one deems it possible that the posting may have been an honest mistake due to it not being obvious which board the thread belonged in, there is no reason to discipline the user. If, however, it is obvious that the person was ignorant of the rules or just completely disregarded them, then there is reason to reprimand the user. When in doubt, the user must be given the benefit of said doubt. If it turns out that the user actually is a dick, there will be plenty more chances to stick some green writing under his name.

[obesebear]

This needs to be cleared up, a warning means absolutely nothing unless the person who receives it continues breaking that rule or others back to back to back.  The boards are clear enough that most people have no problem at all putting posts where they need to be.  There are plenty of gray area ones that stay where they are, and there are plenty of gray area threads that have been silently moved to where they better fit.

There are separate boards for separate topics, and if no one enforces having threads put in their proper place, then qhimm.com will return to how it was before I became a moderator and 90% of threads ended up in Game Tweaking/Projects.   Could the boards be clearer?  Yes, definitely.  Are they clear enough to keep most threads where they should be?  Yes.   Will anyone be moderated or banned for putting threads in the wrong place? No, unless they are obviously doing it on purpose.

Punishment via our warning system is being moderated or worse. Getting a green tag under your name means nothing other than to show other moderators what you were warned for, and to serve as a small reminder to the person who received it.

Also, double posting is cool here... unless it leads to flooding.

[Opine]

Just a thought - but I frequent another forum, where they have an infraction point system. I don't know if this would be possible to implement on this board or not.

There, if you are warned once for something trivial it only appears on your User CP and as a message in your inbox.

It only shows up publicly, under your username in threads, if your infractions points are greater than 0 (Minor warnings have no points, unless you receive a second minor warning before a previous one has expired.)

Also, different violations carry different weights of points. So if you do something obviously being rude, your warning could carry high points - whereas if make an honest mistake, it can have low or none.
Or if you do something warn-worthy before a previous 0-point warning has expired, then second warning carries more weight.

I realize this might make it harder for the mods to keep track of who was warned for what. I also realize this might not be possible on this board. -Just a thought.

[Tenko Kuugen]

I don't think we need an elaborate system like that. In a bigger forum, maybe.
But on average, I'd say we have less than 100 relevant posts in a day. ( Or maybe a little over that, I don't really read EVERYTHING, especially not off-topic )
As such, mods can actually decide on a case-by-case basis what is handled how. It's not like we have 50 mods, where half questions the actions of the others.