Too many moderators?

Number of forums: 901. Number of members: Upward of 120,000. Number of moderators: 123.

Hang on, 123. Why does that number come into play as far as management is concerned? The common justification is that there are enough forums on the board to warrant a staff that large, yet counterexamples seem to be everywhere. For one, we have PKMN.NET, which makes do with seven administrators, three active super moderators (Bre and Continue don't count) and really one active page moderator; things move smoothly since there are more people who are prepared to intervene in conflicts on the forums (whilst the others work on main-site projects), including a few who act in times when the big boys are out to lunch; the only weakness is that all active staff members (except one) reside in the British Isles. Then we have the Pokémon Community, which, I've come to observe, probably has a larger staff than it really needs (I'm pretty sure some other moderator could whisk my post away, especially given what's happened with a bungled rule in OVP and the stalking issue); we have more than twenty page mods and we end up having the higher staff doing the bulk of the work. In all honesty, I personally believe the site could run quite fine if a couple more higher staff members were added, a couple of page mods who do their job enough stay at post, and all the rest cleared out in a mass lay-off.

And now the subject is SuperCheats. It's got 123 moderators among 120,000 members or more and 901 forums. What seems to be the problem?

I remember having a disagreement with a new, haughty member over the subject, but in a way he had a grain of truth in him. I'm not sure as to what the genesis for the mod application idea was when Rich decided to implement it (I only remember being told in advance of a democratic system), but after it was implemented, the vast diversity of the forums seemed to require it. Many of the 901 forums aren't venues everyone on the forum can access and relate to — and I don't mean small differences such as between the Pokémon TCG and Game Boy games, but individual games from all different franchises altogether. One person who has enough knowledge in games of one franchise, say, Grand Theft Auto, that he can help others progress through the games and mediate discussion thereof is bound to have as little enthusiasm in Final Fantasy or Kingdom Hearts as he has much in Grand Theft Auto, so he probably would not be an excellent candidate for a position to moderate a large swath of video game boards (although he could stand a chance as a super moderator, but that's a different story). The natural response to such a deficit would be to hire someone with enough interest in the Kingdom Hearts or Final Fantasy games.

If the concept seems to work, why isn't it? The problem isn't in the diversity of the games, but rather in the number of people assigned to one specific game forum. And mind you, forums are not set necessarily by franchise, but by individual product. That means you have a forum for Grand Theft Auto III, Vice City, and San Andreas with a different moderator or two for each. Add the different forums for different platforms (I don't know whether this issue has yet been covered) and you have an ideal maximum of 18 posts between the three instalments and the two platforms (PlayStation 2 and Xbox), with a maximum of three mods for each instalment. Occasionally you'll have more than one of these posts held by the same person, but often the ones holding the posts are vastly unique.

I'll be blunt here: There are simply too many moderators, and they're causing too many problems for the site. And it's not necessarily the application system, but the number of people Rich wishes to have working for him. These days, unfortunately, we have plenty of skirmishes over who's going to get the last toss-up for a general board position (each of which usually has five spots); the most recent one was for Team and Clan Boards, which I'll admit has a few management issues. The facts are clear, as in the aforementioned sites: A better choice would be a set of well-rounded staff members who know enough about franchises and can easily go through a set of forums labelled under one franchise such as Grand Theft Auto. Failing that, we could probably use a couple more super mods who come around more often; we're down to three already.

Here's the type of overhaul I'd recommend, in short: Reduce the number of normal moderators on the forums and increase the amount of moderators who can easily work in more than one forum by adjusting to the expectations therein. PKMN.NET has it right.

Cross Stinger in 'sucks' shocker

d---head no1: cross stinger

and followed by annefranman52 from the supermod of supercheats....he deserves to be called a n00b.not a d---head.

d---head no3: tornado212 another shameless motherf---ing d---heads......edit: not a d---head. but dumbass.

edit: he shouldnt be called a d---head. he should be called a f---er.

demote meand ban me from being a moderator if you dare you son of a bitch cross stinger.......

See what subscribing to details on MSN (my new address is crystalwalrein@hotmail.com; the old one, linked to at the top and bottom of the blog pages, will be used for emails only) gets you? A moderator, whose signature I had previously had to disable after his stand for 'freedom in signatures' — be it the freedom to curse out Chelsea footballers — challenges the notion that sedition alone won't get him demoted, let alone banned, from Super Cheats. But I think I'll use this quote, taken from his account on Windows Live Spaces, to create an entry on how I've been viewed on Super Cheats.

Members of Super Cheats who are currently reading may or may not have disagreed with me on letting Mr King of Games re-enter — after it became clear that he had fabricated the accounts RKO-123, Dr Advice, and Mr Kennedy (they actually weren't JCD, as I had previously reported), David gave him a few hours to recant before banning him permanently. Not even a month ago, he returned under the account KOG and pleaded forgiveness, whereupon I decided first to put it to the vote and, four minutes later, when I had realised it wouldn't go anywhere, immediately bade him re-entry.

A more recent argument — in fact occuring earlier today — was over the standing prohibition of election of moderators who had been banned for clear offences. Shadow GX had previously been banned for a disagreement with Dave and later received two moderator positions, and yesterday Dennis, who had subscribed to the rule, removed her and Lurch5000. However, Rich, who had said that Shadow GX could stay after I probed the possibility of her asking Nintendo_dude for a position, was infuriated and removed the rule altogether, claiming that there remained chances that previously banned members could have reformed enough.* This touched off an argument between all of the moderators and eventually led to questions as to how far I really was able to go as an administrator.

Personally, I'm doing what I can. I respect Rich's opinion and have in fact asked him to approve certain segments of rules I had drafted, but, as with the removal of team objectives, I'm slightly disappointed. Far be it to say anything against myself, as this would prohibit me from attaining a position at PKMN.NET if ever I was considered if that rule were in place there, but this rule had some sense to it. It's extremely difficult to place any trust in anyone liable to spam and flame or proven to have done so and been banned for it, unless it came from a mutual disagreement. For us, it was an incentive for members to stay out of trouble if they wanted any position of authority.

Then again, having written that whole screed, I'm brought back to the moderator system. I'm sure this was what ultimately befell PC's election system back in the day: In a similar vein to what's happening here, a former administrator, Sarah, insulted another administrator's religion on several occasions and ended up out of the fold after, from what I see in the search results, Jake put his foot down with her. Although administrators aren't appointed through this method, it may have signalled the end of such a system if it was in place at that time, or a reason for it being thrown out previously. This is the flaw our current system has: Our community is so large that we find it difficult to survey individual members for potential mod material, so we let them come to us and look at them. We usually give out ten or more spots out this way before Dave prunes them, which still tends to leave us with eight or more. Between these successful applicants and considering the current crowd we have in the Staff Forum, only one or two of them, if the applications are all to videogame boards, will go on to moderate community boards (General Chat, Team and Clans, etc.), three or four will remain on their board but will be known pretty well throughout the fold, and the rest are likely to tire of their position and leave or end up banned. It may seem inaccurate due to what seems to be a variety of people in the Staff Forum, but in reality only about twenty different people end up discussing things regularly behind the curtains as opposed to the full count of moderators, which has consistently floated above 100. Even among these twenty or so, there will be two or three moles who end up being kicked out or otherwise in disfavour. Thus the quote at the top of this entry.

And as long as there are moles, the abilities of super mods and administrators will remain in question, even if they're selected by Rich himself without much input.

* This can be said for Kylie-chan, currently a super moderator on PC. As Dark_Pikachu, she was banned for spamming and flaming but was later brought back on demand of the other members. It probably wasn't even three months afterward when she was promoted.

Update: Due to excessive flaming in the comments area, comments are disabled for this post.

Cloning glitch

Back in the day when Ruby and Sapphire were still new, it was proven that you could not clone Pokémon as you could in Gold, Silver, and Crystal. However, it recently surfaced, thanks to a person named Poketaz (albeit a Serebii.net member, so that site's eaten its lunch), that it is now possible to clone in Emerald.

1. Go to the Battle Tower in the Battle Frontier. Go to the PC and save your progress.
2. Deposit the Pokémon you wish to clone in an empty box by selecting Deposit Pokémon.
3. Log out and save again. Now access the PC again and withdraw the Pokémon you deposited.
4. Without saving, go over to the attendant hosting the Link Multi Battle tournament (the one farthest right). Confirm that you want to challenge and select your two Pokémon.
5. When the attendant says she needs to save the game, respond 'Yes'. The game will freeze for two seconds. Once the game starts running again, turn off your Game Boy Advance and then turn it on again. Do NOT save the game at this point.
6. The Pokémon you deposited and withdrew will appear in both your party and the PC.

Exit objectives

On 1 March 2006, a referendum on teams and clams was demanded as spam increased in every thread. The question was raised as to whether the Team and Clan forums were even necessary. When protests from regular users swamped calls for the removal of the board, a member's mention of a team purpose idea made it to my mind:

Exactly SGX, many people would be gone, including myself there, I rarely go to any Video Games board to tell you the truth. Also, people need somewhere to talk about other things, not only the so called "team purpose" because if that is the whole point of a team, why don't you allow teams to go back to the Video Games Board, I mean, they are specialized in that, aren't they??

I may have misinterpreted this, but in three days it culminated in the institution of a new rule that called for mission objectives. The idea was that having a valid mission objective, such as assisting new members around the forum, assisting in moderation, organising petitions, and arranging community events would drastically improve the quality of posts in the forum. Over time, though, resentment boiled until late last week, when a group called ~La Revolution~ used the petition objective to launch a campaign for the removal of the purposes. This morning Rich announced that, although the rule was intended to reduce spam, its unpopularity was grounds for abolition.

Looking back on the rule, though, there were a lot of problems with it that made it hard to enforce and eventually completely undermined it, rendering it a superficial burden. Forstly, I vigourously concocted and promoted this rule mainly because of the hatred I had for teams from the get-go; everyone wanted something to be done about the board without it being scrapped on the spot, but I reasoned back then that it would be better to institute a policy that would, at optimum performance, eventually destroy interest in the board and render it useless. What a stupid idea that was — what ended up happening was that people lost interest due to the sanction, which I had aimed for, but there ensued a longing for the good old days (old PC, anyone? I talked to old PC members about this).

Another issue was the ability to enforce the rule. For someone who's probably the only one given the power to ensure that purposes were adhered to, whilst other mods just checked to see if there was a valid purpose in the first post, and is at work with the rest of the forum and had a full-time job and schoolwork, keeping tabs on teams to ensure that the goal was being worked for didn't just seem impossible, it was impossible. The rule ended up being ignored once the forms had been filled out; it was an empty rule. Then we had the 'member assistance' effect: The purpose that teams found the most convenient to use was — you guessed it — member assistance. The purpose was just to provide a buffer for members that were caught up in a mod situation on the forums, but it was now being used for nothing; members new to the forum would naturally join up and the identity of a team was enough to be individual identity at their stage of life, which rendered the member assistance purpose useless altogether.

Two things, therefore, leave me awestruck. The first was, as I stated above, how blind I was to the possible consequences of instituting such a policy. The other is how long it took for dissent to build up to the point where Rich felt compelled to remove it himself. Then again, there are a lot of things he's done in order to make the forum run like a democracy — such as moderator applications.*

* The old PC, as I recently learned, had the same thing. Of course, it didn't take long for that to get out of hand.

One new super mod, two new admins

It seems events now are requiring me to write more than I really need now. I approached Rich this morning about hyperlinks (some members had managed it) and it evolved into the discussion of the letter I had written earlier concerning departure. Once I had made it clear that the letter was a product of anger (as I had infuriated a PC moderator about leukoemia earlier), it became a question of whether I wanted the admin position. I expected it to be a work in progress — but I saw this morning that he was able to flip the switch on Nintendo_dude and me. He also promoted Annefranman52 to super mod.

So once more, the place is in a dither. Well, not this early in the morning, but come the afternoon it will become a hotbed for discussion, as the other three staff bumps have been. Now I just have to wait for the letters to flow in about my position, people asking me how to do certain tasks on certain games....It's going to be a tough job, but I'm ready after more than two years on the site.

Troll in the dungeon

http://forums.supercheats.com/topic.php?topic=26632

Some member named 'Concerned' thought it would be funny to barge into the site and wave some invisible documentation at us claiming that he had the copyright to 'Super Cheats'. He failed miserably. One, he would have just slapped Rich with a class-action suit. Two, he'd make available the documentation to anyone visiting the forum as per applicable laws.

This is one of the unfortunate trends going on at forums. We know that there are rules to which people must adhere if they want to stay. However, there are some people that deliberately break them for kicks, owing to their serious lack of judgement or grudge against some people. The method shown here was to cause hysteria, much as the Pokémon Community attempted. A person will barge right into a forum and start spreading a rumour that there was a hacking in progress or material had been stolen, or there could be an impression that an April Fools' joke would make (although it's not exactly valid due to the fact that the administrators are doing it). Then there are people who intend to start a war. Imperial Dragon did that by pinpointing Jeroen as the source of the SPP hatred as I had done long ago.

I may as well leave you with that as this idiot keeps saying 'lawsuit filed...' on the forums....

Update 12 April: Some person has now initiated an anti-Aeshma forum on ForumsVibe. It's evidently related to yesterday's copyright trolling.

The triumvirate comes back

As a small update to the events of February, Shiny Zapdos and Jamarie have returned. This is due to a secret liaison with Rich done under the consition that they not apply for moderator for a while. They are also banned from the Team and Clan Boards for thirty days.

Two new super mods

Darkboarder_77 and Koolkid have received a present that I don't have the power to wrap — hell, even Santa Claus couldn't wrap it. The two, amid some praise and some protest, have finally been put on the super moderator rank!

It's no surprise to me, though: The former has been of the material, but whether he would actually get the spot was rather faint. He was smart, he was an aspiring leader, he stayed out of teams, and he certainly can use that to his advantage. Koolkid, though, I can't say much about him, seeing as I never really associated with him.

Super mods were inaugurated, as you read before, in late June in response to the chaos in the staff room and the difficulty in assigning moderators. So three were set up: Nintendo_Dude, Aeshma, and me. There currently exists a rumour that two of us will be sent to another rank, and there has been talk of this well before, but whether it will happen rests in Rich's hands and I personally believe that it won't become effective for a long time. But now we have two more that will hopefully alleviate some of the burden on the current super moderators.

Hey, at least we're on par with PKMN.NET, Serebii.net, and the Pokémon Community now!

Update
Owing to infringement of moderation regulations, Shiny Zapdos and others have submitted a protest to reverse the promotion of Darkboarder_77. At last report Rich has denied this protest and has promoted Spideraman99 and Ilovemissyelliott to the positions as well. At this time Dennis is commencing some sort of recommendation system.

Two Accounts = Trouble

Until two days ago, Dr Advice was a dodgy reference about the goings-on of the Super Cheats staff. And until then Mr King of Games was afresh from his technical victory over The Legend Killer RKO, who was caught faking up 'Mr Kennedy' and Soucercer of Wise (the latter I had banned for a month from the team area). But then some horrible exposé had to come up, and it was left to Dennis to declare that he had found them, on the basis of an IP check, to be the same person!

I have seen people create fake accounts before, but I have never seen it used for a purpose like this. Dr Advice was nothing very special — although Sanzano did toy with him in a session called 'Psycho Surgery' and ended up banning him temporarily for trying to interfere with the moderation process (two moderators at the time, LPD and The Ultimate Cheater, was also banned for this offence, but The Ultimate Cheater was cleared shortly afterward) — and Mr King of Games didn't seem to necessitate an about-face on his record, having initiated a popular character tournament. In contrast, I had always known the creation of a sub-account to get around restrictions on forums; on PKMN.NET I have seen several members try to get around signature restrictions (if the size of all images attached to a profile exceeds 40,960 bytes (40 kilobytes), signature display is suspended until the pictures are changed to fit the quota, but their rule code only states that the signature will be edited directly) by creating an account on which they suppose they can exploit a sig once more — but these are usually found out and either the restrictions are tacked onto that account as well or that account is removed from the database.

Many pre-built member databases — forums and submission and comment systems like the Super Cheats system and blog venues like Blogger and MySpace — try to discourage the creation of multiple accounts, but this is easily defeated by creating a new email account (which, due to the presence of public computers, can't possibly be monitored). The objective isn't to keep people from bypassing restrictions on their formal accounts, but rather to deflect 'phishing' (the use of a mask of a valid email account by a bogus user to trick people) and to thwart the installation of adware and spyware that could pass from the site to the user's computer. Since that measure hasn't worked well, of course, sites have resorted to forcing users to type a security code to log in or register (a bot used to install spyware won't be able to decipher the code, which is embedded in a graphic).

Then, in rare cases, there are people — Video Gamer Network is unfortunately full of them — that create accounts to feign another user. The Legend Killing tournament on Super Cheats, a question-and-answer game much like a cross between Hollywood Showdown and The $100,000 Pyramid, was the venue of the Dr Advice case: Mr King of Games was the emcee and Dr Advice, for reasons then unknown, was doing unusually well in the tournament and was able to beat out 'The Legend Killer RKO' at his own challenge and get him banned. (It was later revealed that The Legend Killer RKO was itself a sub-account to Jcdamasta330.) But after The Legend KillerRKO emailed Dennis for clemency and was turned down, Dennis decided to do a little study on Dr Advice and found him to have IPs identical to those of Mr King of Games himself. Oops.

At any rate, there is no way for this practice to be effectively stopped, but it is not, as you may think, a very common practice on most forums due to the presence of vigilant administrators like Dennis.

Happy Birthday Rich!

http://forums.supercheats.com/topic.php?topic=16711

Thirty-one years ago, the person that would form Video Gamer Network out of the dust of the Internet was born in the UK. (Don't ask me exactly where.) Yes, it's time we made a salute to Richard Gardner, founder of Web Media Network, the Team SuperCheats we love, and the Webby that Gaming Update (ahem) loves!

Thousands of web pages
Based on PHP
Encompasing through the electric ages
And making cheating reality

There are ten or so sites in the pack
(Don't ask the exact count)
With tips and talk the viewer can rack
With a score of high amount

Video Gamer Network!
The one network that does
What is to be, what right now is
And of course forever was
And with our ode to this great group
We can stand together and say
Without the constant vocal loop,
Rich, happy birthday!