Message From The Admins

We've had to do some painfully subjective bans over the past few days. I say painful because they are bans that were made due to cumulative, subjective issues with certain users over months and years, and not single infractions that broke the camel's back. (So to speak.)

These are always extremely difficult calls to make, and by our internal policies can only be made by an admin -- not a mod -- because they're a subjective judgement call made for the health of the site and not due to violations of any particular forum rule.

These events are extremely rare. In the entire site's ~5 year history, I can count the number of these bans we have made on one hand. This is because making bans for subjective reasons that aren't backed up by specific rule infractions harm the users' overall perception of our integrity and consistency. If we can nuke some guy for no specific reason, what's to say that you aren't next?

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Our moderation is short-staffed. It has been for awhile. This is mostly due to the fact that everyone I have approached about the job who I feel is qualified (I can share my requirements later if you're interested, but that's another post) has turned me down.

Honestly, this is expected: the people who are sane enough to understand the nature of the position and the thankless level of responsibility are typically too sane to accept the offer.

Being a moderator is thankless, strenuous, and altogether pretty awful. The fact you only appear out of the woodwork when something has gone wrong, plus general human mental quirks around confirmation bias, means that the more you do your job, the more you will inevitably become associated with being the bad guy. You must constantly fight this perception, and it requires skill, diplomacy, training, and a certain level of self-critical diligence and effort that is often unreasonable to expect from volunteers.

I have gotten a lot of feedback about heavy-handedness among some of our moderation staff, and you'll just have to trust that I have taken it to heart. But I believe all of our moderators are doing the best job they can within the limitations of the rules we have imposed upon them. We need to work on consistency and avoiding the perception of favoritism. When favoritism appears to occur, users can't always be expected to give us the benefit of the doubt and understand there is almost always non-public, extenuating circumstances that have caused it.

I ask that you believe me when I say that we're working on it.

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That being said:

Users need to understand that our mods are limited in their powers. They cannot perform perma-bans, nor temp-bans without providing lengthy documentation and evidence. Even then, there are typically threads about the user in the Moderator forum that involve every mod, and every admin, and frequently run to many pages before a decision is made. Just about the only decision a moderator is allowed to make in a vacuum is a topic ban, and even then, I'm pushing towards using them less and less as a disciplinary tool in general.

Why do I tell you this? Because I get a lot of complaints about a single moderator, attributing blatant, dictatorial, vengeance-driven behavior and permanent, ruthless disciplinary action that they simply do not have the power to take even if they wanted to. This tends to make me skeptical and dismissive of the overall claims even if there are nuggets of truth buried in there, because I start to distrust the reliability and intentions of the messenger.

We site admins have a famously low tolerance for drama. We have no interest whatsoever in investigating who said what to who, who exaggerated what about what situation, who has an agenda against which user clique, who's spreading rumors about what relationship, or any of that.

We run a FFXI and FFXIV gaming site, of which the forums are one small component of the overall operation. There isn't enough you could pay any of us to keep track of all that drama, and if you try and play games with the moderators or admins based on any of it, the admins are quite likely to just advise nuking every affected party so we don't have to waste our available free time and precious sanity tracking down who's saying what about who. That's time and effort we could be spending on making the site more useful for everyone else.

This isn't me being mean, or lazy, or dismissive. This is practical reality. We aren't on these forums all day like you guys. We simply can't keep up. There aren't enough hours in the day.

And that's just the admins! Moderators are all volunteer, so they have even less of a reason to do so. Frankly, I'm amazed they haven't all told us to go to hell by now.

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This means that if we end up getting a group of users who are consistently the source of reams upon reams of stacked-up drama every time we visit the site... users who consistently tiptoe right up to the edge of the rules and then fill our Inboxes with reports, complaints, bizarre-ass interpersonal drama about relationships and stalking and disagreements and sniping, etc, eventually an admin (like me) is just going to make the call to nuke them just to keep us all sane. It simply isn't worth it.

There is a cut-off of diminishing returns such that your contributions to the forum are not worth the sheer effort it takes to keep you around. It's nothing personal. No harm, no foul. There's the door.

I've recently made this call about two elder users. Banning Sevourn and Flionheart was my call -- not our moderators' -- so you can stop sending me PM's alleging forty different drama-filled conspiratorial interpersonal narratives about how or why a certain moderator would have done so. You just make yourself look like part of the problem.

Like I said, the number of bans we've made like this in the half-decade the site has been around can be counted on one hand. In both cases, the record of warnings, topic bans, temp bans, perma-bans-and-pardons, etc number several pages of text in the user's account notes.

So please do not freak out that suddenly the red-barred ban hammer is going to come down on your head with zero warning. We don't operate that way. And we're not going to start flipping out and banning people out of sheer frustration alone.

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But you need to realize that the smooth operation of this site is a partnership. I need my mods to be consistent, polite, diplomatic, and patient. If they aren't doing that, I still need to know. Please continue to report your concerns. Your feedback is always taken to heart, even if it's just tucked away into a corner of the admins' heads for future consideration and does not result in immediately action until I get enough consistent complaints to make a case.

But I need my users to avoid twisting themselves into impossibly complex, nasty Gordion Knot relationships, while engaging in moderator-backed efforts to destroy one another's reputation and credibility, and then running to an admin when it blows up in your face. It's important that we all establish realistic expectations of what we can expect from you, and what you can expect from us.

Everyone needs to take a few steps away, and breathe.

Thanks.