Moderation

[T}{OR]

Is it possible to move the OT posts and create a new thread out of them? Just an idea...

[nearmiss]

It is easier to just delete or edit them.

A separate thread Off topic would just be a random mess

[philip.ed]

out of interest, has Oleg ever asked people to stay on topic? Sometimes the O/T stuff is interesting, it's the abuse that some members dish out which is just intolerable.

[Biggs [CV]]

I have not been here long, but I do visit many forums. Personally I would make an "Off topic" thread and sticky it. I would take any off topic posts and put them there. I would also get Nearmiss some help by adding a assistant moderator. Preferably someone who works differant hours and can check up on the forums a couple times a day when Nearmiss is not able to.
Being a moderator is not a fun job. This forum seems to be more mature and well behaved than most some getting him some help may work well.
Just my .02, take for what its worth...........

[philip.ed]

What needs to be drawn is a line on what kind of posts are off topic. For example, my post notifying Oleg that the codes were wrong was deleted for being O/T. But surely that is within the context of the update? IMHO that really should not have been deleted. If every post like that had been deleted in every update, then there would be a number of features in SoW which would never have been edited to suit reailty.

[Blackdog_kt]

Originally Posted by Triggaaar

Actually anything relating to what's being done with the game was seen as on topic - you could ask anything about it and make suggestions of your own. What was runing the updates were posts (several from me) discussing random nonsense, like the ethics of chute shooting, and those posts don't belong in an update thread. And there are always posts telling others whether or not there post was ok, and we've been told that they don't belong in update threads either. I don't know what's so difficult to understand, discuss what's happening with the development of the game in update threads, and discuss everything else elsewhere.

That's actually my take on things as well. That being said, i realize it's a time consuming task, so nearmiss does the best he can to find a middle ground between enforcing something we voted for and not having to spend the entirety of his time doing it.

From where i'm standing, what we have now is not the best case scenario but it's one of the only two possible scenarios:
1) Let it run wild like before
2) Be strict within the limited time confines of real life, which ends up in the moderator (notice the lack of plural there, this is the issue and it's not the fault of nearmiss) having to take shorcuts to prevent it from taking up all his time.

The solution is simple:
3) The forums needs a few more moderators, preferrably on different time zones.

This way the rules we ourselves asked for would be enforced, while also giving moderators enough time to pause and think:
"Hmm okay, this is not 100% on topic but it's useful, i'll let it slide and check back up on it at night before i go to bed. If it devolves into a debate about the moral implications of war i'll tell them to take it to another thread, or even cut and paste their posts into one myself".

I've been in various forums over the years and this was the best method i've seen, pruning the threads and moving off topic but possibly useful stuff into their own thread. The downside is that it's not doable if you only have one guy. Under the current circumstances nearmiss can not be blamed for the outcome and neither can the community.

I think these are just steps in the right direction to get us where we need to go. Reading this thread i see that members have come up with suggestions of their own and nearmiss has a level headed attitude towards it all which further helps things along.

What i would do if i was an octopus with 3 brains and 3 different accounts running on separate PCs () would be to monitor the following:

1) Relevance of the posts to the update. Spin-off discussions would be allowed on an "evaluate it as it comes" basis and judged on how many "layers" detached they are from the original topic.

For example, posting a reference to back up a correction to something that's wrong in the screenshot would be okay. If not directly related to what the developer wants us to focus on it would still be ok to mention it but not to steer the main discussion away from the originally intented theme.
Knowledge is knowledge and if someone has it, let them share it with the developers as long as the new off-shoot theme doesn't end up totally dominating the rest of the thread. Bit tough to balance, so let's see it in detail.

A discussion on the internal workings of a piston engine would be fine, IF the update was about piston engine related features, like exhaust flames.
Posting the same discussion about the effect of mixture on exhaust flames would be off topic however, if the update was about showing off the AI's routines at work in a short video. It would still be ok to post that "i just spotted what could be a mistake on the exhaust flame effect" but refrain from going any further than that, as an in-depth analysis of it would totally sidetrack the original topic about the AI. So, we could have:

--->main topic: Self explanatory, this stays in
------>1st layer: Feedback and possible oversights concerning EVERYTHING that has to do with the game or the update content, even if it's not directly related to the main topic. These are just comments/statements.
References and in-depth discussion are ok, as long as they concern the main theme of the update only. This is done in order to minimize clutter, however valuable or interesting it might be. So what do we do with it in order not to miss potentially useful information? Move it to layer 2.
--------->2nd layer: More in-depth discussion and references about things that concern the update and the simulator, but do not directly pertain to the main topic and intented content of the update. Essentially, this contains all the stuff that's worthy of discussion game-wise, but doesn't specifically focus on what the developer wants to show us this week.
This is most of the times useful information and spreads the knowledge among the members of the community, but also has the potential to totally pull a thread off-topic. It's still valid information, but it needs to be a thread of its own. The solution?
A moderator can move it or the users could display some common courtesy and go "i spotted this and this and i have XYZ references, i'm opening this thread here [link] so we can discuss this more without messing with the originally intented theme of this thread".

2) Manners, regardless of the content of the post. No matter if people present valuable feedback, some modicum of respect should be maintained. I could have the best references in the world and copies of the libraries of all the world's aviation museums in my book case, if i present it by telling people to "shut the f**k up, you know nothing", then i should be given a warning to rephrase the useful part of my post in a non-insulting manner and failing that, whatever kind of ban-hammer punishment is in place for personal attacks. A bit of irony and humor could slide, as long as it stayed civil, but not much more than that.

Like i already said, it's not complicated at all to see how this would benefit everyone. What's complicated is trying to enforce it with one volunteer in the moderator seat, because it entails actually reading through most of the thread.
If we had like 1-2 persons for US, EU and Russian or Asian timezones to do this in turns however, it would be much easier to do. What could happen is that i could post a blank "marker" post mid-way through the update (eg, write "marker" with big bold letters and nothing else) to let the other moderators know how far along i am moderating the thread. Then, they would just have to search for my latest posts, click on the one that's in the weekly update thread and continue monitoring from there, add a marker of their own when they are done to let the next guy in line know where to pick it up from and so on.

Hopefully, SoW will be released before long and while i suspect that various updates will keep pouring on (future expansions, patches and so on), people will have sufficiently satisfied their curiosity about what SoW is, know what is and isn't possible by comparing their previous wishlists with the end product and as such, will tend to keep in focus more.

[nearmiss]

The following sentence is from the forum rules

Any kind of discussion concerning moderators' or administrators' actions is prohibited.

Everyone will be delighted to know we now have an additional moderator on this forum.

KG26_Alpha

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