Is something wrong?

Question

Before you consider answering or voting, please read the whole question.

As the second of three questions mentioned in this meta, I wish to ask if something is wrong. The meta question was inspired by this answer to this meta and a bundle of comments that related to them. Some of it got kind of testy. The moderators and some users are at odds over whether the moderation on this site is running as it should, and assertions of bias were made.

The process for response to this question:

• If you think something is wrong, add an upvote to this question. If you have more to say, describe it in your answer, NOT in comments.

• If you thing something isn't wrong, a down vote to this question is a great response, as is an answer explaining why something isn't wrong. Again, comments are really not desired, but answers with meat are.

As various answers pro and con arise, votes on them will either accumulate or they won't. What I ask you all is to NOT use the comments on any of them to answer or argue. I request that we really try to use the SE format and voting to gage whether or not something is wrong. The detail of what needs to be In Answers. I also ask of you not to personalize this, even though it's a people thing and we are all people.

The "Be Nice" rules really need to be adhered to.

Rules of Engagement:

• I don't get to voice an opinion. I volunteered to mediate this discussion, if it becomes one, and will refrain from any input pro or con. I am comparatively new to RPG.SE, and offer my sincere thanks to all who participate here for how it supports one of my hobbies.

• Getting personal is going to attract flags. This is a bit delicate, since mods act on flags and part of the question has to do with "are the mods doing it right?" as regards this concern. That's a limitation of how this site works, and I'll work hard in communicating with the mods to try to ensure that any chance for "conflict of interest" is mitigated and removed.

• If nobody answers, and about ninety eleven of you down vote this question, that will send a signal of a sort.

• If a load of answers arrive, that will send another signal.
• More likely, it will be something in between, and I offer you my very best effort to mediate such dialogue as arises to keep it all on the level

Thank you all in advance for any help or insight that you can offer on this matter.

I offer these two posts as possibly related to a cultural/community "maybe there's something wrong" data points not directly related to the dispute that got this question asked.

Answer 1

Yes

I think there is something wrong.

Matter of fact I think there's 2 things wrong with this site compared to other Stacks. And as they are connected, I'm not sure which is cause and which is effect. Or Hen and egg. I cannot say which was first. So I cannot necessarily blame the mods for it, it might just be their reaction.

Community Behavior

The way I would describe the more programming minded Stacks is "professional". It isn't about liking an answer or liking the concept, it's about getting a working solution. That means people will generally respect any answer they get. They will be happy there's people out there trying to help with something they'd need to pay $1000 a days upwards to get otherwise. An up-vote is given when it leads to a working solution, no vote may be given if there is a clearly better solution in another answer and a down-vote is for singling out dangerous, incorrect and/or spam answers. Even for opinionated answers, votes are given based on how well the idea is presented. I'd never down-vote an idea that is presented well with sources and evidence that it will work, just because it's not my style. Obviously, everybody can vote however they like, but as a norm, this is how it works.

Here, I have encountered people that down-vote you because they don't like you, don't like your opinion or found your post personally not useful (compared to "this answer is not useful for the site in general"). There is no professional courtesy for the guy who spent his time trying to help the OP. You need to craft a perfect answer, or no answer. There is no in-between.

That also means, that since down-votes have been used for personal preferences, there is nothing left for the community to use for policing the site.

I have been told by a 30K member, that we need strong mods, because we cannot delete bad answers otherwise. Yes, we can, it's a privilege, look it up. If the community knew about their policing instruments and didn't use them for Facebook Likes, we would not need strong mods.

Moderator Behavior

Moderators on a Stack are supposed to be exception handlers. Doing things the community cannot do. And for the record, that means handling voting fraud, sock-puppet rings, spam and harassment. However, here on RPG.SE I find our moderators being kind of Forum Moderators of old. They constantly use their powers to police the site in ways that originally belong to the community and the communities powers. When I read sentences like "aggressively police" then every inch of me screams "DON'T". That's not your damn job. Your are the trusted exception handlers, not the community leaders.

Conclusion

Now, as I said before, I cannot figure out why this is. Are the mods policing this site so heavily because the community doesn't? Or is the community so free with down-votes because it knows that it won't need them for their intended purpose with the mods policing the site as they do? I cannot say. But I see both of it as two sides of the same problem and we need to fix that.

Answer 2

I was a supporter of this facilitated discussion idea earlier, but I'm not now. Here's why, and what we should be doing instead:

The mods have told us (repeatedly, for years) that if the problem is misbehaviour by a moderator, the right thing to do is bring it to the attention of the Community Managers, and that the more people talk to the CMs, the more seriously the CMs will take it. We don't need to be Archivists; in fact we shouldn't. If the issue is serious, it's serious no matter how often it's happened. If it's trivial, ditto.

Because of this, and because multiple individuals (including all mods collectively) have declined to participate in this meta discussion at all, I now think this meta-level airing of grievances is a mistake. It will dilute the effectiveness of using the official channel: folks will expend their frustrations here instead of in the official channel to the CMs where its effects will accumulate.

To contact a Community Moderator: email the community team collectively at [email protected], or use the "Contact Us" link at the bottom of every page, or pick one from the list and email them or catch them in chat.

Answer 3

The site, and its users and moderators, have several problems beyond those already mentioned. Here are the ones I've noticed. Most apply in meta or in meta-commentary on posts, but many also apply in all other interactions too.

Focusing on personalities more than behavior, judgment more than characteristics

Writing this out and thinking about it, I realized I'm not doing as well on this as I'd thought or hoped. Sure, I might avoid flipping the bozo bit on people… but it's still too easy to just express disbelief that someone could think doing XYZ is a good idea, rather than explaining why it's a bad idea. Here's why these are bad ideas:

1. Writing someone off as a hopeless malcontent or incompetent — but not removing them permanently from the site — fosters lingering resentment and frustration, since they're still there, still doing things, still having an obvious influence. Most of the people involved have fairly significant rep, and we all know that means they're being listened to. There's no resolution, just gritting teeth harder and harder.
2. Manually ignoring people turns out like Add the ability to ignore users, but without software support. That's still a bad idea for all the reasons given there (especially this answer).
3. Writing someone off also breeds a cavalier attitude toward anything those users are involved in. I think this has been particularly hard on one or two mods, resulting in saying things like "the five upset people will always be upset", which can easily drift into "anyone who's upset about this is one of those five, oops I mean six, always-upset people". Once things truly spiral to this point, it's very hard to get back to a place where people can actually tell you you're wrong. And there's always a need for that, since we're all human.
4. Writing someone off, or seeing someone written off, breeds distrust and fear. Each developing "side" is unsure to what extent the others are able to cleverly manipulate things to hide their influence, or to what extent they themselves are being ignored with rolling eyes. The smallest of cues are seized on for evidence either way, even far out of proportion to any conscious intent. It becomes difficult to take even apparently friendly overtures as anything other than an even more deeply-concealed plot. Somehow.
5. Focusing on calling something a bad idea rather than explaining how it's a bad idea sparks defensiveness in anyone who thought (perhaps hastily, or perhaps even rightly) that it was a good idea. It's awfully hard to completely get rid of that reflex, but focusing on the facts first can defuse it to some extent.
6. Discussing the factual up- and down-sides of an idea can lead to exploring more of the subtleties, possibly mitigating some of the problems, or at any rate allowing a deeper understanding of them.

Bad handling of critical fumbles

We don't seem to be too good either at anticipating problems in communication, recognizing them when they arise, or preventing them in the future. Not only is this not something we're good at, it's not even something we recognize ourselves as being bad at. From various reports, it's taken us two years to actually get to the point of admitting we've got a problem with hard feelings and miscommunication. That's impressive!

We're making the same mistakes repeatedly, as seen by various users bringing up old patterns of continued problems, and other users chiming in about having seen similar kerfuffles a year or two years ago about similar things. What's more, we're not learning from anyone else's mistakes either; there are thousands of years of human experience in how not to deal with interpersonal problems that we don't appear to be tapping very well at all. For that matter, there's the much more accessible pool of experience running SE sites (nearly all of which are considerably less wracked by drama than we are, even on sites with userbases of similarly infamously poor social skills) that we're also somehow not managing to draw on well either.

Those boil down to "work out an actual method to better avoid mistakes", which I've harped on a lot lately; the reactions I've seen have mostly appeared to be confusion at the idea or its benefits, or disdain for the effort necessary to do things right. (Or, perhaps, a feeling that all possible measures have already been taken, I'm not sure. I don't think that's reasonable either, though.) Well, this is what happens when you do things wrong: things get worse and harder.

Unwillingness to accept responsibility or blame

Look, reconciliation with people is hard. That doesn't mean it's something we can just skip out on. If we keep doing so, there might not be much of a site left. This is something everyone needs to do, but, unfortunately, the role of ♦ mod comes with an extra share of this. We really need to drive this until it's actually solved, not just sweep it under the rug for another three months. SE employees can probably help, although it's better if we're all trying to work together, rather than them having to come and negotiate a ceasefire with a bunch of people that aren't willing to come together.

And when we make mistakes, we need to trust others on the site not to crucify us for admitting them. This is counter-intuitive, but locking up and refusing to accept blame generally just results in others doubling down on assigning it to you. Just feeling bad publicly isn't much good, though; what's really necessary is to figure out what you did wrong and publicly starting the process of fixing that and trying to prevent recurrences.

P.S. This took me a good bit longer to get started on, and then finish writing, than I really expected. Sorry for not putting this out within two days like I said in chat.

Answer 4

I'm a very casual user of the site, and yes there seems to be a problem to me. The RAW tag creates a situation where a lot of answers are either fairly reasonable or completely wrong according to whether it is present or not. I am not trying to reiterate the argument whether the tag should exist or not, but its existence has problematic consequences. These may or may not be worse than its non-existence and may or may not have solutions, I don't know.

Even worse, though, there seem to be subjective divisions within divisions, since people don't always agree as to whether a particular answer is or is not RAW. I think I've even seen this happen where people's interpretations of the text differ, such that someone in effect is saying, "this is not a RAW answer, not because it doesn't attempt to be one, but because it attempts to be one and I disagree with your interpretation of the text". To me that doesn't mean it's not a RAW answer, although it might mean it's an incorrect RAW answer. The problem isn't that people disagree, it's that their disagreements are solemnised into site policy regarding the RAW tag and then the mods want to or have to get involved. Something that ideally would be "just site content" is "site rules".

I thought RAW was originally envisaged to distinguish questions asking for help with the rules vs. questions asking how the game can be altered to particular circumstances. For example, "how can I make this fight with orcs harder?" is a different question from "RAW how can I make this fight with orcs harder?", since the former admits answers with house-rules to represent whatever in-fiction consideration means the fight should be harder, and the latter explicitly says not to give those answers because that's not what the question is about. Fair enough, I can think of at least three really good reasons to want to keep a question like that RAW: you don't want to use house rules; you want to know what the published rules say before you start house-ruling for yourself; inviting house rules would make your particular question way too open-ended.

But questions like this and this are about text interpretation, which is a different activity from roleplaying even if the text in question happens to be an RPG text, and even though most roleplayers do need to figure out rules from time to time even when their playstyle is nowhere near RAW. This example is entirely civil despite contradicting answers, so the matter clearly isn't hopeless, it just doesn't always work out like that.

This has apparently resulted in some kind of armed stand-off between certain users and certain other users, including mods. I don't pretend to have a good overview of all the details and all the skirmishes, but it most certainly is a problem in that people are regularly getting into hostile discussions of playstyle as a preamble to whether something is a legitimate answer to a question. It should not be that difficult and contentious on a SE site to figure out how tags dictate answers.

StackOverflow has questions about standards and language-lawyering that have provoked similar sorts of issues (basically, you get answers that say "This works on my machine" to questions that very specifically ask, "is this guaranteed by the C++ standard to work everywhere?", but apparently without it descending into distrust of mods, and without mods needing to implement initiatives to ruthlessly clamp down on answers that fail to address the question as asked.

Skeptics has a similar property that it's very difficult to write adequate answers, but at least there the notion of what's a sub-par answer is built right into the site concept, and they're up-front about the fact that the whole site is not for people who don't want to read and write that sort of answer. RPG tries to be for all playstyles but it does this in effect by filtering questions by playstyle and then yelling at each other over any doubt concerning the boundaries of the filter.

I feel like what people really want, and that the RAW tag only approximates, is to recommend some sort of "same page tool" before even sitting down to ask and answer a question together, as if neither roleplaying nor RPG.SE can be a tolerant compromise. Does it really have to be the case that you agree with each other up-front or you're doomed, and it's expected that all disagreements should result in irreparable schisms? This relates to what LegendaryDude says about criticisms of each other's badwrongfun being endemic in the hobby.

I'm pretty sure that from the outside it's not at all obvious:

• why these different playstyles render so many answers fundamentally useless to those in a different camp from the writer
• why this tag needs to be somehow procedurally different from other tags identifying the context of a question, for example particular games. After all, there aren't continual rows and policing initiatives about people answering D&D questions with GURPS rules, the temptation to disagree seems not to exist in that case.
• why people feel the need for the tag to be aggressively policed and even aggressively meta-policed (i.e. not just the tag itself is seen to need to be taken firmly in hand by mods and others, so are discussions of it). What about this site that means the mods even have to contemplate aggressively deleting answers because a tag on the question means the answers are wrong. What other SE sites need this kind of mod activity? Is the problem genuinely that people who want to know what the D&D rules say about 0 max HP cannot get answers to that question without the protection of an enclave created by site policy and aggressive moderator enforcement? Is the problem that people have different ideas about how the site should be curated (for example that RAW answers and house-rule answers must never mix on the same question)? Is that unless the site can reach and enforce a definition of RAW, the public are so determined that this site must be perfectly curated without visible disagreement, that they won't allow questions about published rules at all (like the death of game-rec) and would rather get rid of them than allow them to exist with inappropriate answers? Is it mostly personal antipathy and playstyle advocacy, and question/answers themselves don't really have anything to do with it? I don't know, but maybe someone does.
• why this division can't be handled by people just naturally ignoring stuff that's not relevant to them (for example, why are people so strongly drawn to answering RAW questions by saying, "the rules are ambiguous or incomplete, but of the plausible interpretations I find the following most practical", drawing accusations of presenting house rules, instead of just not answering RAW questions, or saying "the rules here aren't good enough to answer you question" and leaving that to be voted against rival answers who think the rules do answer the question).
• why people are both upset and hostile about consequences of the whole issue.

I'm not saying this is a mod problem, I'm saying it's a situation which is nigh-on un-moderatable and therefore predictably spawns some problems between mods and users as well as between users.

Answer 5

At the request of nitsua60 I've compiled my comments on nvoigt's answer into a coherent answer/comment from my outsider perspective as a relatively new member here.

I feel that mods are more heavy handed here on RPG.SE but I also understand that on RPG.SE you're more likely to encounter very low quality questions and answers due to the nature of this particular SE and the varying maturities of those who are likely to post questions and answers, as opposed to DBA.SE or SO where, as pointed out in nvoigt's answer, you are more likely to receive answers from professionals in the field of study. RPGs aren't a standardized thing so it's difficult to have standardized answers for every question.

If I had one criticism of the mods here, I'd say that moderation of comments is inconsistent. For example, many comments are deleted as too chatty, not constructive, or otherwise not adding anything useful to the conversation, but check out the comments on the answer here -- that's a pretty obviously chatty comment thread that really adds nothing to the answer or the question. This is pretty inconsistent with how most comment threads are treated, and I can't tell if it's because the comments here weren't flagged by the community because they're fun and funny and no one wants to get rid of that and thus don't get moderator attention, or if they are left alone because ... well, I don't know, subjectivity? I don't really care either way about comments, but I do wish there was a standard that was upheld across all comments regardless of their content because in light of this example there doesn't seem to be one.

Personally, I'm all for more openness and less restriction on comments, but this example points to an inconsistency when I've seen more helpful comments deleted within minutes and moderator comments stating that comments are temporary, yet the ones in this example have been there for more than a week and add no substance to the answer. This probably isn't an issue that needs to be brought to the attention of a CM, but if a newbie comes to RPG.SE and sees that comment thread on the answer for wild magic potted plants, they're going to get the wrong impression and think that that type of thing is accepted on this site when the mods have made it apparent that that is not what comments are for.

On the other side of things, if I could make one criticism of the community on RPG.SE as a whole, it's that it seems like individuals in the community here are more concerned with being right and less concerned with being helpful. That's not an indictment of everyone here by any means, just an observation I've made -- answers that aren't as good but still answer the question seem more likely to receive downvotes here than they would on other SE sites, and it's probably due to the highly interpretive nature of most P&P games.

I'll grant that my exposure on this site has been somewhat limited, mostly focusing on the dnd-3.5e, pathfinder, and dnd-5e tags. Then again, those are three of the four most popular tags on the site so it's probably a pretty good sample. I'll add that this behavior is something I might expect for a site related to a subject as contentious as tabletop gaming, where everyone seems to have their own idea of how it should be done and everyone else is having badwrongfun. It's that mentality that chased me away from the Paizo forums; I got tired of all the constant arguing.

I don't know if there is a solution to this, because it seems inherent to the nature of our favorite hobby. You can't change the mentality of a community as a whole anyway, at least not without a lot of effort and a community that is willing to change. And it probably doesn't need to change too much anyway, but I can say I'd like to see less direct arguing about rules (which I may contribute to, perhaps because of the general attitude re: how to play RPGs and in spite of the nature of the site) and more helpful information and clarification of rules, which is, of course, in the spirit of the SE family of sites.

Answer 6

Yes.

I used to use a different account on here and deleted it because the moderation is just ridiculously heavy handed and offensive with it and I don't want to participate in such a climate. I've got a ton of questions I'd like to ask about various systems but there's no way I would ask them on this site as the experience of doing so is profoundly unpleasant.

As far as I'm concerned rpg.se has failed badly.

I don't remember any of the specific questions I participated in but when comments that look a bit like an answer are removed within minutes of being posted it prevents any form of interaction with the original poster.

Conversely there are questions where you might have part of an answer and because you can't use it in a comment you post it as an answer and get viciously downvoted and mocked in comments.

Which means that you are actively prevented from commenting or answering.

Your voice is silenced

That's not a community, that's a repressive state.

Answer 7

Yes something's wrong, but not quite what I was asking about

Intro

The vote on this question is, as of this writing, 26 up to 8 down. That tally doesn't tell us a great deal, beyond presenting the maximum number of people concerned or interested enough to vote: 34¹, out of a site population of two orders of magnitude larger. Some folks think something is wrong.

Discussion

This question had problems with specificity. The answers addressed more than what was behind all of this, which was rooted in a complaint about moderation on the RPG.SE site. We got answers, and a veritable torrent of comments rife with arguments and finger pointing. I asked that comment wars not be how we respond, but that appeal fell upon deaf ears. People will respond as they will. Defects in the question contributed to this.

Two things are for sure wrong**

Something Wrong #1

Something is wrong with the question. It wasn't specific enough, it wasn't narrow enough, and it lent itself to answers that addressed multiple issues rather than one.

What to do about that?

I discussed my disappointment briefly with @Smurfton, whose meta was the trigger for this to be #2 of a three part process (his original being #1), and we agreed that #3 won't be productive. I gather from other comments by a variety of users that this sentiment is shared.

Decision: no meta #3 per the original proposal.

Something Wrong #2

Not using data to inform a decision, or to determine if a decision is needed.

The original issue can be addressed by a data driven analysis that leads to problem confirmation or identification (does it need fixing yes or no?), and a solution proposal process. There are a couple of metas already with solution proposals that don't look to be data driven. (Even though there's some good stuff in them). The need to look at actual use was a complaint levied in the initial discussion before the assertions of mod bias got us distracted form the original point.

Recommended solution to what's wrong

1. The question is beyond hope. Its shelf life has expired and early fixes to it were not applied. (No soup for me).

2. Using data to assess, scope, and define the problem (or whether one actually exists) with RAW tag usage should assure all parties that the way ahead is based on something more than opinion. (What a concept, on an SE site ...)

I'll offer time and effort to address the core issue (what to do, if anything, about the rules-as-written tag) via on data collection and analysis.

I already posted one month's worth of data and assessment from the last year's use of the tag. Until we complete @doppelgreener's very sound suggestion on analyzing the last year's RAW questions to see what patterns of use have shown, any proposal risks overlooking actual usage and take on the form of tampering. (I am using Deming's meaning of that in terms of process change).

I will continue to present those in the thread where I already provided a link results of Mar 2015. April 2015 will be posted in a day or two. I will use pastebin per SSD's suggestion.

That's my answer to my own question.

Follow up: after the negative feedback from two of the principles in the argument, my second month's of (of 12 total) for grinding away on RAW questions was abandoned: the reasons for throwing up my hands is twofold.

1. It looked to become another source of argument

2. The badly veiled insult to both my intent and my integrity was taken as a sign that some people don't want my help.

---

¹ per @nitsua60's comment: the most votes ever for a question on meta was 46

Answer 8

Yes.

I'm answering twice because there's another separate point I want to address.

Let's assume the moderators are acting in good faith, responding rapidly, and following all the rules. Especially answering questions like this where every answer received a moderator comment:

This answer does not meet the requirements of our game-rec guidelines, which are based on the Back It Up! principles of having done or seen done what the OP proposes with the game. – mxyzplk♦ Aug 9 '15 at 14:52

When a simple question has each and every answer breaking the 'rules' then the rules are broken and need to be changed.

Except it's nearly impossible to get rules changed around here because a certain section of the community loves having and enforcing rigid rules with no scope for interpretation.

Inflexible rules and zealous moderators make for an overbearing situation.