(04-21-2015, 11:22 PM)FreelanceWizard Wrote: I don't view it as particularly productive to give bad posts a place to go where they can still be quoted, linked, etc., nor do I think a place where people can challenge any moderation decision openly is valuable. It's a hard enough job to moderate without worrying about whether the bad actor in question is going to turn right back around and demand satisfaction publicly; it's also no fun to be the target of a personal attack and have to see it staring back at you in perpetuity.
If there's a concern regarding bias on the part of the mod team or me, I would be happy to discuss it privately via PM. I should hope that, during my tenure as admin, I've demonstrated that I try to treat everyone equally (and I like to think I'm far enough removed from most of the RP on the server that no one would think I was actually in a clique that was represented on the RPC), but naturally, perception is reality in forum management.
For what it's worth, if there is a sufficient perception that I have some bias for or against some posters based on a perceived clique, I would certainly be willing to step down as administrator in favor of someone the community finds less biased.
I imagine this is in response to my post, so I'd like to address these points here.
I know a lot of the folks who created Backstage, and I was fairly heavily involved in both communities. The interesting thing that happened with chatsubo/OOC is that there very distinctly was not this sort of discussion. People didn't decide "Wow, chatsubo/OOC sucks, I'm going to make a stink about it". They simply cut down on their participation in the site. They still played the game. They still communicated through other means (the Eve version of linkshells, etc). When Backstage was created, a huge chunk of those people just switched to it.
The key point here is that the vast majority of these people never talked to the mods on chatsubo/OOC about this. They simply saw behavior that they were uncomfortable with for long enough, and stopped participating.
I know it a perfectly rational world, you would expect everyone who started to pull away from your community to talk to you, first. At least to tell you that they're doing it, and tell you why. But historically that's not what happened with chatsubo/OOC. The chatsubo/OOC mods that I knew were uniformly surprised by what happened, because they weren't seeing the signs leading up to it. People were participating in the forums, and continuing to do so despite the shifting culture of it. It was a classic example of a punctuated equilibrium, though: as time went on, more and more people were pulling away from the forum, and only participating in a very limited way in order to eek out some value from it. But when something else (Backstage) popped up to specifically address their concerns, they left en masse.
I'm not suggesting you step down, nor am I suggesting someone creates a FF version of Backstage. What I am suggesting is that we learn from the examples of chatsubo/OOC and Backstage, and apply those lessons towards fixing this cultural shift with an aim towards improving the RPC.
