My thoughts on future automated user moderation page 3 (locked)

with room moderators i think

1 voting doesnt work
2 rooms are cheap, actually more rooms means rooms with less users means less bandwidth/cpu to broadcast
3 let everyone have their own room where they have local moderation rights

you need to convince people to be in your room before this gives you any sort of power, someone with admin rights over an empty room has no power, after all.

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

Not sure. Maybe regular mods could be above the silence ability, but I don’t want user moderators to be. It’s still a problem, though. Any thoughts?

Ugh, so many suggestions and I can’t grasp half of the system now. :(

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.

Wouldn’t a weighted voting system also take care of this?

That isn’t a half bad idea, have mods votes be weighted to be worth more. There could also be penalties for groups silencing a mod. For example is a user mod gets silenced, he could screen shot what happened and take it to a higher mod. They could revoke it and then make it so everyone in the group loses th ability to silence for example.

It has been known, accidentally, that normal users can’t silence universal mods.

That isn’t a half bad idea, have mods votes be weighted to be worth more. There could also be penalties for groups silencing a mod. For example is a user mod gets silenced, he could screen shot what happened and take it to a higher mod. They could revoke it and then make it so everyone in the group loses th ability to silence for example.

Reminds me of the court of appeals in the US Judicial system. Pretty cool.

That isn’t a half bad idea, have mods votes be weighted to be worth more. There could also be penalties for groups silencing a mod. For example is a user mod gets silenced, he could screen shot what happened and take it to a higher mod. They could revoke it and then make it so everyone in the group loses th ability to silence for example.

That sounds like a great idea.

hugs Greg for bringing good idea’s to Kong

hugs several other random people for contributing to the idea

Yeah, that’s why we’d need a lot of safeguards to protect people. Ultimately, though, it’s impossible for an automated system to really tell the difference between a user being “picked on” and a user pissing everyone off.

You could do what Guild Wars do. What they do is that once players get enough “strikes” against them, instead of the system dealing with them, a GM (or in Kong’s case, a moderator) looks into the situation via things like chat logs. If the reports have validity to them, the player is dealt with somehow. If the reports are the result of people “picking on someone”, the tables are turned, and the players who submitted the false strikes get dealt with somehow.

Basically, when it comes to any system where you give a lot of power to the people, you’ll usually need a governing body to make sure the people don’t abuse their power for their own gain. Of course, this isn’t ideal, and you should just instead design a system that can’t be abused, but that’s easier said then done.

Why don’t you speak to David Sirlin about this? This type of system (rule design, theory of laws in virtual worlds, etc) is right up his alley (or so I believe), and he’d probably be able to give you some high quality feedback or ideas (he may want you to pay him for it, though, since he seems pretty busy… I guess it depends on the relationship you have with Sirlin – I’d assume it’s good, since he did design your card game!).

Here is a slight problem greg: In any given chat, even if you talk about everything you could possibly hope to stir up conversation, you would be lucky, in some chats, to get more than 4 people talking. Which is kind of hard on the voting system. Plus not many people are level 10+, but W/E.

I think that’s a highly undesirable side effect to excessive fragmenting of the Kongregate community by chat rooms. I personally think that it’d be better to have, say, a few different chat rooms that actually have a purpose behind their name/existance (the current chat rooms seem very random; I don’t know what each of them represent, if anything at all), and game-specific chat rooms.

That said, there could be a better combo that I’m not aware of, and/or my idea could flop real bad. Either way, I still think the fragmenting of the community with chat rooms is not good for the community. Guild Wars did this, and Guild Wars learnt that, while instancing can be useful, people really like the sense of community as an option and excessive instances and “shards” in an online community tend to hurt it more then help.

To quote James Phinney (I think he’s the lead game designer at ArenaNet, the guys who made Guild Wars) from an article where he talks about Gw2:

For the team at ArenaNet, the idea of making Guild Wars 2 started with a single conversation about all the things we wanted to do in the next Guild Wars® campaign. Very quickly it became clear that we could move the game forward by leaps and bounds… but only if we were willing to rebuild it from the ground up. Here’s what we thought we could accomplish:
Allow players to encounter each other in common, persistent areas. The instancing of Guild Wars gave us a ton of story-telling and gameplay advantages over our competitors, but instanced areas and persistent areas each have their strengths and weaknesses. We want to give players the best of both worlds. ~ http://www.plaync.com/us/news/2007/10/dev_corner_imag.html

I think if you want the ultimate chat model, model World of Warcraft. You can choose which chat channels you see in your “chat”, which means you can effectively see them all, but speak in different channels at the same time. It’s also nice having a global chat, IMO. It’d probably take a bit of tweaking to get it to work well with Kongregate, but I think Kong can learn a lot from WoW, especially since Kong (the website) is very much using the same sort of base system (badges, points, levels, etc) that WoW uses.

But these are just ideas. Take from them what you will.

The thing I see with the chat rooms:

We have 9 message board categories, but a whopping 40 chat rooms!

IMO, a better system would be to cut that to around 15 English (down from around 30) and around 5-10 for other languages. An option to disable chat, but still be connected to the chat server would be welcome as well.

The English rooms I can imagine would be topical rather than just random, e.g. a “Debate Room”, or a “Game Help” room, as well as a few for general chat.

The whole User Mod idea seems undeveloped.

Problem Spot:




Room Moderators can’t ban someone in another room, so can’t that person just go to another room to avoid getting banned?

Room Moderators can’t ban someone in another room, so can’t that person just go to another room to avoid getting banned?

Yes, this could be a problem. The should be able to ban anyone that has talked in their room for the past five minutes or so.

You could do what Guild Wars do. What they do is that once players get enough “strikes” against them, instead of the system dealing with them, a GM (or in Kong’s case, a moderator) looks into the situation via things like chat logs. If the reports have validity to them, the player is dealt with somehow. If the reports are the result of people “picking on someone”, the tables are turned, and the players who submitted the false strikes get dealt with somehow.

If every user on Kongregate paid us $50 to be on the site, we could probably do something like this too. The simple fact is that, if the site is to be successful, what little official moderation we have is going to have to be stretched extremely thin, and we’re going to have to rely on players more heavily than something like Guild Wars, as Kongregate will always be free to use.

I think that’s a highly undesirable side effect to excessive fragmenting of the Kongregate community by chat rooms. I personally think that it’d be better to have, say, a few different chat rooms that actually have a purpose behind their name/existance (the current chat rooms seem very random; I don’t know what each of them represent, if anything at all), and game-specific chat rooms.

The community would be far more fragmented if we relied primarily on game-specific chat rooms.

I think if you want the ultimate chat model, model World of Warcraft. You can choose which chat channels you see in your “chat”, which means you can effectively see them all, but speak in different channels at the same time.

Really? World of Warcraft has the most fragmented chat system known to mankind. I’ve lost track of the number of times I’ve run into someone who also plays WoW, but we aren’t able to interact within the game because we’re on different servers. Guild Wars solves this problem with “districts” on one big server, but it’s still virtually impossible to talk to someone you know outside of whispers in that game.

World of Warcraft also fragments all chat rooms based on your area, which seems a little arbitrary to me. I can be flying on a griffon outside of Ironforge, carrying out a conversation with someone in the general chat, and I’ll abruptly be cut out as soon as I land in the Wetlands, even though the Wetlands general chat is empty and there’s no way to manually re-join the Ironforge one. WoW theoretically has “universal” chat rooms, but you need to know the exact names of them to join (they might as well be password-protected). There are only three places I’ve ever talked actively in chat in WoW: guild chat, party chat, and Barrens chat. The latter is a special case here, but I think we can agree that the two former types represent community fragmentation at their highest point.

There’s also the universal “looking for group” chat, but obviously that serves an extremely specific purpose, and any kind of normal conversation in that section (regardless of the content) is almost always regarded as spam.

An option to disable chat, but still be connected to the chat server would be welcome as well.

Try the mute button.

I personally see no problem in this system, I would love to see it go into effect. This would be perfect beside a few minor problems such as people who don’t “shoot for the stars!!!” and get points. But me personally would love to see this happen, I am almost giddy…

bq. If every user on Kongregate paid us $50 to be on the site, we could probably do something like this too. The simple fact is that, if the site is to be successful, what little official moderation we have is going to have to be stretched extremely thin, and we’re going to have to rely on players more heavily than something like Guild Wars, as Kongregate will always be free to use. I can understand that. In that case, I'd opt for building a team of high quality volunteer moderators. You'll still need someone from the Kong team to watch over them and make sure they do things well enough, but if you have the right systems in place and select good moderators, you can have a solid team. ------------------------------------------------------ *An example from a high traffic website* ------------------------------------------------------ Steve Pavlina did what I described above when he launched a discussion forum for his highly popular personal development website, www.StevePavlina.com (over 1 million visitors per month... I think it’s 1.4 million, but it’s probably gone up since he last posted a traffic update). When he decided he wanted to launch a discussion forum it was obvious he’d need help with moderation since he was already getting a crazy amount of traffic and, of course, he didn’t want to spend all his time doing it by himself. So what he did was put out a request for moderators, asking anyone with interest to send specific details to him (provided they met his criteria). If you’d like to see the post me made for that, you can see it here (it’s pretty informative if you like the idea of moderator applications): http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2006/09/forum-moderators-wanted/ Anyway, long story short, Steve received 80 applications, and from that, he selected 30 moderators. I was one of the people selected (I tell you this not to impress you, but to let you know what perspective I’m speaking from.) From that, we are left with 20 moderators (the others decided to retire because they were too busy, and one got banned for going on a racial tangent and breaching the forum rules after being warned once already). FYI, that number includes the administrators of the website. The admin are, at the moment, Steve and his wife Erin. ------------------------------------------------------ *How well does a team of 20 people moderate a popular forum?* ------------------------------------------------------ Well, firstly, let me give you some forum stats to give you an idea of forum traffic, conditions, ete. As of a few minutes ago, here’s what the forum stats told me: Threads: 11,945 Posts: 129,807 Members: 10,172 Guests online: 527 So, to answer my question: Pretty damn well. Spam usually lasts no longer then a day (most doesn’t even last hours), and other more sticky issues such as attacks, etc, are virtually non-existent. That doesn’t mean that such issues don’t occur, but it usually takes us no longer then a few days to effectively sort out a thread or a series of posts that aren’t appropriate. Any delays are caused by us taking the time to carefully deal with things. If we were more strict and less reasonable, we could easily deal with things within a day or less. I’ll mention that it helps that the audience Steve’s website attracts is pretty mature already (and vastly different to the audience Kong will attract), but that means we just get less “low level” inappropriate stuff. Our inappropriate stuff comes in the guise of intelligent debate, subtle trolling, and self promotion that aren’t always easy to spot (nor is anything really ever black and white... there’s lots of grey area). ------------------------------------------------------ *To sum up* ------------------------------------------------------ It’s possible to have an effective volunteer moderation team. Paid moderators/GMs aren’t really needed (unless you need them for legal reasons, business reputation reasons, or something like that). bq. Really? World of Warcraft has the most fragmented chat system known to mankind. [Plus the other WoW stuff you pointed out] Ok, you do bring up some good points with WoW (I didn't really play it long enough to learn that much about everything), but I think you're still a little too focused on specific methods of implementation when you would probably get more out of focusing on what are the good aspects of the various systems that are out there and then finding a way to implement those elements in a way that suits the various goals of Kongregate as a site. When I gave the example of WoW, I was mainly refering to the fact that the different chat channels all show up in the main window (if you set it up that way). You don't have to go to one different chat window to go talk to your guild, or another to go talk to all chat (again, unless you have it set up like that) -- it all goes in the same window. ------------------------------------------------------ *Taking a lesson from tags and blogging software* ------------------------------------------------------ It kind of reminds me of adding tags to websites in terms of functionality (or "categories" that are used in blogs). Ie. Instead of having things listed in some sort of category heriarchy, you apply category "tags" to individual items (such as websites, or say, posts on a blog) and then if you click on a category, all articles with that tag are displayed. Tags let you display the same post/article under many different categories without requing that you make a duplicate of an article/post or make some sort of dummy post/article linking to the specific article/post that you want under more then one category. You following me so far? (Ha, probably not. I'm doing a terrible job of explaining this, but bear with me.) So, like a tags system, instead of having different "categories" of chat that require you to either be in one category (ie. chat room) using an EITHER/OR model, I'm proposing you have some sort of AND system where you can be entered in multiple "chat rooms" (ie. recieve messages/chat from many different chat "channels") and have whatever you recieve from those "chat rooms" be displayed in one chat window. ------------------------------------------------------ *An example what I'm trying (but probably failing) to explain* ------------------------------------------------------ A good example of this system is the Guild Wars chat. Note how you can get chat input from different “channels” (eg. All chat, team chat, guild chat, alliance chat, etc), but it all appears in the same chat window. You can also turn off specific chat “channels” if you so wish, and you no longer see chat from that channel. Turn it back on, though, and you see everything that you missed when you had it turned off. I think it’d be great if Kong had that sort of functionality. I was thinking you could have a system where you “join” specific chat “channels” and be able to see chat from the channels you select, but I guess the Guild Wars “tick box” system works better. Although, due to the amount of chat rooms Kong is likely to have (which I think is fine), you may want to have it function as “if you tick a box, it means you will receive chat from it” and have most chat boxes un-ticked until the user decides he wants to tick them. How would a user chat to a specific chat “channel”? Just like WoW or Guild Wars do. You select the channel you want your message to go to, type it, and send it. You could use slash commands like WoW (I can’t remember the specific commands, but you use a forward slash + a letter or something that represents whatever chat channel you want to type to), but the Guild Wars system of “hold down shift + click a shortcut key” works very nicely and is very intuitive. You can, of course, also click on the “chat panel” you want to type in instead of using a shortcut key, but I’ve no idea how you’d do that in terms of user interface. Of course, the end goal with all of this is to (A) create a better, more user-friendly, more enjoyable system (B) create a more inclusive system, and (C) make it easier for people to connect with each other. ------------------------------------------------------ Anyway, again, these are just ideas. What I mean by that is: (A) you shouldn’t just listen to what I say; listen to all ideas and (B) take what is useful from the ideas you hear and use it to design a system that meets your needs/desires while still remaining technically feasible. I suggest thinking in terms of aspects that you like/that are good and then combining them rather then choosing one specific idea and then running with only that. Most stuff is feasible, you just need good enough programmers to do it (and, of course, time/money for those programmers... I understand implementation isn’t a magical process that happens instantly). - Bruce

The above is probably singlehandedly the post I have ever agreed the most on. He raises some excellent points, and I’d just like to reiterate on some of them.

Well, firstly, let me give you some forum stats to give you an idea of forum traffic, conditions, ete. As of a few minutes ago, here’s what the forum stats told me:

Threads: 11,945 Posts: 129,807 Members: 10,172 Guests online: 527

So, to answer my question: Pretty damn well.

This is absolutely right from my own personal experience. I’m a mod (although not active) and a long time member on another gaming website, that have higher numbers of members and posts. And how many mods do we have? 10. And I can’t think of a single big problem that the forum part of that website has had. And mind you, we do attract quite a fair share of teenagers and kids too.

It kind of reminds me of adding tags to websites in terms of functionality (or “categories” that are used in blogs). Ie. Instead of having things listed in some sort of category heriarchy, you apply category “tags” to individual items (such as websites, or say, posts on a blog) and then if you click on a category, all articles with that tag are displayed. Tags let you display the same post/article under many different categories without requing that you make a duplicate of an article/post or make some sort of dummy post/article linking to the specific article/post that you want under more then one category.

This is EXACTLY like Jayisgames does it, and it’s a great example of how well it works, if some people are having trouble understanding where Bruce is going with this.

So, like a tags system, instead of having different “categories” of chat that require you to either be in one category (ie. chat room) using an EITHER/OR model, I’m proposing you have some sort of AND system where you can be entered in multiple “chat rooms” (ie. recieve messages/chat from many different chat “channels”) and have whatever you recieve from those “chat rooms” be displayed in one chat window.

This is basically like mIRC and IRC in general.

These are, IMO, HUGE improvements that, if Kongregate could somehow implement them, it would boost your value as a website (not financially), at least 100 %.

Wow, thanks for your kind words, ThemePark. =)

Reading responses like yours is very rewarding. I don’t expect everybody to like/agree with what I say, but knowing that it helps/resonates with at least some people is all that matters to me.

That reminds me of a good quote:

What matters to me — what is real to me — is inspiring and helping people. Directly or indirectly, whenever I’m able to help someone solve a really tough problem or to motivate someone to finally push past a big obstacle, that is something I find tremendously fulfilling. And the fulfillment I get from doing this is so great that it trumps all the external stuff. It doesn’t matter how much money I make. It doesn’t matter if people reject my ideas or poke fun at what I enjoy doing. This blog entry may be read by over 1000 people, but it may be such that the ideas within are only able to help one person in a very small way. The other 999 may conclude I’m nuts and unsubscribe. And that’s fine. It’s that one person I’m writing for.
~ Steve Pavlina, http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2005/01/dont-die-with-your-music-still-in-you/

These are, IMO, HUGE improvements that, if Kongregate could somehow implement them, it would boost your value as a website (not financially), at least 100 %.

Ah, but that’s the great thing about providing value. When you provide value to people, they can’t help but want to show appreciation for it. Whether it comes in the form of word of mouth, subscriptions to premium games, or a user simply clicking on an ad because they want to help out Kongregate, appreciation generated by offering of value is a very powerful force indeed.

One could even say that the amount of value you offer is an exact measure of how much financial compensation you stand to enjoy.

Note: When I say “value”, I mean a contribution that fills a need. I’m not talking about contributions which don’t fill and need and, while the contributor may have worked hard on his/her contribution, don’t offer any real value. The good news is in those cases it’s usually more so a matter of “how” you express your value, not “what” you express – unless the “what” you express is some sort of scam or something that is more so a drain then a contribution.

Greg’s idea is brilliant. I would love to see it implemented as soon as possible.

Your thing was with a forum. Yeah, on a forum, solving an issue in a day is not a problem. But with chat, you can’t fix the problem later. Personal attacks are active instead of passive(they would have to go to the specific thread to find it) and with an hour of arguing could lead to the chat being so filled with flames nobody can have a good discussion. Sure, a couple days for a forum may seem OK, and hours may seem great (IMO, minutes is good, 1 hour or more is starting to get mediocre, assuming it is a big forum), but with chat, it needs to be 2 minutes tops. And there is no way a 20 moderator staff could handle that.

Yeah. There is no way 20 moderators can handle 40 chatrooms adequetly. Maybe 20 mods, 20 rooms, but you need at least 1 mod online per room, in my experience.

Yeah. There is no way 20 moderators can handle 40 chatrooms adequetly. Maybe 20 mods, 20 rooms, but you need at least 1 mod online per room, in my experience.

Adventurers w/w/o Pants has no moderator 9/10 times that I scroll down the list. Sure, one stops by every now and then, but we get people who need a good silencing just as often as the next room.

I’m not saying that Kong already has the required number – just that you should have at least 1 online per chatroom.

Sometimes that’s not possible – in which case, you can have one mod covering 2 or 3 rooms – but that usually doesn’t work with volunteer moderators, because they want to be able to stay and have a conversation as well.