Forum Moderator(s) Overzealous

[Ravingdork]

I just witnessed a 141 post thread have 136 of its posts deleted, quickly followed by another thread with over 120 posts have more than 100 of its posts deleted.

What the heck, Paizo? Is that not a bit overblown? I can't help but think such heavy-handed censorship practices would only serve to drive people away from your website, and possibly your business.

Did you hire a new moderator eager to prove themselves or something?

I'm not seeing any rhyme or reason to it. It's not just offending posts (tgose that break communityguidelines) or those quoting them, but fairly innocuous posts as well! If a thread really has devolved that you feel the need to delete 90% of the thread, why not just lock it instead? Leaving behind a contextless husk only leads to confusion.

Best I can figure, anything and everything that gets flagged is getting removed. As some debates heat up, this moderator behavior will only encourage people to weaponize the flag button against those they disagree with, which I seriously doubt is something Paizo wishes to encourage on their forums.

Please only remove posts that violate the code of conduct, and look at everything with a critical eye before making the decision to delete, lock, or leave well enough alone.

[Cori Marie]

Several topics are getting very heated as of late. With that it might be that the very small moderation team does not have the time to take as critical of an eye was you would like, especially since every moderator of the forums also has other job duties that need to be done.

[Doug Hahn]

With big "problematic" threads I assume the mod workflow is:

⠀1. lock
⠀2. remove all flags
⠀3. review when they have time to better understand context
⠀4. re-add comments if needed
⠀5. open thread again with warning, or leave locked

It probably takes a good amount of time time to comb through these long threads; their job is to protect the Paizo brand and present a welcoming community. Better safe than sorry.

I say this as someone who's disagreed with having his own comments removed before but also understands the mod's job ain't easy.

[GGSigmar]

What were the threads about? What happened there?

[Dancing Wind]

Slavery. And Alignment (more accurately: the nature of Good and Evil, using real-life examples).

Both topics are repeatedly moderated and closed. At this point, I'm not at all surprised that staff have lost patience with "nuance" and just weed out anything that doesn't explicitly reference a PF2 rule.

Part of the reason one of them was so long was that the initial post was posted on Saturday. Paizo moderation staff have a 2-day weekend, so flags (generally) don't get reviewed until Monday. Sometimes, people create contentious threads knowing that staff have those days off.

[Jonathan Morgantini]

Hi! Its me, I'm the moderation (primarily, others help). For some context: It was decided that both of those threads had just gotten too toxic and were shut, and eliminated. They should also be locked, if they arent let me know. At Paizo, we maintain a neutral position as best we can when it comes to the forums. That means some of you are going to think we moderate too heavily, while others think we dont do it enough. Thats, ok and we understand that. In those threads cases, those were topics that are ALWAYS touchy subjects, and get moderated more heavily than others.

PLEASE email me at the Community email if you ever have any questions, it's literally part of the job to talk to y'all. As long as someone isnt being blatantly toxic, nuanced disagreements are welcome. But the minute you resort to personal attacks (ie. "you are just being dumb") etc, thats a violation that gets removed. I'm currently in the process of revamping the Guidelines to update them and get a solid consensus about how we want these forums run, since before me it was a CS responsibility.

I'll try and check here for any comments later, but there is always more work to do.

[Blake's Tiger]

Don't forget that anything with a quote from a flagged/removed post gets removed too, even if the content of the author's post isn't a breach. That can have a pretty big cascade effect on the number of posts being removed.

[Saedar]

Counter-feedback: mod early and often.

Keep it up, mods.

[Freehold DM]

Meh. Mods is mods.

[Hilary Moon Murphy]

Jonathan, you have a thankless job. So I'm thanking you!