How is the community doing? [2017] [duplicate]

Question

We wanted to take a minute to check in and see how the community feels like things are going on the site. A little more than a year ago, we had a pretty lengthy discussion about site problems; it mixed in a specific debate about the [rules-as-written] tag, concerns with comment deletion, concerns with question closure, concerns with downvotes without comments, concerns with toxicity in chat, concerns with posts getting edited... Basically a wide ranging set of things that had ended up all bubbling up together at one time.

Out of that, we took some guidance we thought would be constructive and worked with the community to implement it. It's been a year, and it seems to me like the site's going pretty well. New users are up (the rate of new user addition's been going up dramatically since November). Page views have nearly doubled year over year. Visitors and active user stats continue strong growth along the line they've been following since 2014 (+50% YOY). But also, we've seen much less in terms of flame-wars on the site/in chat, and subjectively from the moderator point of view it's seemed like a much more constructive and less contentious than in some of the past. We'd like to share our thoughts, and also get yours on what is going well and what could improve.

Here's how I'd like to run this specific Q&A so that we can get good value out of it. I'll post some of the things we've done/observations we have/things we think still need improvement. Please do the same. Try to post one kind of thing per answer, so that when people upvote/downvote based on whether they agree or not it's more clearly actionable - if you write an essay about 4 different things, it's not going to be clear what part(s) people agree or disagree with.

As usual, Be Nice applies to meta as well as the main site. You may strongly disagree with other users or with the mods or whoever, but we trust you can find ways to express what you like or don't like without being hostile or insulting to others.

Upvote or downvote based on your agreement. Let's not have long comment threads - if you disagree with an answer, post your own answer. This isn't just being pedantic - if we have a 30-comment thread on an answer, what does that tell us we need to do? Mostly it tells us whether one person is really irritated instead of whether a large part of the community disagrees, which is what we kinda want to get to.

So here we go - my thoughts on things that are going well or need improvement, feel free and add on!

Answer 1

We aren't D&D5e.stackexchange.com

Yay! We still have a hugely active 3.x and 4e community, so our that-new-thing-only issues have somewhat diminished. We are still largely D&D.stack, but Fate seems to have carved out an okay market share with our users and Apocalypse World isn't doing bad either. Overall I think we've made some small positive motion in the direction of diversity

Answer 2

We have a high-quality site!

I go to this site for expert answers on RPGs, and it still meets my standards most of the time. I am kinda biased towards and against certain users at this point, but new user posts are still frequently quite good and sometimes someone surprises me. Participation in other sites similar to ours, like writing and worldbuilding, really highlights how good of a job we are doing at producing a high-quality stack. Our questions are frequently well-asked and often well-answered, and questions like 'how does I cast wizerd spells in D&D' don't dominate the home page. This isn't a change, but it's sort of the core metric I use for site health, so...

Answer 3

We have some meta process problems

I'm still upset about the whole game-rec/tool-rec thing. Since then, I feel like there have been at least a few other failures of process regarding mod/community interaction on meta. It's frustrating to me that moderation takes such a hostile stance to disagreement regarding appropriate site procedure and policy, and that you guys seem incapable of listening to loud, ignorant, angry, poorly informed users and figuring out where they are coming from and in what manner their complaints are valid. I get that that's hard, but it's also really important to moderating well. Sometimes I feel like the problems the mods have in listening to people who are wrong and behaving badly extend to people who are maybe not wrong, and maybe not behaving badly.

Like, I do my best to remain reasonable and compassionate in discussion (sometimes I mess up. That seems to be happening more frequently lately), but me and mxyzplk don't get along, I guess. Most of the time I post something on meta I think is important, I pretty much assume that I'm going to get an insulting, patently offensive comment or answer from them. I don't flag them anymore because at some point in the past I got the impression that that came across as insulting or something. I wish I could talk about stuff on meta in a respectful way without having to deal with that; it's pretty annoying. Usually I can count on SSD to post something reasonable anyways, so that's nice, but it's also frustrating because (since we as a community really value our moderators and their opinions on meta issues) if I don't like what SSD is saying and think it's wrong or whatever I can't really address that well since the existence of the question as a topic has already been indicated to be offensive to another moderator and I generally try to avoid behavior that I think will agitate the moderation community (like participating in meta discussions that they don't want happening).

This is a serious issue, and I hope it will be resolved at some point. I dropped out of the site at the tail-end of that game-rec stuff for like a year or something because it was frustrating and there was acrimony everywhere and continued site activity wasn't really worth it. I'm glad things have died down, but the underlying problems are still there.

Answer 4

Well-intentioned help-piles are occasionally problematic.

First, the mea culpa: I have been guilty of this as often as anyone else I've seen. Here's the problem, generally:

• New user posts a poor question. Downvotes and close-votes come quickly. This is proper: we should close unclear or OT questions quickly, and votes are for sorting useful and not-.
• Lots of users really want to help... three, four, five comments come in very quickly along the lines of "can you provide X, Y, and Z, I think they're the reason you might be getting downvotes" and "can you explain the problem you're having; as it stands this just feels like a discussion prompt." &c. &c. &c. Each individual comment is proper: they're factually correct, they're friendly and they assume good faith, and they--if understood--would help improve the post.
• New user is overwhelmed. Sometimes it gets sorted out, sometimes it contributes to a "this site sucks you're all a bunch of tools screw you" comment, self-vandalism, and rage-quit. In the worst instances, the user's inappropriate comment gets deleted and their post-deletion gets reverted--both actions are proper!--while they're still watching, which only exacerbates the seeming idiocy of what can only be a back-room cabal. (Never mind the fact that occasionally there's evidence of an actual back-room cabal, as chatizens are actively discussing unfolding events in real-time.)

It's true that the rage-quitter might not have been a good fit anyway. It's true that the one who ends up working out may never suffer any long-lasting ill will. But the mere fact that there are new users whose first impression is "overwhelmed" I find problematic.

To be clear: in the cases I'm thinking of everybody is saying correct things, saying them nicely, and is well-intentioned. Here's an example (10K only). I cite this example only because it was easy to find--not to chastise the users featured there in any way. (So many of these end up deleted that they're hard to go back and find.)

So what to do? I think we need to coalesce around a norm of patient helpfulness. Let me suggest some good practices:

• Vote (up/down, close/open) as always. This is not intended to change how the post gets handled, just the user.
• If you're the first to comment, leave a welcoming and friendly comment, thanking them for contributing. Pick one or two of the largest issues you see and have acted on (downvote, hold-vote). Don't offer the "this might be why people are..." comment, say "I voted to hold this because...."
• If you don't have time to comment thusly, don't leave a briefer/terser comment. Someone will come along within five minutes and leave such a comment. We've got a really responsive citizenry. (Can a SEDE expert verify that? I wonder if it's possible to see a distribution of time between first close-vote and first comment, filtered on posts by users with under 200 or so rep?)

• [Great suggestion from @thedarkwanderer] Be a little more-liberal with editing than you might be with an established user. With an established user it's common practice to leave a comment along the lines of "I think this post would be improved by...." With the brand-new user, though, we suggest you go ahead and make the edit, and leave a comment along the lines of "Hi $USER--it seems to me that your use of two systems' terms is confusing, so I cleaned up your post a little to just use terms from $SYSTEM-TAGGED. I hope this helps, and if I've gotten anything wrong you can just [edit] your question again or revert my edit by clicking on 'edited $TIME ago.'"

• Once a few comments like these are on the post... wait. Let's see if the user's responsive before giving them a ten-item checklist they have to wade through. "Uhh, okay. I'll read the tour, then this meta about one post. Then I'll edit down to one question and post another separately. Now I'm getting two streams of comments! What the what, what?"

• Use the "on hold" terminology: avoid referring to close-votes and closure as such. After all, the change was made explicitly to try and send gentler messages to new users.
• If it appears an experienced user is working productively, restrain the urge to chime in. Even if they say something you disagree with! In a similar vein, if one of the established users working with the new user says something you disagree with, don't argue with them in comments. Nothing is going to sour a new user like two established users yelling at each other, drowning out their question. Either wait for the comments to die down, ping the tour-guide in chat, or wait until the post's reopened to fix minor issues of accuracy.
• The moment you get any flak/pushback from a new user, just step away. I, personally, have recently been trying to hold myself to a two-comment per post maximum. Trust that the system will work: if a new user engages in good faith they will get help in a useful way. If they're not they won't. It's not our job to directly shove them from one category to another, it's just our job to be the site-response that prompts their self-training.

I think these all boil down to a few fundamental principles:

• Keep your eye on the prize: getting the question good enough to be on-topic/reopened. We can fix the small things later, focus on the big things while closed.
• Trust your fellow citizens to do a good (enough) job,
• Be patient.
• Whether this user ever comes back--whether the post ever gets one more minute of their attention--the site's better off if they leave with a neutral-to-positive impression rather than a negative one.

Answer 5

TL;DR

I like seeing vocal (while respectful) disagreements on Meta; I believe it's a healthy sign. I feel like I'm seeing less of that this last year and it worries me. (A little.)

I worry about a lack of diversity of opinion on Meta/in Meta discussions.

It feels--and I'm sorry, but I just can't point to a simple series of posts that create this impression--like we've heard less diversity in opinion expressed in Meta discussions this last year. I don't know whether that's good or bad, because I can't deconstruct how much this impression may be coming from (at least) the following factors:

• I joined at what appears to be one of the most tumultuous times in the site's history, so my lasting first impressions were of pretty-vigorous debate. (Recs, then RAW, anyone?)
• My own acculturation/indoctrination, such that what once appeared to me as "that's an interesting different POV, I'm sure glad someone took the time to write that up" might now look like "this person just doesn't get it." (I'm not saying that's the correct interpretation, just recognizing that I'm as susceptible to groupthink as anyone.)
• A few notable personalities "took a breather," and that might have an outsized impact on my perception of the range of discussion. (I'm thinking of more than just KRyan who has self-identified as such in this discussion already, but don't feel it's proper to "out" anyone else by name.)
• Signal discrimination, as applied to the user-base: if we're doing a better job of quickly rejecting poor users, then by necessity we're probably also upping the rejection rate of "good" users. (Just the inevitable evil of any system that discriminates with imperfect criteria.) If we are inevitably rejecting some voices that might be productive and valuable at the same time as we reject more low-quality contributions, then let's recognize that as a cost as well as a benefit.
• Perhaps we're just doing the good job community-moderating on mainsite that's already been mentioned in other answers, so that fewer users grow frustrated and "escalate" to meta? But it feels a little confirmation-biasey, so let's give that a hard look.

Answer 6

We're going to have another mod election ASAP.

Unfortunately, other commitments have caused @waxeagle to not spend much time with us. So we've asked for a mod election to backfill his position. Given the changes, the site's not too much work per se for @SevenSidedDie and I, but having a diversity of viewpoints is always desirable. So look for an announcement of that soon. We'd love for the folks who have been doing great work curating our community to run!

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The April 2017 election is now underway.

Answer 7

We've seen the community step up their role in moderation much more (good IMO).

One of the key takeaways I had from the debate early last year was that people thought mods were acting "too much" instead of just handling exceptions. But discussion revealed we felt like we had to act because the community wasn't doing so themselves (flagging comments, closing questions, editing, etc.). The community said, and I paraphrase, "well we feel like we don't need to do it because you guys are." A vicious circle.

So, while we didn't accept some of the more dramatic proposed solutions like "mods shouldn't close-vote any more," we tried to step back and let the community act more and act first. Specific leaders stepped up and then the rest of the community did too, and the results I've seen are:

1. Chat is much more civil
2. Most questions that need revamp are closed/edited/reopened by the community
3. Most problematic comments/comment threads are flagged by the community - it's now rare that I go to a question and see a big 10-comment argument that hasn't been flagged already, in fact it surprises me now when it happens.

Great job to the community and it's resulted in a big improvement to the site's tone.

Answer 8

We don't comment answer!

Seriously, it's not even a problem anymore. It's so nice.

Actually it makes it hard for me to use other SE sites because increasingly the network norm seems to be for high-rep users to leave answers in the comment section on questions they think are too trivial, or bad answers on questions they think are too hard so as to avoid downvotes, and running into that so frequently after doing stuff here is jarring.

(Apparently, this is still an issue for the mods, who have to respond to our comment answer flags. Hopefully, network-wide community management will improve things at some point)

Answer 9

From the perspective of an outsider who wasn't around for most of the context, there's some anomalously combative mod behavior.

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First, disclaimers:

1. This is a great, useful site, and I've upvoted other answers that say so. I'm writing this answer not because it's the primary answer I have to "how are we doing," but because it's the only thing I have to say that isn't already expressed in another answer.
2. I used the word "anomalously" in my header because the concerns I'm addressing here are anomalies. This isn't "this mod is generally a jerk." It's "this mod is normally totally fine, but specific triggers and topics seem to cause them to suddenly act like a jerk, and they seem to have limited awareness of this."

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In the comments to the dark wanderer's answer, @mxyzplk mentions that specific examples would be helpful. The question specifically discourages long comment chains, so I'm adding some as a separate answer rather than adding to the (already rather long) comment thread on that answer.

The specific examples @mxyzplk is looking for are right in the question that @the dark wanderer linked in their answer. Both questions have answers from them that received a decent amount of downvoting and pushback. The first characterizes the asker's behavior as "offensive," while the second says "this is being made way more complicated than it needs to be" and features a comment that "I'm very much not happy about how this conversation has gone so far."

This is characterized by @BESW in that comment thread as "brusqueness," but it doesn't really look like brusqueness. Brusqueness is a no-nonsense answer to the question, without this kind of additional editorializing. These answer look more like grumpiness-bordering-on-flaming.

And the thing is - both questions have other answers that a) say basically the same thing, and b) aren't grumpy. So it's not like this is impossible!

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I am certain (both because I understand at least a little about how online communities work, and because I've read some of the old meta discussions) that this isn't just random acts of grumpiness - it has context, history, and reasons behind it.

But from an outsider's perspective, it's weird and off-putting, and not to put too fine a point on it, it kind of seems like it always centers around @mxyzplk.

So, if I may offer a piece of gentle advice: mxyzplk, when somebody you don't like (possibly for good reason!) posts a question:

1. Take a deep breath.
2. Write your answer.
3. Take another deep breath.
4. Read over your answer and remove the grumpy bits, even if you think they're justified.
5. If you can't bring yourself to do (4), refrain from answering. SSD seems to be excellent at addressing these sorts of things with more equanimity, and no doubt picking up a third mod (as discussed elsewhere) will also help make it more of an option for you to just not answer some questions.

(Obviously this applies only to writing public content for the site. You're allowed to be grumpy when you're writing, say, suspension messages; I have no reason to believe you have behaved inappropriately in the context of mod actions.)

For newcomers like me, I suspect this will cause this community to seem more like an entirely functional community, and a little less like a mostly functional community with a distressing amount of drama lurking just below the surface.

Answer 10

We still have some contentiousness around putting answers on hold.

We get many new users who ask multiple questions in one question, or are unclear, or don't say what game they're talking about.

In general the community's doing a great job of putting these on hold, getting clarification, and reopening once they're good.

Where I see this going off the rails, though, is there are people - who are motivated by wanting to help the user - that do a couple things.

1. They answer too fast when the question is obviously going to be closed
2. They object about questions being put on hold
3. They edit the question dramatically without input from the OP to try to get them on topic

This would be fine, kinda, but then it leads to conflict with the other people trying to work the questions according to site policy, and then people get heated and start to violate Be Nice. Over the last year we've had to issue a couple warnings and suspensions when discussion over a closed question went from 0 to inappropriate between site users in a short amount of time, and we hate having to do that.

From what I see, all the questions that should be open have gotten reopened after their workshopping - the only ones that remain closed are the ones that are off topic or the OP never came back to.

I think the solution here is "trust the process" - getting put on hold and clarified, IMO, isn't what is driving off users. Fights amongst the locals on their first question, that drives off users. If a question is unclear, let it close, work with the OP to engage them and get it worked up and then reopen it.

Answer 11

We weathered a hostile user/sockpuppet attack very well.

One thing of note is that during this year we had a specific new user who quickly went off the rails, and then decided to create sockpuppets to continue to cause problems. It's hard to find socks once someone starts to put effort into it, so that person's still on the site. It was our first time on the site to really have a persistent adversary.

But, the disruption was limited by virtue of the community doing the right things and not rising to the bait, both initially and then in the long run. That user then seems to have given up being disruptive because it's just not fun here. Bad comments get flagged and deleted, hostile posts get edited, yelling on meta gets downvoted by all the site users that know how to behave. While he/she did get some peoples' goat, they chilled and let the process work instead of taking up their part in a conflict.

While we mods were the "tip of the spear" in responding to this when it happened, I believe it's just the community doing its thing that really brought the problem to a close.

Answer 12

Comment deletion levels are appropriate, even though it still upsets some users.

Remember, feel free to submit your own alternate answer... But I believe, and have seen other site members say, that our policy of deleting comments per Why are site comments being deleted? continues to make the site strong. Answers in comments circumvent the basic theory of the site, off topic comments hide the quality content in our answers, etc.

I believe that in general this works. Much of our comment deletion is flag-driven so I think others agree; they don't want arguments and clever quips getting in the way of the information either.

Some folks disagree. They want to discuss more. Or they had a good comment get deleted once - this happens. But comment deletion is routine and daily, and "I had a comment deleted once in '14 I liked and now I hold a grudge about it" overlooks the vast overall benefit to the site. Or people are concerned that "other SE/site X doesn't do it this way" - well, we're our own site and we have the freedom to implement SE best practices in the way that works best for us.

So while comment deletion a isn't perfect process, I believe it's currently at a level that reflects the majority view. You hate your joke going away, but it's less cruft for the other 5000 people hitting the site that day.

But how to make it less upsetting to folks that don't like it? We've tried linking metas, we've tried doing it with explanation and without explanation. The one thing I think has helped the experience is we do move long threads to chat instead of just deleting them now that we have that functionality, and that's helped some I believe, balancing in-context discussion with brevity - some users even have initiated those on their own, which is boss. I think more setting up chat when discussion starts is the best answer to balance the site hygiene with the desire for discussion.

Answer 13

This is one of the more tightly run Stacks I've seen, and that's a very good thing considering the broader context of the RPG world online

First off -- hats off to the whole RPG.SE community for the tight ship we run here. We augment our diamond mods extremely well, to the point where even as a 5k user, I have had to do very little work around here because we have so many folks stepping up. (This is relative to the fact I have already cast over a thousand close votes on EE.SE in a span of 6 months -- that site has a nuts close vote queue!)

While the helpfulness dogpile phenomenon is an issue that nitsua rightly raises in his answer here, by and large, we don't suffer from the instant-abandonment that plagues DIY.SE or the near-curmudgeonliness of significant chunks of EE.SE (granted, that's hard to avoid given the volume of LQ stuff they get coming in vs. the main answering audience they have -- I can barely work the close queue on that site due to the sheer volume of questions that are the EE.SE equivalent of someone who hasn't read the PHB asking "how do I wizard in D&D 3.5e?"). This is an impressive achievement for a Stack working a topic where truth can be hard to come by and acrimonious debate is extremely common.

Speaking of that acrimonious debate, this is one of the few fora I've seen or even heard of that has been willing to take on the tough questions regarding playstyles and playstyle conflicts, problem players and GMs, and other such meta-table matters without devolving into argument or punting questions into the bleachers. I suspect the Q&A style of SE combined with the tight moderation is why we pull this off so well, and that's again something we should be proud of.

Answer 14

Handling subjective questions and answers is still messy

We have a popular category of question that gives community and diamond moderators some headaches: the advice or technique question.

These tend to be long on details, and require judgement, experience, and creative solutions to answer well. Unfortunately, they attract bucketloads of armchair advice as well. Often it's well thought-out advice, but it's unclear whether it's just made up and sounds good on paper, or actually works.

We expect our answers to subjective questions to be drawn from experience, and on that point, we expect such answers to provide that experience to help the voters evaluate the answers. It's very uncommon to do so, though!

These questions have been with us forever. They're very popular to answer, and voting tends to be highly active. They tend to draw a number of answers into the double digits.

We generally seem to like these questions.

But we're not sure how to handle them. The questions themselves are sometimes closed and reopened multiple times, and often involve a lot of comments to clarify and refine the question.

For mods specifically, we're not sure how to handle them. Closing the question is contentious and unpopular, and is sometimes hard to firmly justify. Getting hard-nosed about Good Subjective/Bad Subjective in the answers turns out to often be a losing strategy (with some exceptions), involving a lot of manual intervention, custom comments, and multiple rounds of interaction with the authors — if the authors even respond. When they don't, our only recourse is deletion of the answer, which is a heavy intervention for something that isn't blatantly off topic. In both cases, the improvement is overwhelmingly not proportional to the effort expended – sometimes it's even non-existent. Meanwhile, this direct, manual intervention from mods is extremely disruptive, and sometimes seems to create more bad blood than it seems to create positive change. Yet, just letting these questions run wild (and they do) doesn't seem to be desirable either.

I don't have any proposal for this — I just present it as an unresolved issue I think is currently facing the site. It's not a great situation, and it has no obvious solutions. This is a type of question where our quality-control tools built into the site appear to fail us.

I would say this is one of the larger unresolved content-based issues that is currently simmering on the site.

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Only because it's currently an exemplar of the situation, showing all the spectrum of answer quality and the contentious hold voting, I provide as an example How can I best implement a recurring villain when the players are not opposed to killing?. I was just there attempting to implement the post notice solution to the issue, when I ran out of steam and the ability to judge fairly halfway through (it is exhausting) and removed all the comments and notices since I couldn't fairly only do some of them. Then I came here to write this post, which is one I had been intending to write even before that specific question was originally posted.

(Notably, the post has two pending flags on it that have just been sitting there, because as mods we can see clearly it's got some issues, but resolving them is non-trivial, and we don't want to just dismiss the flags and look away.)

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There has been a lot of meta ink spilled regarding these questions. Some related reading:

• My question got too popular - what should I do now?
• Why is one +21 question On Hold when a similar question is ok with +53 votes?
• What's up with this "please edit to add citations" banner?

Answer 15

Meta and chat both could use some more diversity in the regulars

I feel that some of our subcommunities are underrepresented, both in Meta and the chat. Right now, both fora are relatively evenly split between our Fate-folk and our traditional D&Ders among our regulars -- we could use some more folks from non-D&D trad game backgrounds, especially outside of fantasy settings. (Are all the runners out there afraid their Mr. Johnson will catch them in Stack chat and slap them silly for it? ;)

Answer 16

We have been more proactive in issuing mod-messages and suspensions

This came up and I realized we hadn't mentioned this and it bears mentioning, so full disclosure...

Back in the blowup last Feb, one of the things I say in my linked answer is that "we've never banned anyone from the site except the spammers." After the blowup when we were seeking advice from other SE diamond mods on how we could improve, that raised some eyebrows. "Well that's your problem right there." Talking with them and reviewing how we'd issued a bare handful of suspensions in 4 years of site activity, we realized that suspensions are not supposed to be some kind of "nuclear option" but instead are a well crafted escalating teaching tool. They let us know that we were significantly underusing that functionality and that could be contributing to the site toxicity level.

And it's not just about "the meanies." Here's the list of reasons we get from the Great SE Machine when we start a mod message as things that could lead to messages/suspensions when repeated despite warnings.

• consistently low quality questions over time
• question repetition
• sockpuppet upvoting
• targeted votes
• abusive to others
• revenge downvoting
• self-destruction of useful content
• using signatures or taglines
• excessive self-promotion
• excessive discussion in comments
• plagiarism
• something else...

Some of these are about people being rude, but some are about just normal bad content behaviors that are repeated. The more the community has to intervene in a user's content over time, the more likely fights will emerge. I think everyone could probably name a couple usernames where you had come to expect a large incoherent question every time, or the like.

So when issues repeat, we march down the list this functionality gives us. After it gets bad enough it's on our radar we message, then the suspension app itself suggests an escalating series of "cool-off" periods each time it recurs - 1 day, 3 days, 1 week, etc. It takes a lot of work to get up to the 365 day one, but some people have managed (the sockpuppet attacker was the first). An important thing to understand is that the offenses don't have to get "worse." If you come back from a 30d suspension for rudeness and say something rude, you're headed out again, it doesn't have to be "super rude"; if you are trying to skirt the line then clearly the learning process isn't over.

For some folks, it serves as an important message that "look - we are serious, you can ignore comments telling you not to do that but you can't just do anything you want here." For some, it has had to ramp up till they're on a long break (still a small handful). But it does help them - and the site - to cool off by not having the disrupting behavior.

No one likes hearing about suspensions, but I wanted to be transparent about this. I believe our using these features in a way similar to other SEs (instead of largely ignoring them) has contributed to the improved climate I see here over the last year. (I'm also active on Workplace and they finally year-suspended one of their top rep users... I was sad to see him go but agreed that it needed to happen, he had been chronically insulting folks at random.) People are of course welcome to appeal "unjust" suspensions to the community mods, and we tell them that, but the first question is "well, did you do the thing on the list they said you did?" and if the answer's yes, then that appeal probably isn't going to have legs. "But I like excessive commenting/being abusive to others/sockpuppeting/etc.!" "Yes... I am sure you do."

The fact no one has noticed we've changed this means we've still been pretty light on the trigger, but the improved climate from having fewer arguments and things to argue about has been positive IMO.

Addendum

The conspiracy theorists may posit we are using this feature to "stifle dissent." Not really. If you look at the folks not around vs still around, I think you'll see our actual critics are still here whereas noob hotheads and the chronically incoherent are the ones that are gone. Certainly, if you post "The mods are stupid!" in comments across several main site questions, you'll be taking a nap, but same deal if you spray comments about "BESW is stupid!" Not nice is not nice, you know it when you see it. You have nothing to fear if you just take complaints to Meta and Be Nice. And again, suspensions can always be appealed to the community mods.

Answer 17

As a fairly new user to only RPG.SE (just a couple months), I think RPG.SE is very well maintained. The content of questions and answers are usually always great quality thanks to the mods and high-rep users. Every time I've had a question on the main site, I've always been able to find another question that helped me in the way I was needing.

From what I've seen on the main site and meta, the mods and users are typically both very respectful. From what I see that others might perceive as "strictness", I see it more for maintaining quality questions and answers that can stay relevant. In my perceptive, it's about keeping the bar high. I came for the RPG content, stayed for great community.

Answer 18

Moderation, including community moderation, can be... terse

There are a lot of moderation-type-activities that are really repetitive - deleting answers in comments, moving discussions from comments to chat, and asking new users to specify what system they're talking about are just a few that come to mind. New users, old problems that never go away.

Now, as I understand it, moving comments to chat is an automated process that includes the boilerplate comment about what happened. But the other two, while tedious and repetitive from the perspective of experienced users and mods, are new and potentially confusing for new users.

We have some users (BESW comes to mind) who are great about going the extra mile to give a warm welcome, explaining in detail what they're doing and why, and inviting people to make constructive changes. Others (mxyzplk comes to mind, though they're far from alone) are much more matter-of-fact, to an extent that sometimes rubs me the wrong way, and seems, from what I can tell, to be more off-putting the newer you are (regulars who've seen such messages before and understand the reasoning don't think twice.) It's not about doing anything wrong, per se, just a style that IMO is suboptimal.

Mxy specifically defends this style, but if you like terse communication and you get warm, you might roll your eyes and feel mildly irritated; if you're expecting warm and you get terse, it can send strong subtextual signals along the lines of "you are wrong, and I personally dislike you too much (or think that you are too stupid) to waste my time politely explaining how and why." That's not a message we want to send, even unintentionally. So I think it's better to err on the side of warm, at least with new people who are still forming opinions about site dynamics.

Now, obviously, being super nice and polite all the time and explaining everything in detail is exhausting work - part of the reason I've stepped back from RPG.SE in the last several months is that I haven't had the energy to be confident that I was contributing well. But I think we have enough experienced users now with enough energy that between us, we ought to be able to be extra nice to all the newbies (including for mod-only stuff with a third active diamond mod). It's basically an extension of both mxy's answer about increased community moderation, and nitsua's point about not leaving less helpful comments if there are others who can leave more helpful comments a few minutes later.

TL;DR - If you can be polite, step up; if you don't have the patience right now, consider stepping back for a bit and seeing if someone else takes care of it.

Answer 19

Unconstructive criticism is still posted in comments, which are then deleted

In the question about AoE saves being rolled once by the DM which was asked by LegendaryDude, I posted a response that drew a lot of ire in the comments. Not from LegendaryDude (who countered some of the negative comments), but from others.

I am more than happy to see these arguments get deleted afterwards. The points that were gone over in those discussions served as a good place for me to improve the answer by addressing the issue more specifically. And as far as I understand, the down-voters disagreed with my approach to the solution and I so am happy to take those down votes.

What irritated me greatly, however, were those comments made by high-rep users such as "This answer doesn't understand math" or thereabouts: something posted to bash and undermine the effort that went into the answer, without justifying the action. As far as I know, that comment only got deleted. I don't follow people closely, so I don't know if this was a once-off behavior. But I hadn't thought to flag it at the time, and now it no longer exists for me to flag. My memory may be wrong, but I believe there were more than one such style of comment posted.

I am not sure how to address this myself. There is no down-vote for comments, only flags. And I am not sure how often it happens around this stack. But I did consider leaving after I witnessed such toxicity. Thankfully I took a break and cooled my head off before nearly deleting my account.

Answer 20

We do well as far as diversity of games, and are fairly good about diversity of playstyles, but we could do better in a couple regards

We do very well at representing a broad cross-section of the RPG world as far as the games themselves. Again, this is something we should be proud of, as it seems that more traditional fora specialize on only a few games (there's no point in trying to ask a Fate or Shadowrun question on GitP, for instance). We also extend this to the games we try with each other as Stackizens -- I would have not been exposed to Roll for Shoes, Little Adventures, Dungeon World, or even Traveller if not for this Stack, and I know we as a Stack have tried to put other things together as well.

We also do a fairly good job of representing playstyles -- while the fallout from the RAW debacle was quite annoying for a while, our two main 3.5e experts have stuck with the RPG.SE program as a whole and are doing very well there since we decided tags-for-playstyles is not for us. (I think that's something we should decide as a generalization of the results of the RAW debacle combined with the "no meta tagging" rule of Stackdom as a whole, but that probably should be a whole another Meta question!)

Where we can improve, I feel, though, with representing and understanding playstyles is with understanding simulationist play. We grasp narrativist, fiction-first play extremely well out here in RPG.SE-land and also have a good understanding of balance concerns in various systems, which takes us a long way to dealing with the issues most tables bring to us, whether they focus on slash-and-hack (or run-and-gun) beer-and-pretzels play, tactical warfare, high intrigue no matter the setting, or epic character arc development.

Immersion-oriented simulationist play, though, whether it be in the grittier, DM-common-sense driven OSR styles that harken back to early AD&D or more modern rules-as-metaphysics styles that bring us to where Rules as Written matter the most, is something we have problems with at times. Granted, it is not an issue peculiar to us -- it is likely one of the toughest playstyles to grasp from the outside for anyone, and I, even as someone who tends toward that style of play, struggle to explain it to others. (If someone has ideas as to how we can improve on this, please share!)

Answer 21

Sometimes I wish we were less aggressive about closing questions.

Sometimes I'll see a question go by, and I'll say to myself: "I could give a good answer to that! I could post an answer that would be helpful to the person asking the question and to other people reading the site. But, this question violates one of the site rules -- like, it's too broad, or it's opinion based -- so it's inevitably going to get closed."

Waxeagle wrote: "...one of the best gifts we can give to a new user is a rapid close with a strong comment about what can be fixed followed by a rapid reopening." But, in practice, when a new person posts a question and it gets closed, they tend to leave the site and we never get to answer their question.

I'm on this site because I like answering people's questions; people post questions on the site because they like getting answers. When moderation steps in and prevents questions from getting answers, it feels like that's not serving the needs of either group.

(I've brought this up before. SevenSidedDie wrote here: "The asker will come back and fix it if it's important to them. And if they don't care enough to return and fix it, it's better that it stay closed anyway.")

Now. RPG.SE is a really active and healthy community compared to some others I've tried, so from a certain perspective, whatever the moderators are doing is working and we shouldn't mess with it. And I'm not even sure what we would change to fix this issue.

But -- well -- you asked if there was anything bothering me about the community, and this still bothers me, so I thought I'd mention it again.

Answer 22

We can't afford to loosen up on the moderation much more than our regulars have already proposed, probably ever

Sadly, the broader context we operate in is quite an acerbic one, and we can tell from how it spills over into our Stack. New users come here with their fight-or-flight instincts primed from previous RPG forum experiences, expecting either to be answered no-questions-asked or heckled and argued with. This makes our new user moderation far more delicate a task than it is on other Stacks. Aviation, for instance, is able to get away with a somewhat looser moderation style because of the surrounding culture it lives in; namely one largely of professionalism and precision, mainly out of necessity, and even with new users from outside the surrounding culture, the workshopping process flows far more smoothly there.

While avoiding dogpiling will definitely help in defusing the instincts of new users who would otherwise treat a help dogpile as an attack on their question or, worse yet, as a personal attack, this may be the biggest problem we have to work out how to defuse if we want to make RPG.SE more attractive to new users. In a way, this is a clash between online-RPG-forum argument culture, where dominance is established through argument over matters of opinion and a new user's only hope to gain respect is to argue their way into the community, and Stackizen culture, which is largely a self-critical, professional culture similar to that which surrounds say Aviation.SE. (Even traditional fora covering aviation are largely recognizable as reasonable discussion from what I can tell from the threads I've read, whereas fora in the RPG space become almost bewildering in the tone and forcefulness of their arguments -- they're applying the kind of stern tone I reserve on DIY or EE for "you are trying to do something horribly dangerous to life and limb" to something that is purely a matter of fun, and worse.)

Answer 23

Personally I feel that the site is overly strict and doesn't represent the RPG community as a whole, over emphasises the rules-lawyering aspect of it, and doesn't match the expectations you get from working with other SE sites.

I appreciate that the RPG community does have a fairly hefty history of flame wars and that there's no point in letting it erupt here but at the same time I wouldn't consider recommending this site as a resource for someone in need of an answer because there's so little room for leeway in the process of asking a question. If a newbie gets it wrong first time they are often repulsed by the swift and firm response.

I just wish things could be 10% more mellow.

Addendum - I was checking on mxyzplk and 7sided's activity profiles and noticed that both are nearly identical in terms of what they are interested in, mostly pathfinder/dnd and gm-technique. Although that's probably representative of the whole community it does leave us with a very narrow field of focus within our mod crew.

I'd like to see things approached from different angles other than the mechanistic approach of D20 systems, it feels that such an approach does not do well when moderating storytelling type systems where the rules are more 'bendy'. Players primarily from systems like WoD will have quite different expectations than those primarily D20.

Answer 24

We could use a replacement for wax eagle, as he got kidnapped by a dragon ;)

Right now, I do feel we are short diversity in our diamond mods -- not that SSD and Mxy don't do a good job on the whole, but I really feel we miss the deeper understanding someone who is rich in RPG metatheory and game design knowledge could bring to the moderation team. (Basically, a Brian-lite -- I don't think Brian will be doing another moderation stint for a while, and we lost one of our finest metatheory minds in Bankuei from this community a while ago which saddens me greatly, but we still have a few folks about who could bring this viewpoint to the mod team if they were up for it.)

Answer 25

The operating differences between this and other Stacks could be more transparent

I've been a longterm user of Stack Overflow, and came here expecting a QA site that mimicked the style of SO, but focusing on RPGs. I did get that, but certainly not in the way I expected... My comments vanished without explanation, my posts were edited in ways that I was a bit uncomfortable with, and so on. I now recognize these traits for what they are - the result of a culture focused on keeping this Stack focused and high-quality - but my initial interactions with RPG.SE were really confusing as a seasoned SO user.

I think it would be a good idea to create a collection the meta posts where these operating principles were distilled, and find a way to make it highly visible to new users - particularly those migrating from other Stacks. I find it odd that we're seemingly okay with confusing people that are familiar with our format.

Answer 26

We are a shining star in the dark, and that's a good thing, but being a beacon in the darkness is not enough in the wider online-RPG world

I leave you with a question: how can we apply the lessons of the pre-accident investigator (note, linked video is 45mins long) to what ails the online-RPG culture as a whole? How can we bring even a few of the lessons we have learned here on this Stack about supporting multiple, widely-separated playstyles and radically different systems side-by-side, tackling tough metatheory and game design issues in an accessible way, and understanding the root causes of common table-botches to other RPG communities?

Answer 27

The existing moderators should resign, and let new moderators be elected.

The moderation on RPG SE is so wildly out-of-line with any other site on the SE network that it's an ongoing blemish for SE. Aggressive moderation in questions, answers, and comments is unparalleled. A highly narrow and intrusively bureaucratic interpretation of SE guidelines is taken in contrast to all the other sites with which I am familiar. The prior Meta threads had their most-upvoted answers ignored in favor of lower-voted moderator answers. That's crazy.

I would challenge anyone with access to the data to compare proportional moderator activity here (including closures, deletions, and comments) to non-moderator activity, versus any other SE site. This definitely appears to be an outlier.

The only way this can be improved is for the existing moderators to pass the torch to other members of the community.