What has our beloved Smashboards become?

[McFox]

It's stuff like this that just makes it such a pleasure to know that my best volunteer work just isn't good enough for some people.

 

[Mith_]

I think the amount of brawltards as you like to put it has gone down a lot.

I don't care honestly. I just post here to pass time. Yes spam (from non cool people) gets annoying but whatever.

 

[McFox]

Hey Eor, remember back in 2001 before Melee came out and everything was great?

No, because you're a n00b.

 

[Crimson King]

Haha, pwned by McFox. From what I can remember is the boards always go through periods of smart discussion and dumb discussion. Awesome thing is the people complain are usually the ones helping the dumb discussion along. Instead of complaining, why not try to make the site better? Use Social Groups to recruit the best members, then create change that way instead of complaining.

I lol'd when you said "For the few years I've been here..." then read you signed up in Aug 07. Barely even two years, so don't talk down to other people like that. Some people haven't been to forum that actually expect a lot out of them.

Again, make your own changes.

 

[Kirby King]

If "incompetent staff" is really as pervasive a problem as you all make it out to be, I'd expect to see a lot more posts in Forum Disputes (the place that exists, you know, to deal with those sorts of things). That is, I'm sort of sick of reading about how mods here suck but no one ever going through the proper channels that we set up for this exact purpose to even tell us what exactly the problem is. (Is the problem that we moderate too much or we moderate too little? Today you seem to be saying that it's too little; ask another half of the boards and you'll get the exact opposite answer. Forum Disputes often gets posts complaining about overmoderation, but you seem concerned with undermoderation. I guses we theoretically could be guilty of both, but given the nature of the complaints we get, I doubt it.)

I'm also going to point out that as alluded to above, generally speaking you guys haven't been on the boards particularly long, or at least long enough to make accurate sweeping judgments about the intelligence (or lack thereof) of people posting. I don't point this out to assert my superiority or anything, but just to suggest that you're missing some perspective that you would have if you had been around for longer. To prove my point, someone with a March 2008 registration date mentioned how much better the site was when Gid ran it... but Gid honestly had little to do with day-to-day operation of the site even in March; he spent the most time working on it years ago. That's just not something you'd know if you joined in 2008, though, so you see why I'm skeptical of you blaming everything on "Gid was better than MLG" when you really only joined after Gid had mostly left.

 

[Teran]

Use Social Groups to recruit the best members, then create change that way instead of complaining.

Doesn't work.
Isolating yourselves into little cliques is not the solution.

 

[finalark]

I think I just came up with a solution:

If you find a thread to be spam, don't reply to it. If no one replies to the spam thread, the said spammer will probably stop. The words "don't feed the troll" apply to spammers too.

Doesn't work.
Isolating yourselves into little cliques is not the solution.

And I have to agree with you, Teran. Diving a community into groups sounds like a recipe for disaster in my book.

 

[Teran]

I think I just came up with a solution:

If you find a thread to be spam, don't reply to it. If no one replies to the spam thread, the said spammer will probably stop. The words "don't feed the troll" apply to spammers too.

Well... that is kind of in the global rules.

In fact, Replying to Spam results in an infraction.

 

[¯\_S.(ツ).L.I.D._/¯]

@OP.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qw9oX-kZ_9k

 

[Crimson King]

Doesn't work.
Isolating yourselves into little cliques is not the solution.

I never said that. I said gather the people you feel are the best posters and unite with the goal of cleaning the boards up. If a thread has 11 posts, and 6 are good posters, 5 are bad but go ignored, the good posting habits will be picked up. It's a FORUM, by definition the users are what make it good or bad. Cliques will form no matter what, but use them to stimulate good posting, and you will have some change.

 

[McFox]

Doesn't work.
Isolating yourselves into little cliques is not the solution.

He means recruit people who you think can positively affect the boards into a Social Group where you can discuss how to bring about this change, and then leave your group and actually go do it, instead of just throwing complaints out there so that everyone who is trying to make this forum a better place for everyone else doesn't get completely disheartened when they really are trying their best.

*EDIT* Ninja'd.

 

[Cinder]

I'm not gonna lie, that seems like a good idea o.o

*needs to do a better job of taming his rebellious spirit*

Edit: Done :3

 

[Tom]

I'm very interested in reading a thorough, legitimate description of the "incompetent staff" that the OP mentions, as well as those who agree with him (read: Cinder, Zook, Kawaii Bunny). If our staff is incompetent, I only ever hear vague or passing complaints in childish formats like... well, like pie charts with no numbers.

Can you cite or link to multiple examples of where our staff has proven to be incompetent?

What are we not doing that you think we should be doing, and what are we doing that is so bad that you view it as incompetence?

Do you have examples of other forums that you frequent that display examples of competent staff? What is the difference between the SWF staff and their staff?

I read, especially in this thread, a lot of "oh, well we have no say in the problem," or "we might as well deal with it because we can't change it." Well, what is the problem? What is 'it?' To be taken seriously as a complaint or an issue that needs to be addressed, you most certainly need to be more specific than "well, the staff is incompetent."

I can pull together multiple examples of where we volunteer our time to do our jobs and do them properly, but alas, the burden of proof is on you (read: those who want to see a change, those who see a problem, the three I listed above, etc.). If you want to be seen as more than your stereotypical teens on the internet, pining for what once was and complaining about "the man," then you're going to need to be more specific.

I look forward to your responses!

edit: While I'm still on the subject, many people blame MLG for these vague problems. Can you describe what the MLG leadership has done to SWF to make it worse, besides hosting us on servers that do not consistently crash, giving everyone custom avatars, opening up social forums for all of the regional boards, allowing for Brawl+ boards and discussion, and perhaps most importantly separating the Brawl Smash Back Room from the Melee Smash Back Room, so that both games would have a chance of un-overlapping survival and metagame development? Surely you realize that you are just using MLG as a scapegoat.

 

[M.K]

If "incompetent staff" is really as pervasive a problem as you all make it out to be, I'd expect to see a lot more posts in Forum Disputes (the place that exists, you know, to deal with those sorts of things). That is, I'm sort of sick of reading about how mods here suck but no one ever going through the proper channels that we set up for this exact purpose to even tell us what exactly the problem is. (Is the problem that we moderate too much or we moderate too little? Today you seem to be saying that it's too little; ask another half of the boards and you'll get the exact opposite answer. Forum Disputes often gets posts complaining about overmoderation, but you seem concerned with undermoderation. I guses we theoretically could be guilty of both, but given the nature of the complaints we get, I doubt it.)

Excuse me, you have no right to say that unless the problems are ACTUALLY dealt with accordingly, because AS YOU SAY, the "competent staff" should deal with them accordingly. However, they have not done so in my experiences.

In fact, my friend and I both filed disputes in Forum Disputes against an incompetent moderator with great information to support our positions. We also had an administrator agree with our positions, stating that the moderator should/would have incurred "7 points" for his actions in our board, enough to warrant a ban. The moderator was demodded, but only a week later, he was reinstated as a moderator. Despite the fact that our information SHOULD have been kept confidential from the party in question (we read through the Dispute Rules throughly), the moderator in question was able to get into the Forum Disputes (through a glitch?), look at our disputes, and then contact us through AIM to tell us that the "Disputes essentially went right to him" and he proceeded to interrogate us on our intentions in front of several of our fellow board regulars. Like, seriously, some of us TRY to solve the problems, and the problems aren't solved anyways, so really, you have no right to say that the problems WOULD be solved even IF we went through the proper steps, because experiences have led me to believe that you are wrong.

You can check my dispute, really, I'm sure you have access to it.

 

[bobson]

What's everyone's problem with the staff? Aside from a few stupid worthless rules which they themselves break, I've never seen anything overly bad coming from them.

Oh, and the Brawltards slice should be half Brawltards and half Meleetards. Seriously, you ****s are just as annoying as they are.

 

[pokesmashfighter]

What's everyone's problem with the staff? Aside from a few stupid worthless rules which they themselves break, I've never seen anything overly bad coming from them.

Oh, and the Brawltards slice should be half Brawltards and half Meleetards. Seriously, you ****s are just as annoying as they are.

Your lucky you didn't post your signature, or I would have to infract you.

 

[bobson]

Your lucky you didn't post your signature, or I would have to infract you.

I've found that they really only apply that rule when it's needed (e.g.: You posted "lol 10chars" and had one of those obnoxiously enormous Photoshop-filter-king signatures that would be three times the size of your post if your location didn't contain a "clever" quip that stretched it out).

Or maybe I'm partial to the rule because I'm a long-winded son-of-a-***** and my signature is comparatively tiny.

 

[Teran]

He means recruit people who you think can positively affect the boards into a Social Group where you can discuss how to bring about this change, and then leave your group and actually go do it, instead of just throwing complaints out there so that everyone who is trying to make this forum a better place for everyone else doesn't get completely disheartened when they really are trying their best.

*EDIT* Ninja'd.

Ok, I get what you and CK mean.

Oh and snap, I have no problem with the staff here actually, I never once said they were incompetent. In fact... my latest Blog entry says quite the opposite...

 

[Zook]

I'm not going to get into the whole staff thing because 1) I don't want to make enemies because this thread and 2) there's been instances of non-administrators getting into the Forum Disputes.

Honestly, I'm pretty sure that the staff hasn't changed much over the time I've been here loyalty-wise, but I've just realized that you guys aren't the super heroes I used to think you were. lol

 

[Lord Viper]

Your lucky you didn't post your signature, or I would have to infract you.

☆ To me, that's the only thing I have beef with. I would understand that if a sig has a lot of animations to the point it slowed down the page to view, advertisement on your sig, or a link to a virus, but give an infraction for just posing your sig that doesn't have the same characters as your post is just weird. I can't even post my ending post anymore because it's now count as either a sig, or a 10character dodge post count. T.T ☆

☆ Other than that, I have no problem with anything else other than the new sig violations, (I guess that's mostly because almost all the infractions I have are sig violations). =P ☆

 

[momochuu]

I'm very interested in reading a thorough, legitimate description of the "incompetent staff" that the OP mentions, as well as those who agree with him (read: Cinder, Zook, Kawaii Bunny). If our staff is incompetent, I only ever hear vague or passing complaints in childish formats like... well, like pie charts with no numbers.

I wasn't talking about the staff. Just the other stuff.

 

[illinialex24]

Mainly when I have issues I don't post it in forum disputes. Mainly because the issues aren't something you can necessarily discuss.

 

[Scinn]

I'm at green or blue idk most likely green if not none of them.

 

[~Peachy~]

♡Hmmmm...from what I've seen, the staff is really nice and competent in terms of cleaning up some of the "filth" on this site. They can't do everything, so that's where we, the members do what we can to fix things. It's just like the world, our world leaders can't do everything, the blame always goes on their shoulders. Each person can have an affect on the community, whether it's good or bad. It's up to that person to decide. ^__^

♡I think we should stop complaining about things and start taking a bit of action. If you have a problem with someone posting things that aren't reasonable(trolls/spam/etc.), then try to solve it with that specific member through private messaging. If things don't go smoothly then, take it to a moderator/administrator to straighten them out. I've had a few experiences where I had to contact the moderators, and most of the time, they were able to solve the problem. I do admit that sometimes, the moderators and administrators aren't around when they are needed. (sometimes, it takes 2-3 pms to different moderators about a problem), but when the message is received, it is dealt with. The staff isn't perfect, but they definitely aren't a bunch of incompetent freaks that some people seem to be implying.

 

[Kirby King]

Excuse me, you have no right to say that unless the problems are ACTUALLY dealt with accordingly, because AS YOU SAY, the "competent staff" should deal with them accordingly. However, they have not done so in my experiences.

In fact, my friend and I both filed disputes in Forum Disputes against an incompetent moderator with great information to support our positions. We also had an administrator agree with our positions, stating that the moderator should/would have incurred "7 points" for his actions in our board, enough to warrant a ban. The moderator was demodded, but only a week later, he was reinstated as a moderator. Despite the fact that our information SHOULD have been kept confidential from the party in question (we read through the Dispute Rules throughly), the moderator in question was able to get into the Forum Disputes (through a glitch?), look at our disputes, and then contact us through AIM to tell us that the "Disputes essentially went right to him" and he proceeded to interrogate us on our intentions in front of several of our fellow board regulars. Like, seriously, some of us TRY to solve the problems, and the problems aren't solved anyways, so really, you have no right to say that the problems WOULD be solved even IF we went through the proper steps, because experiences have led me to believe that you are wrong.

You can check my dispute, really, I'm sure you have access to it.

Without getting into too many details here, the moderator in question was out of line and wasn't supposed to have access to Forum Disputes in the first place. That problem's been fixed. I'm looking into the other issues you brought up and will get back to you personally once I find out what's going on.

I'm not going to get into the whole staff thing because 1) I don't want to make enemies because this thread and 2) there's been instances of non-administrators getting into the Forum Disputes.

Send me a PM instead.

Mainly when I have issues I don't post it in forum disputes. Mainly because the issues aren't something you can necessarily discuss.

Then it seems very difficult for us to address anything you find problematic, no?

 

[illinialex24]

Then it seems very difficult for us to address anything you find problematic, no?

It is that I can understand, but often the issues are with the moderator themselves and often you would trust their judgment.

 

[Kirby King]

It is that I can understand, but often the issues are with the moderator themselves and often you would trust their judgment.

Sometimes yes, sometimes no. If it's a matter of "he closed this thread about X because it was too much like thread Y," and I don't know much about either X or Y, then yes, I'll probably just defer to the moderator. But otherwise there's not much reason to have to rely on a moderator's judgment in order to decide whether they're acting properly or not.

That said, this doesn't mean:

• that you can post "moderator A is being bad, punish him" and we'll oblige. You do need to make your case to the extent that moderator A is indeed being bad so we can reach a decision, because the burden will be on you to establish your case.
• that we won't, after we look into things as necessary, determine the moderator was in the right. Forum Disputes is a chance to have your appeal heard; it's not a guarantee that your appeal will be sustained.

 

[illinialex24]

But there still is the issue if your having an issue that you can know them and not know us. I know it isn't a guarantee but still.

 

[Livvers]

I'm here to say that I totally agree with sig infractions. If someone has a three inch sig and one line of text, that looks effing sloppy.

Also, I can't believe people who whine about sig infractions. It's one point that stays with you for what? A week? =|

 

[illinialex24]

I'm here to say that I totally agree with sig infractions. If someone has a three inch sig and one line of text, that looks effing sloppy.

Also, I can't believe people who whine about sig infractions. It's one point that stays with you for what? A week? =|

They are actually permanent now. 10 points = 1 permanent point past March 1st.

 

[upwndbykaiibi]

Wow... That's very sad to hear...

 

[Eor]

If someone gets 60 points for sig infractions then why do they even keep a sig?

 

[illinialex24]

If someone gets 60 points for sig infractions then why do they even keep a sig?

To make a point?? People are arrogant.......

 

[Cinder]

If someone gets 60 points for sig infractions then why do they even keep a sig?

Eor does make a good point...I mean, I'd learn my lesson after the first one or two...if someone gets 60 points of sig infractions, we're probably better off without them >.>

 

[Mith_]

i like the freakin thing they did to make ur sig not show up if ur post is too short. i think that is a fix the admins made from a plea from the members.

 

[momochuu]

If you get that many sig infractions, you honestly don't even deserve to post.

 

[Mith_]

If you get that many sig infractions, you're friggin awesome.

Yes I know its so obvious.

 

[Denzi]

I'm gonna say I fall into the blue category. (Okay, maybe a little into the green =])

But sadly, that's a pretty accurate chart.

It's rather saddening.

 

[bobson]

To make a point??

To make sixty of them, in fact.

 

[Kinzer]

Cinder is my favorite Meleetard... that is the opposite of Barlwtard, right?

Anyway thanks for the blog, I got a laugh out of it. :D