My thoughts on future automated user moderation page 2 (locked)

>Maybe making he requirement for application being at least level 15 and 2 months or something like that. Or making the apply button enabled only after at least 5 people voted for you for “being able to become a user moderator”. That way applying to user moderation would be harder and therefore make only the right people moderators.

I agree to what pereking said, but i would like to add to that. I imagine that in the future of kongregate, there will be many more badges, and more badges = more points. I was thinking that every few months you can raise the bar to when a person becomes a regular user, you can do a ratio of 30 badges to 1 lvl so as kong gets bigger, it will be at the median to become a regular user.( by that i mean it will sustain its “toughness”, so if the level for regular user is always 10 or 15 and there are something around 90 easy badges, obviously the time to get to that level will be quickened in a way.) I would not like to see a person wait 3 months to become a regular user, but i would not like to see them get to the specified level 20 days before the month or 2 month period. I would like to see the users to take a little bit more time(or a lot) to get to the specified level.

This looks very interesting Greg, hopefully any problems can be tweaked so that this or something similar to it can be implemented.

My only complain so far is I am still not level 10! :( (time to go earn badges!)

Also I would bank towards making it harder rather then easier to move on from regular user status. I think it would be better to crack down on abuse over being to lenient. (at least at first).

Love the idea Greg!

But I agree it should be closer to a minute… Also, I love the Silencing system. Will post more thoughts later.

Several comments:

It sounds much too easy to become a “User Moderator” or “Referee”. It was suggested that people need to be recommended before they can even have an “A”. Greg, you replied that people would just spam to get it, and then there would still be the same voting up or down. However, this is not true. If a person has just been spamming people to try to get an “A”, are the users likely to vote him or her up? The more you make the aspiring mod work, the better idea of their character goes to the general public. Also, about recommendations: Users should only be allowed to make a certain amount per week or month. Maybe even make it as low as 1-2 a month. This would prevent casual nomination.

Now for a different topic. “Room moderators”. That sounds like a good idea, since the room owner would generally have a good idea of who is trustworthy. And all of your talk about the Room Mods being the ‘highest of the high’ makes me almost want to be one. But I’m a free range cow. You can’t pen me in that easily! Nice try, though, Greg. You almost got me…

I’ve found that there are some real morons above level 10 in some places, usually these are the people who spam crappy games or rate tons of games without playing them.

I think that the Regular Member should atleast have some sort of higher level, or just be activity-on-site-based xP.

…Which is why we must get levels much more faster so that we won’t be labled as a social outcast!

Silencing people is good, imo, but what if people gang up on us poor mods so that we’ll shut up for that time? We love to talk, you know.

And all of your talk about the Room Mods being the ‘highest of the high’ makes me almost want to be one. But I’m a free range cow. You can’t pen me in that easily! Nice try, though, Greg. You almost got me…

Agreed, NinjaCow, I mean, it was so easy to become a room mod, considering that we just had to ask for it :P. Nice try trying to fill in the empty rooms :P.

Final thing:

Maybe the people who are lower than level 10 but are active (eg. AntB and r3p3nt) could ask you whether they can become a Regular Member?

How about using forum activity as a measurement for regular users? No, I don’t mean post counts. But it seems to me that those who could be a Regular User, ARE in fact those who are regular users on the forum.

Sorry if it’s a bad idea, it’s 9:30 am, and I haven’t gotten any sleep. X(

How about using forum activity as a measurement for regular users?

Not really a good idea.

Nice ideas, greg!

THEN the 10 seconds would begin, to give anyone who objects one “final chance” to vote. I imagine that most voting would last somewhere in the neighborhood of 30 seconds

Yeah, that’s what I tought. It’s just that, when I read your ideas, the first thing that came to my mind was the image of myself playing Ether Cannon while reading chat and seeing a silencing vote pool taking place, knowing that those 2 seconds in which I would have to take my mouse off the game and click “yes” or “no” would probably kill me. But, on a second thought, I really don’t think an extra 20 seconds would make that much of a difference for players in that kind of situation…




bq. Also, about recommendations: Users should only be allowed to make a certain amount per week or month.

The idea of limiting recommendations could be extended to votes for or against the applicants, and it could be a pretty good feature to limit the abuse of the system.

Maybe an universal mod/room owner/admin review it first before making it a “user moderator”?

>…Which is why we must get levels much more faster so that we won’t be labled as a social outcast!

I will not give into peer pressure to level up! I WILL NOT DO IT! hugs level 12

>Maybe the people who are lower than level 10 but are active (eg. AntB and r3p3nt) could ask you whether they can become a Regular Member?

I think that’s a pretty good idea. Although I wouldn’t make them ask an admin… Maybe room owners? I can’t imagine there would be many that would fall into this category because, as I said, the greater the number of badges, the higher chance there will be ones for games you enjoy playing so the easier/more fun it would be to level up. So I don’t think it would be that difficult to reach level 10 anyway. But if the person is active enough to fall into the regular user category without reaching the level, it means they’d have to have been in chat enough that the room owner, or at least room mods, would know them and be able to say “yeah they’re a great user who deserves this power” or whatever.

For the voting for silences thing, I guess that makes sense greg. Is there anyway you could silence the person while the vote is going on? So that if it’s shot down they’re only silenced for about 30 seconds but if it gets enacted they won’t be able to spam further? Also, it will be interesting to see how this works in the less chatty rooms. There are certainly times where there aren’t enough people talking to get the vote passed, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t enough people watching. I don’t think there’s a way to know it without trying, but it will be interesting to see if lurkers vote on these things.

This is what I always wanted! Why I didn’t got idea to put this to Kongregate? Like Quake 2 has silence and ban commands, hopefully Kongregate gets them too!

The idea is ofc very good but you need (and you said a bunch aswell) restrictions to make sure it doesn’t get abused.

If people need to be high lvl and member for a while it will stop people from creating alts solely for that purpose but I still think some people can and will gang up on others.
Maybe thats just something that needs to be weeded out for it to stop from happening but I’m just mentioning it.

And some people who are high lvl and been around for long still act like [CENSORED].
Peopel can just beg/ask friends for votes.
There is a room owner now and mods have been picked for a reason.
Maybe they and they only should be able to pick people who they can “promote/upgrade” to user moderators.
Here it lies simply in the trust you have with moderators and people are gonna beg to be upgraded again.

Thou your system has a good number of restrictions in it and with some finetuning/balancing I will give it a positive feedback for now.

I’m just afraid the system might work to quick if someone says a few things and all people inmediantly go ZOMG SPAM arghhh! While it isn’t that big of a deal maybe, just saying lots of different cases are not always the same and some people might misunderstand something or something simular.

Been rambling a bit but I hope it makes sense.

Alright my opinion..

I find the main problem is simply groups of friends that want to abuse the system and its users. If a mod comes in and attempts to ban one of them, then they all say no and that mod gets a strike it wouldn’t be fair at all. So would big mods and room owners be voted against as well? Or would it just be an “A” user?

Also wouldn’t it be easier if you had the room owner approve the Referees, this way they can also track the progress and such to decide if they would be good for Room Mod, then after this they could traverse to General Mod from a recommendation from the Room Owner or fellow Room Mods, which would then be approved by you.

Seems like a very interesting system, but as you say, we don’t need it immediatly.

Another point: anyone who’s been BANNED as apposed to silenced in this system should not be allowed to rise above regular user. Additionally banning should bump them down to new user after it’s up, to stop them spamming votes, and to stop them electing other trolls to user-moderator. Silencing, as it is a little easier to be given than a proper ban, shouldn’t have any stigma(such as no moderating, etc) attached except the length of time being silenced. This would mean proper banning by moderators would only be needed for repeat offenders or extreme circumstances. You’ll definately still need good numbers of moderators to administer bans and to break up the persistent troll gangs I see forming, despite the one month limit. You know there’ll be some on a site that big.

I think this is a good idea, but as I was reading it, I saw a problem. What if a moderator is in a room with a group of people who are all needing silencing? If he/she silences one of them, they will obviously vote no, striking the moderator. In this circumstance, the moderator loses all power when it is needed.

Other than that, I think it’s an interesting idea.

Jayge: This is where full moderators come in, they can be called to stop these people. If the user moderator is good enough some strikes won’t count enough(if they’re not more than 30%).

Every sucessful silence AND approving vote by people (so that it doesn’t favor rooms with tons of spammers to be blocked, but also doesn’t favor the nice rooms with hundreds of people) you will get a brownie point. If your brownie point to strike ratio is at least 5 to 1 (or 4 to 1, that makes it an even 80% good sliences), and you have at least 10 or 15 brownie points, you get automatically a submission as a “really totally good guy”(work on the name) to Greg and can be considered as a potential normal mod.

I think that something sort of like this is already built into the system, since I can simply compare the number of total silences to the total number of strikes. If the ratio of strikes is really low, then I can manually appoint this person to a moderator position (which, of course, could always be overturned by the community if the power is used irresponsibly).

Greg, you replied that people would just spam to get it, and then there would still be the same voting up or down. However, this is not true. If a person has just been spamming people to try to get an “A”, are the users likely to vote him or her up?

Read my post a bit more carefully… I’m aware that they would be voted down, but just the fact that they CAN be voted down would create a system identical to the one I originally described for people AFTER they apply. Having two steps for something where both steps are identical to each other seems really odd to me.

Users should only be allowed to make a certain amount per week or month. Maybe even make it as low as 1-2 a month. This would prevent casual nomination.

An interesting idea, but that would favor people who aren’t on the site much. What about those who are on the site every day and have far more recommendations simply because they’ve gotten to know people better? We could say “you get X votes per Y hours online,” but that would just encourage people to idle in chat. Maybe those who have more votes could have more weight in voting for others?

I’ve found that there are some real morons above level 10 in some places, usually these are the people who spam crappy games or rate tons of games without playing them.

Like I said, the level 10 thing isn’t about assuring maturity — it’s just about preventing the most obvious forms of abuse (gathering a bunch of accounts). It’s certainly not perfect, but I can’t think of a better idea.

Agreed, NinjaCow, I mean, it was so easy to become a room mod, considering that we just had to ask for it :P.

Becoming a room mod isn’t the hard part; maintaining one is. If you’re just a moderator, I don’t care if you don’t log in to Kongregate for 2 months, then come back. If you’re a room owner, though, that’s a different story — I might have to assign it to someone else.

Maybe the people who are lower than level 10 but are active (eg. AntB and r3p3nt) could ask you whether they can become a Regular Member?

Yeah, there could be some kind of manual system built in, where normal moderators can nominate other users. I certainly don’t want there to be a level requirement for becoming a moderator in the first place; my only intention here with using level is to prevent abuse.

How about using forum activity as a measurement for regular users? No, I don’t mean post counts. But it seems to me that those who could be a Regular User, ARE in fact those who are regular users on the forum.

Maybe the voting system could be built into the forums too? My problem with this is that it seems pretty similar to the system on Digg.com, and I REALLY don’t think that the Digg system works very well. Just browse Digg for a while and look at the comments that are dugg or buried. Someone could disagree with an article and be dugg down because that person’s opinion is in the minority, even if it is a well-thought-out, logical post. That post gets “dugg down” because people disagree with it, not because the post is inappropriate. Then someone REPLIES to that post with something like “stfu moron,” then that “stfu moron” post is dugg UP (yes, UP!) because people simply agree with the sentiment. It’s definitely a flawed system, and it might work reasonably well for hiding stupid comments (occasionally), but I don’t think it would work very well for automatically appointing moderators.

Maybe an universal mod/room owner/admin review it first before making it a “user moderator”?

Scalability is the issue here. Call me lazy (or busy with other things…) but it would be nice to see the community operate somewhat independently, even if a bit of oversight will always be necessary.

And some people who are high lvl and been around for long still act like [CENSORED]. Peopel can just beg/ask friends for votes.

Obviously there will be ways to cheat the system and gain power, but the system should also allow users to take that power away if it’s abused, and prevent it from being acquired again so easy.

There is a room owner now and mods have been picked for a reason. Maybe they and they only should be able to pick people who they can “promote/upgrade” to user moderators. Here it lies simply in the trust you have with moderators and people are gonna beg to be upgraded again.

I trust our current moderators enough to not just promote those who beg for it, but again, the issue here is scalability, as those “normal” moderators were all personally appointed by one guy who’s becoming increasingly busy with other things on the site.

I find the main problem is simply groups of friends that want to abuse the system and its users. If a mod comes in and attempts to ban one of them, then they all say no and that mod gets a strike it wouldn’t be fair at all.

Yeah, this is definitely a problem with the system; I completely agree. Any ideas about a solution?

You’ll definately still need good numbers of moderators to administer bans and to break up the persistent troll gangs I see forming, despite the one month limit.

Troll gangs are indeed a potential problem, like Fragm3nt was saying. Maybe users who have been repeatedly voted down by other users could have less power when it comes to overturning silences? I don’t believe that troll gangs could really become user moderators very easily (since we’d have a whole site full of people ready to vote them down), but I agree with Fragm3nt’s concern that they could at least overturn administrative action. I think a weighted system based on user feedback could be of use here.

I think this is a good idea, but as I was reading it, I saw a problem. What if a moderator is in a room with a group of people who are all needing silencing? If he/she silences one of them, they will obviously vote no, striking the moderator.

This is indeed a flaw. Theoretically, though, these people might already have some votes against them from other users (and they’re likely not voting each other up because they’re too busy arguing, and perhaps even voting each other down). So again, perhaps the answer lies in some sort of weight applied to user votes when it comes to overturning silences.

so, if this plan actually goes through new (regular) moderators would not be appointed?

I’m open to the idea.

I agree Greg, you could just manually check strikes to silences…. But… As you said, scalability. When it starts, manually checking the 20 or so user mods might work out, but when you have more than 25 user mods put on a day, constantly rising and falling, an automated system for the good ones might be needed. But that is long off…

A lot of good ideas here, although, one of the problems I see with it is, too many people don’t talk in the forums. Having votes within the rooms are great, but what happens when a room has 100 or so people, but only 10 or so of them are paying attention to whats going on? This happens every time I get online, 90% of the people in any given room are just playing games, and ignore the chat. Maybe a potential workaround would be to give the people active in the chat within the last minute or so the voting option.

I think these are all great ideas, and I’d love to see this system in the future.

I have a suggestion though:

The current moderators/room owners and staff that we have now should NEVER be vulnerable to being banned/silenced or even muted at any time (as long as they still have the current mod status). I.E. If any bans, silences or muting were to be submitted on the mods and the staff that we have now, then it would basically just have no effect. Otherwise, spam/troll groups could try to pick on the current mods and staff that we have now and attempt to have them silenced, which would just render current moderators useless since they would be silenced all the time.

I haven’t explained this very well, but I hope you understand. You might have to read the post more than once, sorry :(

that sounds like a great idea greg.

Troll groups silencing regular mods could be a problem, like renny said. How would that be fixed?