I'm gonna respond to this as someone who has been a casual reader of MC threads for a long time -- sometimes it's very hard to understand the context of a report.. For example, I skim these threads every week (skim, to be clear, mostly for my weird obsession with if the Series X is going to do well in Japan even though I don't own one yet), and it's still sometimes difficult for me to discern what is earnest and what is a troll without the proper context of the body of a user's history. We try our best, but given the number of reports we get, sometimes we don't have all the information easily available to us. And it can be really hard to understand the nuance of a report. When someone reports something as just "trolling", that isn't the most useful information because -- siloed from any context -- it might come across as simply a disagreement. We also cannot be in every single community at every given time, so we often lack the body of knowledge you all have. That's why the more detailed reports would be significantly more helpful to help us help you so we can actually understand the context of an individual troll who is potentially subtle.
We missed the mark on Caiops and I think we have to discuss the reporting system at large, but we can only go off of what's reported and the less detailed the report is, the more likely it is for something like this to fall through the cracks.
Okay, so this is partly what I meant -- the first time we ever got word of this was yesterday in a ticket to the mods. It was an extremely helpful piece of information that helped people who aren't regular Sales ERA users get the context needed to inform our decision-making process. If you know there is a user who is posting on a Brazilian message board about trolling on ERA, that is helpful for us! That helps us do our jobs better.
i don't envy the position of the mod or admin team on a regular day. it just seems like additional stress on top of regular stress.
the sales community on not-yet-neogaf-gaf was what lured me to the place from gamefaqs's next-gen gaming message board back in 2002. there's always been a deeply contentious element because numbers can be used to reinforce any number of opinions or interpreted in different ways. but they ultimately provide context for conversations and arguments. that's what makes them interesting. instead of bemoaning the lack of success of a certain title or studio, you can maybe track trends and at least come to a certain understanding behind it. ultimately, sales data, as contentious as arguments can be between users, bring down the temperature overall.
the caiops thing is just one issue. the dude argued with me about a conversation i had with a playstation account manager and brushed it off as though the playstation account manager didn't know what he was talking about (about playstation). this was my first interaction with caiops and i figured he was just a younger person who didn't get it and whatever, you know? i've also been a casual participant in these threads for its run on resetera, so i didn't really know what was going on either.
but as a casual participant, seeing the guidelines come down was pretty perplexing. i wasn't aware that the media create threads had a reputation of being this cesspit of toxicity. i think a lot of the arguments would wear themselves out, but to the point where new ground rules needed to be laid down? this was made worse by the lack of the participation of the mod staff, and any apparent consultation or trust of the regular members who post here. these rules were apparently in the works for a while, but for how long, and what precipitated it, and who was in the discussion? by the mod team's own admission, there wasn't a lot of participation from staff in this community, so who was actually doing the due diligence in gathering up data before actioning a response? to me and quite a lot of other people, it looked like it dropped out of nowhere and that things were discussed in the shadows or behind closed doors, where complaints among bad faith actors were given priority above the people who knew the community better than most.
to circle back, this is the additional stress from the mod and admin team that i don't envy. because a lot of effort went in to making a very bad decision that very quickly backfired, and now there's even more stress. i think what you're doing is good though. more staff should feel free to participate in discussions with a community. so thanks for doing that. honesty and transparency when it comes to making mistakes reminds everyone we're all human.
