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Concerns with Wowhead's Forums
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Post by
127599
This post was from a user who has deleted their account.
Post by
pelf
Did you seriously measure these forums on how many memes they generate? Is there some metric that measures Quality like Memes Per Week? MPW? Wat?
Post by
260787
This post was from a user who has deleted their account.
Post by
Gnub
Excuse me, Gnub but who do you think you are? You're a moderator so on behalf of the OP, we'd appreciate it if you'd STFU and moderate.
Thank you for ignoring the community and behaving like a robot.
/end sarcasm.
*beep*
Post by
Malgayne
What about admins, are we allowed to express opinions? :)
Your appraisal of the community is for the most part correct, though I think I would argue with you on the reasons why. Here are my responses to your concerns:
You're right, Wowhead's forum traffic isn't as big as it could be, but there's one big reason for that: the WoW official forums. The fact is, if you want to go online and talk about WoW, there's already a
highly
populated source for that info. The only people we get here are people who hate the WoW forums for some reason, or people who specifically love Wowhead so much that they'd prefer to post here. This isn't something we can directly affect—all we can do is to try and make our forums as attractive an alternative as possible. This leads right into...
It would be foolish for us to run our forums the way Blizzard runs theirs. If the two are run the same way, then there's no reason why you would ever want to use ours instead of theirs. We need to present an alternative, even if it's an alternative that some people—or most people—don't prefer. This idea has informed a lot of aspects of the way we've run our forums, like our decision to retain individual class forums rather than just breaking them down into class roles the way Blizzard has done. This is also why the mods are in "full force"—because we want out forums to be different from the official forum, which is too big to moderate on that level.
I like having our moderators involved in the forums—it's something I specifically encourage our moderators to do. I firmly believe that it's better to defuse a flame war with a humorous post than to ban the people involved, and in order to do that a moderator needs to have a presence on the forums. I understand that not everyone agrees with me on this. But please understand that maintaining a "silent" moderation system isn't going to free the mods from accusations of being biased—that will happen regardless. Forums where the mods remain silent are actually MORE prone to accusations of bias, because it's a lot easier to talk trash to some mysterious invisible poster than it is to talk trash to someone you know.
Yeah, people will tear up just about any post on a forum, and it sucks. This is a problem not just with our forums but with forums in general. It's also, I think, the biggest problem our forum has. I'm always trying to find ways to help deal with this, but it's not easy.
I don't like the excess of forum games much either. We're trying to figure out what to do with them. Let's ask this: If the board wasn't cluttered with forum games, how many of you would start posting in Off-Topic?
The Beach Boys are awesome.
(##RESPBREAK##)2##DELIM##Malgayne##DELIM##
Post by
165617
This post was from a user who has deleted their account.
Post by
Malgayne
You've made fair responses to the other posts in the thread, but I don't see how you really addressed mine. Maybe I'm missing some things.
The conservative/liberal issues really shouldn't be an issue in any forum except Off-Topic, and I don't see it being much of an issue there. I don't think anyone goes to a WoW forum expecting it to retain a certain political flavor, and identifying the entire forum with a certain political flavor seems to be exactly the kind of bias you want the mods and admins to avoid.
Memes stem from forum size. In order for a meme to reach critical mass you need a certain number of users, and that's a number we just don't have. The official forums might, but you don't even see much in the way of memes coming out of there. It seems like you're arguing that we need to find more ways to stand out, and simultaneously arguing that we should be just like other forums.
Our mods
are
better than that. We never lock threads for having a certain point of view—we lock threads for flaming. If you can't express your point of view without offending everyone, then your thread gets locked no matter what your opinion is. If you feel like we're failing at this goal, then I welcome your feedback—please let me know where it's happening so I can take action. If you feel like this is an impossible or unworthy goal, though, I respectfully disagree with you. :)
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Post by
558249
This post was from a user who has deleted their account.
Post by
Squishalot
1) The issue with people here being conservative, like I stated earlier, is the fact that most people that go to forums are not. Its like going to a car rally on a motorcycle- you feel out of place. You could argue that, "Hey, that makes us unique." Well, no it does not because its not labeled as such. You go to that car rally, in your car, because its a car rally- not a giant motorcycle run. Its like you stumbled into a wasps nest and the sores make you unique and stand out because no one else was hardmed during the making of this film.
If you like your motorcycle, go to a motorcycle rally. If you like your car, go to a car rally. Don't go on your motorcycle to a car rally and expect everyone to start riding bikes just because that's what you like.
Read: If you don't like the way Wowhead is run, in terms of its moderation, go to a forum that you do enjoy, be it the official forums, 4chan or Youtube comments.
2) The thing that I brought up about memes I stated earlier- it was apart of an argument. The mere fact that you pointed this out backs up a point I had earlier about people pointing out a single detail and not the overarching logic. Memes are a strong way to measure the impact that a site has. Is it any wonder that youtube and 4chan are main sources of memes? My point stemmed for the fact that Wowhead doesn't stand out other than being an uptight forum with clueless people.
Does it need to be? Memes, both their creation and use, are a strong way to measure the size of the juvenile / immature population of a site. Thottbot has no real memes, but it too has a strong impact on the community. And besides, at the end of the day, Wowhead and Thottbot are both designed to be database utility sites, not forums. A mature forum is there to support the database.
Read: If you measure the value of a forum in memes, then go back to 4chan.
3) Mods should be robots- there is a reason why people in the FDA don't hang out with people from Pfizer's or Kelloggs- its a conflict of interest. I don't quite get how anyone doesn't get this. By getting yourself involved with a debate you are more likely to care how that thread turns out. If you see that the thread is being driven in a different direction than what you would want then you might be more likely to lock it.
I'd like you to bring up at least one example of a thread locked by a mod that's participated in it as a discussion member. Go on. We'll be waiting.
Read: If you have no stats / info / sources to back you up, then your argument is, pardon my language, full of crap.
Post by
Malgayne
Be fair—I DO want to hear feedback, even negative feedback. I'm not in the business of telling people "if you don't like what we're giving you, go elsewhere". I want to make sure I fully understand the arguments, and I know what you want out of our forums that we're not providing. If, once I do fully understand your arguments, I have still determined that it's something we won't or can't provide, then I'll tell you so. But I certainly don't want to tell you to shut up and go away just because you're expressing a negative opinion.
That applies to the rest of the posters in this thread as well. :)
Post by
Squishalot
I thought I was being fair, in respect to his arguments. He clearly expects a forum to have certain characteristics that we don't have here. But in that light, it's not really correct of lostguide to come to a Toyota showroom and complain about the fact that there aren't any Skylines or WRXs or Hummers in there.
Presumably, if he's looking for a Skyline or WRX, he can check out a Nissan or Subaru showroom instead, since that will have what he wants. If he wants a forum full of trolls and memes, 'because that's what forums are about and that's what types of people who go to forums are like', then really, 4chan or the official WoW forums are more for him.
I lurk on a couple of webcomic forums, and I used to post heavily on one philosophy discussion forum before coming to Wowhead. All the ones I frequent, and the threads in particular that I read on said forums, are characterised by mature discussion and are relatively free of trolls, unproductive behaviour, and generally require little to no moderation to maintain that. It's certainly not the case that 'most people who go to forums are not conservative'.
Strip any perception of maliciousness out of my statements, and you'll see that they're very fair points. If he enjoys another forum more than he enjoys Wowhead, then what's he doing here?
Edit: The especially interesting thing is the perception that I'm getting that his primary cause for concern is the Randomness forum, from his comments on the front page. But all things considered, is that what the forums on Wowhead are about? Not really - I would have assumed that the main service the forums provide come from WoW General and the class forums, which are generally self-regulated by 'senior' members of the community.
Edit 2: In fairness, lostguide has been a reasonably good contributor in the past to some productive discussion topics in Randomness at least, from what I recall. But I also presumed he posts here because he enjoys it, as I presume with Gorefiend, Adamsm, Funden, Hyperspacerebel, Heckler, and everyone else who gets involved in a good discussion. Given that he's not enjoying it anymore, and that nothing in the culture has changed, it means that he's essentially ready to move on.
Post by
148723
This post was from a user who has deleted their account.
Post by
Squishalot
2) The thing that I brought up about memes I stated earlier- it was apart of an argument. The mere fact that you pointed this out backs up a point I had earlier about people pointing out a single detail and not the overarching logic.
I just realised - Malgayne didn't point anything out about memes in his original reply. Are you imagining arguments and fights that don't actually exist?
Post by
148723
This post was from a user who has deleted their account.
Post by
Squishalot
2) The thing that I brought up about memes I stated earlier- it was apart of an argument. The mere fact that you pointed this out backs up a point I had earlier about people pointing out a single detail and not the overarching logic.
I just realised - Malgayne didn't point anything out about memes in his original reply. Are you imagining arguments and fights that don't actually exist?
No, other people brought up memes, he's responding to them.
But he's responded to those a few times in this thread already.
Post by
148723
This post was from a user who has deleted their account.
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