MyBB Community Forums

Matt,

the main problem is consistency and fairness. It is evident that flamewars must be stopped, when they exists after giving at least 2 warnings to the people causing it whoever they are!

Preventive thread closing is too much a question of subjectivity and people without any experience in life can have a lot more difference in their judgment than someone 30 years older than them. The solution are clear rules, because thoses rules can be interpreted in different manners depending who read them:

MattRogowski Wrote:No Flaming – Rudeness towards other members will not be tolerated. Keep this forum friendly.
No Instigating - We value your opinion and we appreciate your input, however continual provoking or inciting will result in warnings or suspensions.

The "No Flaming" section tell about rudeness, i have honestly to tell you that i have often seen "rudeness" in the way the staff were reacting to some posts, even at the april fools day someone try to make believe that he was 2 other members of the forums this was beyond "rudeness" to me it was totally illegal to impersonate someone else as well in the USA as in Canada. But this is just some example. Like i wrote before, consistency and fairness are the keys here, backed up with clear rules.

The "No Instigating" section have to be clearer also. What if a user try stubornly to make staff understand that they did something wrong? Will he be considered "provoking or inciting"? Will he receive multiple "warnings" before suspensions or can he be suspended right away? Now what if someone is crying at an injustice that he believe to be a a victim of and want to tell other users here about it? Would you consider this to be "provoking or inciting"? Seem that if someone is "dumped" by its girlfriend it is OK here, but if someone is "dumped" by another member it is not OK! Again here, consistency and fairness are important, always backed up with clear rules.

May i suggest that a single moderator can only delete, close or suspend a post/thread when something illegal have been posted and that it need at least 3 staff members including a "head" staff manager to decide of the action to take for other kinds of "misbehaved" posting that are looking to be against the rules before taking action? This could be at least an intermediary solution!

For sure if you allow any user to make fun of each other on some thread without intervention because you do not believe it will degenerate in a flame war, you are in a bad position to intervened in another thread where you believe it will degenerate. Like i wrote before, beeing mature and professionnal will need quite a change in attitude from the users as well as for the staff. I would predict at least 70% less posting on this forum and 50% less active members...

We could debate on this for years, but a good business manager would not need this time to understand that something must be done for the welfare of the project. If he want it to be a fun and ludic project he can go one way but if he want a mature and professionnal project he must go another way.

I realy hope that these principles can be understood with all the secondary actions that must be made to accomplish the desired goal.

In short, if the project is there to please everyone it will fail for sure, if it is there to please a specific audience and kind of people it will be successfull. And when i write successfull i do not mean necessarely about money...

I hope that everyone will try to think about all i wrote and not only try to debate to only keep there own little pleasure spot at MyBB!

Sincerely,

Exdiogene

A change of domain to .com wll not MyBB more serious. There are some other changes needed for that and I don't see it happen anytime soon.

(2010-05-01, 12:58 PM)exdiogene Wrote: [ -> ]Exdiogene

The MyBB environment should be dictated from the top all the way down. The Owner needs to establish a MyBB environment that encourages collaboration and communication between its staff personal, otherwise the MyBB productivity and revenue will have the same casualties for the new Domain of MyBB. A company like MyBB that has the symptoms you stated in your post, usually needs to have a complete management overhaul.

I have seen this happen so many times on other forums, "generally speaking" you bring on a temporary Admin (some times referred to as a board cleaner) he does all the dirty work, everyone directs their hate towards him... then he is fired and replaced with another Admin which brings back peace in the MyBB Community... all this has to be well prepared since it has to be done like a sting operation to prevent the fired STAFF from creating damage to the NEW DOMAIN NAME.

Another thing is let us vote for whom we want as our STAFF SUPPORT on here. I hope you guys take my advice. Why does't someone open a new thread so we can all vote? Is there anything thats wrong with what I said?

(2010-05-01, 12:58 PM)exdiogene Wrote: [ -> ]Matt,

the main problem is consistency and fairness. It is evident that flamewars must be stopped, when they exists after giving at least 2 warnings to the people causing it whoever they are!

The problem is that it is only your opinion. Moderation is subjective in it's nature, so what may seem inconsistent and unfair to you or someone else is not to us or another person.

The problem also is that many of the time, incidents are handled in private, which is how it should be, out of respect for people. But this lack of publicity to what happens leads you to a guessing game and you start to make conclusions about things that are not necessarily true and you attribute them to some arbitrate in relation to the MyBB Team.

If you want this community to run better then you need to start trusting better. It's not like we have fun or like wasting our time out of banning and warning people, closing threads, unapproving posts and threads, dealing with arguments and sensitive disputes. I know each and every one of the staff members here would rather be studying, or outside exercising or relaxing or spending time with their girlfriend or boyfriend... et cetera.

In terms of rules, everyone here needs to realize that we're not trying to be the laws that, for example, come out of the U.S. congress. It doesn't need to be a legal document binding every single imaginable possibility in the universe for which we may enact something. We're not going to waste our time for example stating that "Warning: This cup of coffee may be hot." Because that is stupidly common sense.

Everyone here also simply needs to realize that just because we are staff does not mean we don't have emotions or cognitive thought or opinions on certain viewpoints and that maybe we act just like each and everyone one of you do at some point in time or another. But we are extremely lenient when it comes to warnings, bans, etc. We hate giving them out and we'll give you every single chance we possibly can before we think the community can't tolerate it anymore. Yes, we treat people how we want to be treated so cut us with some slack too. Many of the few threads you have seen with people leaving are for legitimate reasons (work, lack of time, need a change of venue, community is not what it once was, disagreements over issues) which is completely fine. It's their choice to disagree and their choice to disagree and leave if they don't get their way.

Its like Ubuntu right? Free awesome support, higher priority paid support.

I'm new here, having done my first MyBB board and I have a couple issues that did get an answer from one of the support team, but when I ask a further question, to clarify it, no reply. I was going to send a private message, but I then saw that this person said no private messages for support. By now the thread is out of site on an older page, so . . . what do I do. I have boards on vBulletin and if I have an issue, I put in a ticket and voila, I get results. But, I realize their support staff are being paid. So, for that reason alone . . .

I would be glad to pay for support, when that seems to be the only way to fix an issue, just my thoughts, thanks

http://community.mybboard.net/thread-68848.html

Every Community is a direct reflection of the Admin. Therefore, if the Community is unhealthy and the Admin team has been in place for years, the traits will not change. No matter what name you change MyBB to.

The only way any Community change can take place and be successful over time is when driven by the person in the lead position. There are absolutely no exceptions to this rule.

What nobody seems to have picked up on is that it's the community who start these arguments, not the staff. What you're saying is that the community start disputes, the staff then have to clear up after them, and if the staff don't deal with them in a way the community, who are the ones who caused them in the first place, deem satisfactory, it's the staff who get it in the neck. Huh?? You create a situation and complain if we don't handle it to your expectations?? That doesn't make much sense. If the community didn't start all these disputes, we wouldn't have to do anything that people don't agree with because there wouldn't be anything to do anything about. If you don't like things being moderated, don't start the threads and arguments that get moderated. Everyone here is intelligent enough to know when something will end up having to be closed, or will end up in warnings/bans.

(2010-05-01, 12:58 PM)exdiogene Wrote: [ -> ]May i suggest that a single moderator can only delete, close or suspend a post/thread when something illegal have been posted and that it need at least 3 staff members including a "head" staff manager to decide of the action to take for other kinds of "misbehaved" posting that are looking to be against the rules before taking action? This could be at least an intermediary solution!

That would be a monumental waste of time and man power. Four people involved with every single thread that needs to be closed or every post that needs to be deleted?? As if we don't have enough to do. So you're saying someone insults someone, and I'd have to ask three people if it's OK to close the thread?? Yes I can see that working well.

(2010-05-01, 06:21 PM)technoman Wrote: [ -> ]I have seen this happen so many times on other forums, "generally speaking" you bring on a temporary Admin (some times referred to as a board cleaner) he does all the dirty work, everyone directs their hate towards him... then he is fired and replaced with another Admin which brings back peace in the MyBB Community... all this has to be well prepared since it has to be done like a sting operation to prevent the fired STAFF from creating damage to the NEW DOMAIN NAME.

You would consider that a professional way of running things...?? We're not just going to make random people admins to give people somebody to hate.

(2010-05-01, 06:21 PM)technoman Wrote: [ -> ]Another thing is let us vote for whom we want as our STAFF SUPPORT on here. I hope you guys take my advice. Why does't someone open a new thread so we can all vote? Is there anything thats wrong with what I said?

Why would you need to vote for people?? You're contradicting yourself, first you said things should be dictated, then you say it should be a democracy where people vote for staff.

(2010-05-01, 07:23 PM)pts123 Wrote: [ -> ]I'm new here, having done my first MyBB board and I have a couple issues that did get an answer from one of the support team, but when I ask a further question, to clarify it, no reply. I was going to send a private message, but I then saw that this person said no private messages for support. By now the thread is out of site on an older page, so . . . what do I do. I have boards on vBulletin and if I have an issue, I put in a ticket and voila, I get results.

We are not on here all of our lives. vB support staff are paid. We are not. It is the weekend. I don't think we all want to be cooped up indoors answering threads all day, I've been out most of the day, as have other people, we do other things with our time. 24 hours have passed since you last posted there, you can just bump the thread. You cannot always expect a reply within a few hours. Obviously we want to help people as much as we can but it's just not always possible, no matter how many staff we hire. We all have other more important things we need to do too.

(2010-05-01, 07:27 PM)MattRogowski Wrote: [ -> ]Why would you need to vote for people?? You're contradicting yourself, first you said things should be dictated, then you say it should be a democracy where people vote for staff.

Because some of the STAFF are very opinionated and dont want to have our say in things

(2010-05-01, 07:37 PM)technoman Wrote: [ -> ]

(2010-05-01, 07:27 PM)MattRogowski Wrote: [ -> ]Why would you need to vote for people?? You're contradicting yourself, first you said things should be dictated, then you say it should be a democracy where people vote for staff.

Because some of the STAFF are very opinionated and dont want to have our say in things

And that is just who they are. If they weren't staff they would be just the same. Also, just because you know them in these set of circumstances over the internet doesn't mean you know them. Especially until you know what it's like to be in our shoes and everything we give up just for 27 thousand members.