LJ Idol Season 7 Week 13 - It's Not Important
o/` "Person man, person man
Hit on the head with a frying pan
Lives his life in a garbage can
Person man
Is he depressed or is he a mess?
Does he feel totally worthless?
Who came up with person man?
Degraded man, person man
Triangle man, triangle man
Triangle man hates person man
They have a fight, triangle wins
Triangle man" o/`
-- "Particle Man" performed by They Might Be Giants
In this era where technology dominates almost all lives at some level, most people can utilize a forum if they've the inclination to do so. The skills needed are minimal, especially with all the user-friendly software available to the administrator in order to create one. Your typical user presses one button to quote, another to paste in a link, perhaps a third if embedding an image or video, and finally hits the rectangular button at the bottom labeled 'post'. Nearly instantly, everyone else in the forum can read what you had to say, look at your images, follow your links, and respond with their own opinions. Your typical user doesn't give much thought to rules (assuming they read them at all) beyond a cursory reading required at registration or to the maintenance of a successful site...unless something breaks. We then flock to the nearest 'net communication which is not malfunctioning at the time and vent our wrath. How dare the administrator have a life outside the site, it's been down a whole three minutes now, they're never getting another penny from me...oh, wait, it's up again! See you later!
I used to be one of those care-free users.
Back in October, I discovered a site called MagiStream. I've always been a sucker for pixel pets, and in this instance the artwork for the images in people's signatures was especially arresting. The lines were clean, the poses original, and the representative artwork on a creature's page of professional quality. In short order, I found myself frequenting the site and collecting as many of these pets as I possibly could. I also quickly lose interest in most pixel pet sites as there isn't much for users to do or else there's so much for the users to do that it becomes one more NeoPets clone. MagiStream was different; you could breed the pets --- had to breed them in order to complete the quests, all of them original stories embedded in the created world and part of the creation concept of the site, and in order to obtain some of the pets at all --- but the site had no flash games, no battle arena, no equipment to put on the pets. This one was about the community and run on a PhP BBS style set of forums. Each community function had its own forum for those functions: word games, trivia and such in one forum; role play in another; a section for site updates and administrative announcements; another for general community discussion of game related topics. I found it an amazingly civil place and I'll admit that I did pause to ponder this small miracle, especially after I learned that the site had been invented and was being run by two sixteen year old teens.
Some time in December, the need for a forum in which more serious and prolonged discussions could be held came up. The site already had an area for casual chat, but it was just exactly that. If you wanted to discuss religion or relationships or other in-depth matter, it quickly got lost among all the "What are you doing RIGHT NOW" threads. The only other area in which such discussions might take place, the rant thread, could not be policed well enough. Discussions got started but they couldn't be threaded; if they got out of control, no one knew before it was too late and some of the more bullying players used that to their advantage in order to quell complaints for which they might otherwise have gotten their forum privileges removed.
These things I discovered on my own. When the administrators and moderators put the idea of a serious discussion forum out in order to get a consensus from the players, most indicated they wanted such a forum. I posted my opinion in the matter along with some suggestions I thought might be useful which I had found helped circumvent rule breakers in other forums and mailing lists I had moderated.
That was my last act as a regular player.
They wanted someone older and more mature to moderate this particular forum, named the House of Speakers. I supposed I'd initially caught their attention because of several joking reference I'd made to being an old fart of nearly forty. That, coupled with the fact that they liked my calm and rational way of dealing with all sorts of personalities in a respectful manner, landed me a job herding cats.
Of course, I re-read the aforementioned rules very carefully to make certain I understood them. A second set of more restricting rules had been implemented in the House of Speakers to help foster the quality of discussion we hoped would reside there. I read those too. Now, however, I found myself concerned with the minutia of enforcing these rules. No precise instructions had been provided. How do you warn someone? How many warnings does a player get before they receive a more severe penalty? What exactly can I do as a forum moderator (it had been explained to me that forum moderators only had powers in their own forums and could not do anything elsewhere or site-wide)? These points were especially hard to define given we were talking about a grey area in which various people might be passionately stating their positions and opinions. I'd never had to worry about it beyond the basic "keep it PG-13" and "don't harass other players" when I was a regular user.
Some of the answers manifested themselves in an area marked exclusively for the moderators' use. I read over that section eagerly...and discovered that the moderators were not, as I had suspected, merely the fellow schoolmates and buddies of the two young men who had launched the site. Instead I found a close communicating team united by one single goal: the desire to keep the site a pleasant and exciting place to be for as many of the users as possible. Suddenly, I felt a lot better about taking the position. I'd been wondering how on earth the 'old fart' would fit into this outfit and now understood that I really had been chosen carefully to meet the moderator team's needs, right down to the time zone in which I lived and the topics I liked to tackle (the other moderator chosen for the House of Speakers apparently keeps a schedule opposite mine and seems to have a liking for topics I can't or won't touch).
I also learned the real reason why we had an apparently spam-free site: someone on the moderator team keeps a constant eye on ALL the forums and removes it to a quarantine area as soon as it's discovered. In actuality, lots of spam gets posted to the site but thanks to the vigilance of moderator team the players will never have to deal with it. No, it will be our addresses which are harvested as we move the thread to quarantine, inform the user (it's not always their fault and people do get viruses that perpetuate link spam in particular) why they have been banned from posting, and then write the ISPs to inform them they are harboring a spammer.
I will never again complain to a site administrator about down time or site malfunction now that I have seen the lengths to which they and the moderator team must go in order to repair such things. In the beginning, the server resided in the site owner's bedroom and if something went wrong he got an alarm. Depending on how badly something had gone wrong, he would have to get out of his bed and fix it (as the site has paying donors he himself felt obliged to take care of problems as soon as they arose). One account tells of him begging a pastor for computer time while he was on a church retreat so that he could make certain that the donation pets were released on time and that the server didn't crash under the demands. Now the server isn't even in the same country; he has to call the data center if something goes badly wrong. In one instance someone unplugged the server, which took the entire site down. It's the moderators' jobs to field the endless stream of "What happened to the site/I can't log in/what did I do wrong/when will the site be back up/why won't the site stay up" comments while the administrator works on the problem. Gods help you if you have Facebook, Twitter, or some other publicly accessible means of communication. Your users will find you and they will bug you to death. Another thing I learned which most users either don't know or don't care to think about: being a moderator for a site doesn't mean you have instant access to anything, particularly the site developer or site owner. Tristan and I have never laid eyes on one another and probably never will.
Most surprising to me was that the moderators were not some sort of revered entities. They are human and they all have their quirks and tolerances. Professional standards demand a tolerant and neutral face. Behind the lines, however, in the relative safety of the area in which only moderators and administration may post I discovered that they too had players who were --- to put it delicately --- in need of special handling. I had, in the course of my interactions on the site, privately identified a few such individuals but I was mightily surprised to find that the moderators harbored similar feelings for the same individuals. In many instances publicly we cannot do anything about their behavior because they know the rules so well they can skirt them without actually breaking them. The average user sees a moderator allowing so-and-so to behave obnoxiously, unaware that the same moderator would dearly like to forget he or she is neutral and either cleave them in half with a sharp tongued reply or ban them entirely from the site for no other reason than the fact that they are obnoxious little twits.
That is not, unfortunately, an offense for which people can be banned from most forums. It takes something stronger, such as physically threatening a group of people or another player. Sadly, one cannot ban someone for being ignorant, stupid, inflexible, or any number of other unfortunate social traits. As long as they are stupid within the letter of the rules, it doesn't matter what they do to the spirit of the rules. We can only remind them gently, as one would a developmentally delayed child, why such behavior is less than desirable and suggest other means of expressing themselves which will likely be ignored.
Thus goes the life of a moderator on a forum. I clean up your mental messes and deal with the socially backward who ideally should never have been given a computer and 'net access so that you don't have to do so. You, the regular user, see a pristine forum in which everything is in working order. You simply have to click a button in order to post. My fellow moderators and I watch the words scroll by, take a few aspirin, and then bawl all over our psychiatrists' desks later in the week about the detritus of humanity with which we must commune.
The psychiatrist ups the dosage of whatever medications we're on, shakes his head, and then collects his fee.
The poll is up and can be found HERE. Please take the time to cast a vote for me if you liked the essay.
Hit on the head with a frying pan
Lives his life in a garbage can
Person man
Is he depressed or is he a mess?
Does he feel totally worthless?
Who came up with person man?
Degraded man, person man
Triangle man, triangle man
Triangle man hates person man
They have a fight, triangle wins
Triangle man" o/`
-- "Particle Man" performed by They Might Be Giants
In this era where technology dominates almost all lives at some level, most people can utilize a forum if they've the inclination to do so. The skills needed are minimal, especially with all the user-friendly software available to the administrator in order to create one. Your typical user presses one button to quote, another to paste in a link, perhaps a third if embedding an image or video, and finally hits the rectangular button at the bottom labeled 'post'. Nearly instantly, everyone else in the forum can read what you had to say, look at your images, follow your links, and respond with their own opinions. Your typical user doesn't give much thought to rules (assuming they read them at all) beyond a cursory reading required at registration or to the maintenance of a successful site...unless something breaks. We then flock to the nearest 'net communication which is not malfunctioning at the time and vent our wrath. How dare the administrator have a life outside the site, it's been down a whole three minutes now, they're never getting another penny from me...oh, wait, it's up again! See you later!
I used to be one of those care-free users.
Back in October, I discovered a site called MagiStream. I've always been a sucker for pixel pets, and in this instance the artwork for the images in people's signatures was especially arresting. The lines were clean, the poses original, and the representative artwork on a creature's page of professional quality. In short order, I found myself frequenting the site and collecting as many of these pets as I possibly could. I also quickly lose interest in most pixel pet sites as there isn't much for users to do or else there's so much for the users to do that it becomes one more NeoPets clone. MagiStream was different; you could breed the pets --- had to breed them in order to complete the quests, all of them original stories embedded in the created world and part of the creation concept of the site, and in order to obtain some of the pets at all --- but the site had no flash games, no battle arena, no equipment to put on the pets. This one was about the community and run on a PhP BBS style set of forums. Each community function had its own forum for those functions: word games, trivia and such in one forum; role play in another; a section for site updates and administrative announcements; another for general community discussion of game related topics. I found it an amazingly civil place and I'll admit that I did pause to ponder this small miracle, especially after I learned that the site had been invented and was being run by two sixteen year old teens.
Some time in December, the need for a forum in which more serious and prolonged discussions could be held came up. The site already had an area for casual chat, but it was just exactly that. If you wanted to discuss religion or relationships or other in-depth matter, it quickly got lost among all the "What are you doing RIGHT NOW" threads. The only other area in which such discussions might take place, the rant thread, could not be policed well enough. Discussions got started but they couldn't be threaded; if they got out of control, no one knew before it was too late and some of the more bullying players used that to their advantage in order to quell complaints for which they might otherwise have gotten their forum privileges removed.
These things I discovered on my own. When the administrators and moderators put the idea of a serious discussion forum out in order to get a consensus from the players, most indicated they wanted such a forum. I posted my opinion in the matter along with some suggestions I thought might be useful which I had found helped circumvent rule breakers in other forums and mailing lists I had moderated.
That was my last act as a regular player.
They wanted someone older and more mature to moderate this particular forum, named the House of Speakers. I supposed I'd initially caught their attention because of several joking reference I'd made to being an old fart of nearly forty. That, coupled with the fact that they liked my calm and rational way of dealing with all sorts of personalities in a respectful manner, landed me a job herding cats.
Of course, I re-read the aforementioned rules very carefully to make certain I understood them. A second set of more restricting rules had been implemented in the House of Speakers to help foster the quality of discussion we hoped would reside there. I read those too. Now, however, I found myself concerned with the minutia of enforcing these rules. No precise instructions had been provided. How do you warn someone? How many warnings does a player get before they receive a more severe penalty? What exactly can I do as a forum moderator (it had been explained to me that forum moderators only had powers in their own forums and could not do anything elsewhere or site-wide)? These points were especially hard to define given we were talking about a grey area in which various people might be passionately stating their positions and opinions. I'd never had to worry about it beyond the basic "keep it PG-13" and "don't harass other players" when I was a regular user.
Some of the answers manifested themselves in an area marked exclusively for the moderators' use. I read over that section eagerly...and discovered that the moderators were not, as I had suspected, merely the fellow schoolmates and buddies of the two young men who had launched the site. Instead I found a close communicating team united by one single goal: the desire to keep the site a pleasant and exciting place to be for as many of the users as possible. Suddenly, I felt a lot better about taking the position. I'd been wondering how on earth the 'old fart' would fit into this outfit and now understood that I really had been chosen carefully to meet the moderator team's needs, right down to the time zone in which I lived and the topics I liked to tackle (the other moderator chosen for the House of Speakers apparently keeps a schedule opposite mine and seems to have a liking for topics I can't or won't touch).
I also learned the real reason why we had an apparently spam-free site: someone on the moderator team keeps a constant eye on ALL the forums and removes it to a quarantine area as soon as it's discovered. In actuality, lots of spam gets posted to the site but thanks to the vigilance of moderator team the players will never have to deal with it. No, it will be our addresses which are harvested as we move the thread to quarantine, inform the user (it's not always their fault and people do get viruses that perpetuate link spam in particular) why they have been banned from posting, and then write the ISPs to inform them they are harboring a spammer.
I will never again complain to a site administrator about down time or site malfunction now that I have seen the lengths to which they and the moderator team must go in order to repair such things. In the beginning, the server resided in the site owner's bedroom and if something went wrong he got an alarm. Depending on how badly something had gone wrong, he would have to get out of his bed and fix it (as the site has paying donors he himself felt obliged to take care of problems as soon as they arose). One account tells of him begging a pastor for computer time while he was on a church retreat so that he could make certain that the donation pets were released on time and that the server didn't crash under the demands. Now the server isn't even in the same country; he has to call the data center if something goes badly wrong. In one instance someone unplugged the server, which took the entire site down. It's the moderators' jobs to field the endless stream of "What happened to the site/I can't log in/what did I do wrong/when will the site be back up/why won't the site stay up" comments while the administrator works on the problem. Gods help you if you have Facebook, Twitter, or some other publicly accessible means of communication. Your users will find you and they will bug you to death. Another thing I learned which most users either don't know or don't care to think about: being a moderator for a site doesn't mean you have instant access to anything, particularly the site developer or site owner. Tristan and I have never laid eyes on one another and probably never will.
Most surprising to me was that the moderators were not some sort of revered entities. They are human and they all have their quirks and tolerances. Professional standards demand a tolerant and neutral face. Behind the lines, however, in the relative safety of the area in which only moderators and administration may post I discovered that they too had players who were --- to put it delicately --- in need of special handling. I had, in the course of my interactions on the site, privately identified a few such individuals but I was mightily surprised to find that the moderators harbored similar feelings for the same individuals. In many instances publicly we cannot do anything about their behavior because they know the rules so well they can skirt them without actually breaking them. The average user sees a moderator allowing so-and-so to behave obnoxiously, unaware that the same moderator would dearly like to forget he or she is neutral and either cleave them in half with a sharp tongued reply or ban them entirely from the site for no other reason than the fact that they are obnoxious little twits.
That is not, unfortunately, an offense for which people can be banned from most forums. It takes something stronger, such as physically threatening a group of people or another player. Sadly, one cannot ban someone for being ignorant, stupid, inflexible, or any number of other unfortunate social traits. As long as they are stupid within the letter of the rules, it doesn't matter what they do to the spirit of the rules. We can only remind them gently, as one would a developmentally delayed child, why such behavior is less than desirable and suggest other means of expressing themselves which will likely be ignored.
Thus goes the life of a moderator on a forum. I clean up your mental messes and deal with the socially backward who ideally should never have been given a computer and 'net access so that you don't have to do so. You, the regular user, see a pristine forum in which everything is in working order. You simply have to click a button in order to post. My fellow moderators and I watch the words scroll by, take a few aspirin, and then bawl all over our psychiatrists' desks later in the week about the detritus of humanity with which we must commune.
The psychiatrist ups the dosage of whatever medications we're on, shakes his head, and then collects his fee.
The poll is up and can be found HERE. Please take the time to cast a vote for me if you liked the essay.