I’ve seen some comments regarding past and present moderation and wanted to touch on that a bit. This a long post just fyi.
I have said this many times before, but we try to be as welcoming as possible to all walks of life here on TYM. The NRS community itself tends to be one of the most diverse, inclusive and welcoming communities at least as far as I’m aware. So with that in mind, we have a zero tolerance policy when it comes to virtually any bigotry and/or discrimination that takes place here. This is a competitive FGC/NRS video game website after all. With that said, there’s not very many members on the site staff. And none of us receive compensation, this is 100% volunteer work for the community. The reason I mention that is because it means that we aren’t always going to have a staff member online 24/7. And even if there IS a mod/admin online, that doesn’t mean we are going through every thread and every post. This is why we always advocate for members to use the report function whenever they see a post that they feel violates a site rule. Soo many times a post will be reported that I have never actually seen before it was reported. However, keep in mind that just because a post is reported, that doesn’t always mean it requires us to take any action. But it at least makes us aware of the post and member regardless.
Aside from that, a lot of actions take place that members never see or hear about. Whether they be infractions, deleted posts, DM’ing a member asking about a post or their behavior, members being suspended or banned, and/or the staff all coming together to discuss certain things about the site like the direction we want to go or how certain members are behaving and/or to keep an eye on someone who has been bending the rules but not yet breaking them. There’s been A LOT of very inflammatory and/or bigoted posts that almost no one has ever seen. Which typically are the rare times myself or another mod/admin just so happened to be browsing that specific thread or the status updates and were able to take care of the post before people even saw it. On one hand this is the best outcome, but on the other hand, in general, it might not appear as though we’re doing all that much. Because it’s not like we publicly announce every time we delete something, suspend/ban someone, etc etc.
Most of us realize moderators on the internet aren’t very liked, I completely understand. I’ve had a ton of issues with moderators throughout my experience on the internet. The most common issue I have is them abusing their power and/or not being clear about why a certain action was taken against me. Here on TYM, we try to notify every single member that receives an infraction, suspension, ban, etc via a DM. But again, since it’s a private DM, no one else is able to see it. We will occasionally make a public post about a certain situation, member, post, thread, etc, but it’s rare. We get flack for moderating too much, we get flack for not moderating enough. Sometimes a single member will levy BOTH criticisms. And to be perfectly clear, this isn’t some pity party. Like “oh us poor moderators and what we have to deal with”, not at all. The point in bringing that up is that when you constantly have conflicting criticisms and narratives, it is literally impossible to make everyone happy. So we try to do what we feel is right and is in the best interest of TYM and the community.
All that said, I’m not trying to say or imply that we are perfect because we aren’t. And any and all feedback is welcome, especially if it’s constructive criticism. If you have any issues with a specific action a mod took, an issue with a specific mod/admin, or an issue with moderation in general, make your grievances known. Either publicly or privately. This ties back into my first point of there not being many of us and not being on here all the time.
Anyway, there’s more I could say on this but this post is already super long. We constantly are striving to do better and we need y’alls help to do that.
