Advice on Moderating the WPT and Other Televised Tournaments Forum

[Vincent Lepore]

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Hi Byron

My guess is you would be one of them, and Vince would be the other 4.

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Ouch!

Vince

[toots]

Let me add one more agreement with those who'd request being a little more strict with the trolls running the pros off.

I have very much enjoyed most of the posts that the pros have made here, and have been generally horrified by the trolls who want to sidetrack their posts into personal attacks.

Am I suggesting that a pro player should be given some special protection here and/or handled with kid gloves?

Absolutely.

The pro doesn't have to post here. The pros do so out of their own willingness to share. It's much more likely that some of us can learn from them than vice versa, so when we run a pro off, we're the losers, not them.

[benfranklin]

As already stated by several posters, the main problem with this forum is when threads turn personal. Most of us can easily see when a thread is turning into an intramural p!ssing contest, and we can ignore it or indulge in cheap thrills at our whim. Locking such threads after the fact is the proverbial horse/barn problem.

The problem is when "members" launch personal attacks on name players who post here, or even on name players who don't. In the latter catagory, of particular disgust are the "Would you hit her?" kind, usually posted by prepubescent geeks who have never hit anything but themselves. I think it's safe to say that these kinds of posts keep many pros, especially women, from ever posting here in the first place, and certainly have driven away any who have stopped by in the past.

Again, locking the thread after the damage is done is of little help. Comments of this kind would be grounds for banning in a perfect world, but of little practical use, given the apparent endless supply of mindless idiots and the ease of opening another account in a new name.

The ideal, in my mind, would be to leave this (and other) forums as is, and to have a fully-moderated professional strategy board, similar to what was suggested by a previous posters. To get useful feedback from the members here, anyone could submit posts, but all postings would be pre-screened by a moderator, with inappropriate comments simply rejected. This would obviously be a lot of work, and probably something no one would take on.

[Meatmaw]

I don't think it's easy to automate a process which would help keep pros from getting pissed at trolls. Even if you had the best means possible to delete a post or ban a poster when you felt he was trolling, the damage is done once the pro reads the post(s).

I think ultimately the best way to keep pros around is to fight fire with fire. If someone posts something unpleasant to someone we'd like to keep around, those of us who feel it's inappropriate should assail the particular post with insults and apologies meants to reassure them that most of us are decent. An intelligent post, followed by an irrelevant troll, followed by 15 attacks on said troll mixed in with thanks to the OP are about as good as it'll get to retaining people I'd bet.

[maurile]

I'm glad you'll have moderator powers. It's an impossible task for just one or two people to catch inappropriate posts quickly and delete them. Five or six moderators per forum would not be overdoing it -- that way, at least one or two are likely to be on the board at any given time. So adding you as a moderator is a step in the right direction.

I agree with whiskeytown that the biggest problem is idiots making juvenile insults that get threads off-track and drive away mature posters, including celebrities. (Look at any thread Annie Duke posted in for examples of this.)

I don't think locking threads is as good a solution as just deleting individual posts within the thread, if that's an option for you. Unless the whole thread sucks.

Also, if you respond to the "report this post" function quickly, it will encourage more people to use it, which will make your job easier. (Does it send you a PM when somebody reports a post?)

[maurile]

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I don't think it's easy to automate a process which would help keep pros from getting pissed at trolls. Even if you had the best means possible to delete a post or ban a poster when you felt he was trolling, the damage is done once the pro reads the post(s).

I think ultimately the best way to keep pros around is to fight fire with fire. If someone posts something unpleasant to someone we'd like to keep around, those of us who feel it's inappropriate should assail the particular post with insults and apologies meants to reassure them that most of us are decent. An intelligent post, followed by an irrelevant troll, followed by 15 attacks on said troll mixed in with thanks to the OP are about as good as it'll get to retaining people I'd bet.

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I totally disagree with this. With several active moderators, and with people using the "report this post" function, inappropriate posts can regularly be deleted within minutes of their appearance.

Fighting fire with fire just turns the whole thread into a flame war, and nobody wants to read through that.

[Meatmaw]

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With several active moderators, and with people using the "report this post" function, inappropriate posts can regularly be deleted within minutes of their appearance.

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That is true. I would support granting these administrator privileges to enough trusted users of this forum such that we could have a quick turn around time on such actions.

[flair1239]

I would suggest that you combine simaliar threads.

Or maybe, if somebody starts a simaliar thread lock it and leave a meassage "please post in blah blah thread.".

I think the main problem is just clutter.

[Cyrus]

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What, if any, problems do you think the forum has which you think can be improved through my weapon of choice?

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The board suffers from over-posting. If you want to promote clarity you should be pruning -and then pruning again- till a thread is clear.

One example of over-posting is when people start exchanging messages that would have been better exchanged over PMs or e-mail (e.g. "Yeah, Right"; "What? You don't believe me?"; "Nope!"; "Why?"; etc). Pruning down those sub-threads would encourage people to put up more comprehensive posts. Of course, you'd have to paste up the remaining posts in the thread so as not to orphan them (I hope they gave you that ability).

Good luck. It's harder work than you think.

[Dynasty]

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Good luck. It's harder work than you think.

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Then it's fortunate that Mat has no expectations for me. I'm not getting paid for this. So, I'm basically taking actions only when I'm on the forum for my normal reasons.