Make me a moderator. No, really. I mean it.


We don’t need real names to weed out the trolls. We all know that isn’t going to work. Look:

But since there are, MANY bloggers expanding on these, so I won’t go into my feelings at length. What I will say is this:

We don’t need real names to restore civility on the forums.

What we NEED is more people to stomp on the pointless/nasty posts that make the forums horrible.

That’s all. It’s that simple.

Trolls be trollin’. Real names won’t sort that out. That’s crazy talk. What we NEED is people to stomp on the troll posts, the rubbish, the spam, the bots, the abuse, the negative.

And I’m more than willing to put on my stomping boots and lend a hand. Here’s a visual aid!


Keeva’s note: I figure when Real ID is in full swing, everyone will
be able to find my embarrassing photos, so I’m getting in first.
TADA! Wellies.

I have written to Blizzard a number of times with forum issues, and asked if there is a way that I could “help” with moderating my realm forums. Either they don’t have enough moderators on the job (to be able to keep an eye on everything), or the current system isn’t working. How does it work, anyway? If I flag a post, does it ping a mod? Do you need 10 flags before it pings a mod? Do you need 10 of a single poster’s offensive posts to be flagged before it pings a mod? I genuinely wanted to know about moderation, how it worked, and if I could help to improve it. I never got an answer.

I don’t even know how to get a mod’s attention on the forums (the biohazard flag doesn’t seem to do anything), so I usually just email Blizzard direct – which is very effective, I must say – but this just highlights the fact that moderation on the forums seems very hit and miss, and that if you want something done, you have to tug on someone’s sleeve and ask for help directly.

Will the new system of downranking mean that mods will be stepping into all low-ranked threads to see if there’s bad stuff going on, without the need to flag posts?

How many forum mods do we have? How often are they watching? Do they watch all the time, or do a sweep once a week? Is there one for each realm, or only a handful, responsible for all of them?

There’s just so much rubbish on the forums, it’s not surprising that it’s hard to keep up with it all.



Let us self-moderate

The solution is simple though. Blizzard – allow us to self-moderate. Take a leaf out of WoW.com’s books – have the terrible posts greyed out by downranking them. You’ve already said you’re going in that direction anyway – we don’t need real names on top of that. Let us help keep our community neat and tidy. Let us grey out all the rubbish. Nice bright blue posts are the valuable ones, and dark grey (almost black and illegible) for the trolls or the pointless posts. It really is that simple.

Reporting posts is fairly time-consuming (and paying enough moderators to clean them all up must be prohibitive, I’m guessing). Downranking posts is EEEEEEEEEEASY. Click, done. Relegated to the junk pile, or raised up as a shining beacon of WoW-wisdom.

Let the community look after the community. Put on a few more “real” moderators, but let us all do the bulk of it.

I’ll clean up this town, one malicious post at a time.

RARRRR! *stomp stomp stomp*



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