Jump to content

[Moderation] Resources, Tips, Guidance


Igor

Recommended Posts

10 minutes ago, TRS-80 said:

I hid the post (giving reason: post bumping against Rules, please read again)

 

10 minutes ago, TRS-80 said:

and sent a PM to the dev (piter75) introducing myself and asking him to let me know if the guy continue to harass him via PM (as I would otherwise have no way of knowing that).


Thanks.


Asking bumper politely to not bump after they done it is one thing ... how to prevent this to happen? Or at least how to limit this down as much as possible?

Link to comment
Share on other sites

37 minutes ago, Igor said:

Asking bumper politely to not bump after they done it is one thing ... how to prevent this to happen? Or at least how to limit this down as much as possible?

 

Well, off the top of my head, I think the only way would be to (by default) place all new posts in moderation queue for Development forum, perhaps with exception of known group of Developers. But I think this type of solution would end up to be more work and hassle than the problem. And potentially limit valuable contributions and feedback from new people / Developers joining the community (and might put them off so much they never return).

 

From what I understand that has already been tried with pretty much the exact same results as I just laid out above. But I am the new guy here, so... ?

 

Also, I am having some extra time right now, and able to give the forums a lot of attention, but that will not always be the case. So maybe not the best idea to vastly increase workload of (current and future) volunteer Mods. Just my $0.02. Igor, I know you like to create comfortable environment for Developers who are even more valuable than Mods I would say, but Mods are people, too. :D 

 

EDIT: Therefore taking all the above into account, I propose that the simplest, least intrusive way for Devs and Mods to work together would be to start promoting the idea for Devs (or anyone, really) to simply flag ("Report this content" little flag) and then let us Mods do our job. Hopefully not too distracting for the Devs?

 

EDIT2: If that is not enough teeth for you, maybe give them a day or two (or more?) to think about it (short ban) in addition to the Warning? Personally I am not as bothered by this sort of bumping, but I am not a Dev and clearly it is a pet peeve for you (and perhaps others?).

 

EDIT3: Maybe by creating this sort of super Developer friendly environment, you attract more Developers. IS the trade-off worth it? I don't know. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Link to comment
Share on other sites

What I had in mind is to make use of communication tools and techniques. Armbian doesn't have 3rd party advertisements and banners, but we could use its tooling to communicate a selection of short forum tips. Over and over again. What do you think? It will be some work to come up with something cool and usable in term of content and see how the tooling works.

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I split off all the discussion of TV Boxes to their own thread, so that you guys can continue to post examples, etc.:

 

In general, I think this thread is growing unwieldy and have requested a new sub-forum (Moderators / Moderation) so that I can split this all up into sub-topics for more organized discussion.

 

Eventually at the end of all these discussions, I hope to distill everything into some shorter guidelines. But I think we need to go through the process first and have all the existing tenured Mods weigh in with all the current sort of "unwritten rules" first, because I am too new and still getting calibrated to the existing culture.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • TRS-80 changed the title to [Moderation] Resources, Tips, Guidance

Yet another tip.

Before moving from my average/low website-ux-designfu created website I was studying this book: "Don't make me think". It's covering some UX basics. Light read. Enough to understand why its better to hire professionals to do the website for you then wasting time producing crap that makes more troubles than gain. Graphical and UX design was applied to the website, never to forum. It was planed, never executed. Eliminating confusion is the key element to lower the need for moderating. IMO its a serious job, but still, we can do it better if we known methods that works and those who doesn't. (design is probably just fine and a matter of personal taste/preference and skin can also be changed without much effort)

Link to comment
Share on other sites

On 1/23/2020 at 3:43 PM, TRS-80 said:

Well, off the top of my head, I think the only way would be to (by default) place all new posts in moderation queue for Development forum, perhaps with exception of known group of Developers. But I think this type of solution would end up to be more work and hassle than the problem. And potentially limit valuable contributions and feedback from new people / Developers joining the community (and might put them off so much they never return).

will likely end in me ignoring this queue even more means more work for the newcomer mods here. :lol::ph34r:

 

On 1/23/2020 at 3:43 PM, TRS-80 said:

From what I understand that has already been tried with pretty much the exact same results as I just laid out above. But I am the new guy here, so... ?

people will then just ask somewhere else.. and someone remembers this post?

veni vidi vici... and I remember I unlocked this post back then. at least devs not really tied (yet) to armbian may only post a few stuff here to let us know hot to fix things. We should not make it harder for them to contribute. IMO I prefer to deal with more annoying questions than with missing good contributions which I've to search then in someones gist or on someone else's github repo.. cause we scared him away..

 

On 1/23/2020 at 3:51 PM, Igor said:

What do you think? It will be some work to come up with something cool and usable in term of content and see how the tooling works.

you think this survives the usual add blocker most people have installed? test it and if it works why not..

 

On 1/23/2020 at 5:28 PM, TRS-80 said:

sub-topics for more organized discussion.

those who want will find each other no matter how much a thread is messed.. e.g. the rockchip guys here have a >2500 posts long PM thread talking to each other (and yes Igor you're out there on purpose, I didn't wanna float you back then with all the OT stuff and it all started with a discussion about beer back then.. :lol:). If I think it's 'important' that someone is aware of my post I just highlight them in the thread. If I'm just frustrated about rockchip again I rant in PMs so that only those which shouldn't get disturbed get disturbed.. :lol:

Another example those guys here:

found each other and share the pain to get an RTD SoC working. They had barley support from our side (me being the only one having the W2 board and honestly I didn't spend much time with it - just to much pain to deal with atm)

 

I think we should avoid 'overmoderating' the forum. It is a 'technical' forum and it's driven by development around armbian but there will always be people which just come with 'please support my random petproject' and I think we have to deal with those. Somehow.. The forum is a melting pot of people around arm some are more experienced some less (I started with some dirt cheap orange pi boards - zero and 2g-IoT - with no clue about booting on arm at all and now mostly focused on u-boot/kernel related stuff)... You don't wanna push those guys who can evolve out by being a dick in the first term... I'd rather just ignore those only requesting features without meaningful contribution, they might see that nobody cares about their petproject and move on or evolve to getting things done on their own. We're not super welcoming like it is the new 'trend' around the internet and that's IMO fine (good contributors like @piter75 find their way into the community without getting a 'warm welcome' with his first post :P)

 

For the development/boardbring up.. We once had a dedicated sub-forum for that:

https://forum.armbian.com/forum/22-board-bring-up/

 

somehow one of the few examples where this was used was for mt7623/BPi R2 or RTD 1295 (both didn't really made it) but at least the threads were mostly focused on development not on bloating.. Maybe something like this can work? And maybe such a thread can then be moderated a bit more to keep it focused on development and not random features request/petproject support who knows..

 

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I actually agree with almost all what you said @chwe

 

34 minutes ago, chwe said:

good contributors like @piter75 find their way into the community without getting a 'warm welcome' with his first post :P

 

I got a chuckle from this, good example. In the end, even after initially advocating for public welcoming, I decided to more follow the existing board culture (which I actually prefer) and ended up sending him a PM welcoming him (I think I simply told him "welcome! and good first post!" or similar). :)

 

At the end of the day we are all human beings (well especially discerning people who post such thoughtful contributions, maybe not so much those others demanding unreasonable things, etc.) and I think a warm personal message goes a long way toward making someone feel at home. But maybe not so fake and sunshine surface marketing like so much of the world and internet have by now become.

 

On 1/23/2020 at 1:31 PM, Igor said:

Eliminating confusion is the key element to lower the need for moderating.

 

It wasn't until I read Guidelines that I began to finally get my head around the idea behind the existing structure. So maybe this is something we can make better by improving the little texts under sub-forum headings (perhaps moving some info from Guidelines to there), and/or coming up with some more clear structure that immediately makes sense to everyone (including new people).

 

On 1/23/2020 at 9:51 AM, Igor said:

What I had in mind is to make use of communication tools and techniques. Armbian doesn't have 3rd party advertisements and banners, but we could use its tooling to communicate a selection of short forum tips. Over and over again. What do you think? It will be some work to come up with something cool and usable in term of content and see how the tooling works.

 

Perhaps I was not clear enough in this post (or as usual rambling so much people may have missed the point) that I very much like the idea behind Discourse (forum software) . Even if we don't want to switch forum software (big headache, I know) I think some of the concepts you are talking about here @Igor are exactly why I was trying to get you to at least take a look on that page. I have been frequenting fora for decades (as I am sure many others here have as well) and I think they really are on to some revolutionary concepts.

 

If you agree with those concepts, then the question becomes: what would be less work: re-implementing all of that ourselves? Or just switching forum software?

 

Plus they are Free Software (GPL v2). Should we find anything lacking, personally I would prefer pouring our effort back into project like that than what I consider wasting time putting in work on top of proprietary software base (here with current solution). Although I don't really think we would find much lacking, with Discourse, right out of the box.

 

Having said all of that, I am not really advocating strongly for something so disruptive as changing forum software. I think our effort would be best spent on "Eliminating confusion is the key element to lower the need for moderating" as discussed above, which we can already do right now within current tools.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I moved the prior 2 posts over to Forum Software ("Invision Community") thread, where they better belong, however I wanted to keep relevant part of chwe post here in this thread:

 

48 minutes ago, chwe said:

back to topic, if some features of discourse might help us to get things done great do it.. if it breaks all the links shared around the world about our forum bad...

 

Edited by TRS-80
update link to exact posts
Link to comment
Share on other sites

4 hours ago, Igor said:

Added a small new feature - submenu on "Forum -> Moderators" to display moderators

 

Is it possible to put some short blurb there also like:

 

"Best way to gain attention of ALL Moderators (currently online and future) is to Flag the post (little Flag at bottom) instead of PM any Moderator(s) individually..."

 

...or similar...

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Another random tid-bit:

 

When you Merge some post(s) into another thread, the board software will (very annoyingly, IMO) change the title of the target thread (the existing one you want to keep) to the title from the thread you are Merging from.

 

Terrible behavior, but just be advised so that you can be prepared (ex. have the original target thread open in another tab) so you can copy/paste the title back how it was... (or copy it onto your clipboard beforehand, etc.).

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Guest
This topic is now closed to further replies.
×
×
  • Create New...

Important Information

Terms of Use - Privacy Policy - Guidelines