Community, Communication, and Controlling the Chaos

Over my almost 3 years of being on these forums, I've witnessed countless instances of a large community uproar. Whether it be over site changes, rating adjustments, or just general community drama, there always seems to be something new for people to get mad about.

I know I've said it countless times in the past, but I think a lot of this is due to a generally negative and hostile attitude from a lot of community members. We all need to be nicer to each-other, as hostility only ever causes more unneeded drama. I know there will always be those handful of people with bad attitudes, but the rest of us need to stop feeding into their drama. Report, ignore, and move on. It sounds simple, but it only works if we all, as a collective community, do our part to keep these forums as a friendly, welcoming place.

Unfortunately, things have been seemingly getting worse and worse lately, and I fear what will happen if nothing changes. I've lately been having an alarming number of conversations with other modders who are fed up with the state of these forums to the point of threatening to leave, and I don't think that's what anybody wants. But as I said earlier, we've had plenty of drama in the past. What makes this time different?

I think the biggest issue has been a lack of communication. I opened the community screenshots thread today to find it to be locked, with no explanation post to even hint at the reason. A few weeks ago, I went to DM my edits of a mod to another modder I'm working on it with, only to find that file uploads were removed. Shortly before that, I logged onto the site in the morning to find the agree and informative ratings gone, and the aftermath of the related drama that happened while I was asleep. And while there were actually valid explanations for the file upload and ratings changes (although notably still nothing for the locked thread), I only found them because I made the conscious effort to search for them.

The fact is, when people don't know why something is happening, they get angry. Are the things I talked about really that bad? No, not really. But when people log on to find something they expect to be there gone, with no warning or explanation, they understandably get upset.

I remember back in the olden days (wow, 2018 feels like so long ago! (>< ), there would be threads such as this one that would highlight recently implemented site changes, explain the rationale for these changes, and inform of any planned changes for the future. Sure, these threads could get a bit heated, but at least people understood where the devs were coming from when it came to hard decisions. And any hostility that did occur was mostly contained to that one thread. But now, it's almost a complete guessing game for a lot of things, and hostility is becoming rampant on threads everywhere.

That brings me to the other major issue I wanted to talk about, which is that the amount of drama and hostility on the forums has seemed to ramp up tremendously over the past few months. There isn't too much to say about the general community that I haven't already (be nice, don't feed drama), but I think the way drama is moderated could use a bit of work. Now, I'm clearly no moderator, so I could be way off-base here, and I apologize if that's the case, but I think locking threads should mostly be a last resort. If there is a decent-sized crowd of people causing drama on a thread, and they don't stop after being warned, I think temp-banning said individuals for a relatively short period of time is far more effective than locking the thread. When someone is banned, it shows them that their behavior is unacceptable and they need to improve their attitude if they wish to remain on the forums. But when the only consequence is a locked thread, the well-meaning members of the community get punished, and the people who caused the thread to be locked seem to get away with little consequence.

All-in-all, I think more communication from the moderators, stricter enforcement of rules, and most importantly, a more respectful attitude from all forum members will go a long way towards improving the health of these forums.

I've been extremely hesitant to actually post this thread because I fear it will cause more issues than it will solve, so I ask all of you to please remain civil and respectful in the comments. As I said earlier, hostility is never a successful way to solve a problem. But I feel that it is my job, as a member of this community, to (respectfully) speak out when I feel something is going wrong. BeamNG is an amazing game with an amazing community, and if we all work together, I know that we continue to keep it that way in the future.

~Rezia

 

You have said everything, you couldn't be more right

 

I agree

 

what you posted is the thing to NOT DO like that will mostly piss off the dev since there is the agree rating.

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What you said here was true facts. I think that you said all the thing who had to be said

 

Its just alot of infighting lately

 

?

 

just dont say agree when you can just rate the post with the agree rating

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My 2 cents on this:
I'm not super active in the forums but with what have been happening lately that should've been the better solution instead of us losing a certain forum feature and maybe even members, in fact as harsh at may sound, perma-ban some of them instead of a temp-ban.
Those types of members abuse forum features, they leak mods, they attack members in the DMs, some even on their mod thread and outside the forum, and they even went as far as attacking some admins too. This will only get worse each day and deleting posts and threads won't really stop this type of behavior.

TL;DR version is: Ban hammer is the better solution.

 

I don't get what you people are up to. It has always been the same, nothing has changed, ever. It's the internet, it's a fairly popular game, with a decent following. If anything there are more of these "It was better before kids", even if you guys have only been there for a year or two.

Its the fate of any internet communities with a large enough fan base. Some people are cunts, some people stupid, but it has always been and wasn't any different before. If you wish for kindness and sympathy don't stick around on a public communities. The opposite always end in endless circle jerks.

Besides, the moderators shouldn't have to be held accountable for anything. Their job is to keep the forums somewhat clean, not give explanations on why they had to delete another "gaga bubu" shitpost.

 

Couldn't agree more with everything you said.

 

Mods need to temp ban more often, make the rules more clear and enforce them to weed out the whiney and clueless people. Maybe they'll mature during their absence.

On a second note, I wouldn't mind if the Community screenshot thread would become pic-only, meaning that your message will be deleted if you include text. And just temp ban the people who try to abuse the system our try out the moderators.

In general, people need to be reminded more about the topic specific rules that apply. I often see off-topic stuff in for example the development/screenshot threads but it is not removed.

 

I don't think that's a good idea, because sometimes we like to put "captions" in our posts along with our pictures to give them more context. Like for example if you post a picture of an Oldsmobile 88 sitting in the weeds, you might say "Ran when parked" or something like that.

 

I think some of the problem stems from the world being in quarantine. I know it has caused me to lose patience sometimes, and people in general are just stressed right now. I agree that the moderators should be more open about forum changes and not punish everyone for the actions a few people that can't be mature.

One of my posts got deleted a week or two ago, and I have no idea why as it wasn't offensive or passive-aggressive. I messaged Nadeox, who didn't delete the post, so he didn't know either. I just think that there should be a message or notification for when a post gets deleted and a reason why so the user can know what to avoid posting to prevent getting in trouble in the future.

Anyways, I know that the devs can't make everyone happy, and thats ok. All I ask is that they work on communication with us. If they make it clear what not to do, then maybe some would behave better. There would be less messes to clean, and this would be a much nicer place to spend time.

 

Captions like that don't really add that much to a post, let the image speak for itself. When the thread derails every week you maybe need to let go of these captions and ban text altogether. Let a screenshot thread be what it was originally meant for: screenshots. No useless, optional comments, no discussions about meshslaps, mods or goodness knows what. Just screenshots. You'd think it's not hard, but apparently it is.

 

I think it's pointless because first off, users can easily bypass it by creating a blank image and then putting text over it. Second, it would also be hard to implement as well for a specific thread, and there's really no reason to. It would be redundant for the admins to implement such a thing.

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I do 100% agree with that point you made, with all the quarantine/lockdown bs (I personally don't like too), it is making everbody stressed out so they tend to have less patience and be more aggressive towards other users than usual. I think that can explain why there has been more drama on the forums lately. But for now let's all chill out, quarantine will probably be over before we know it.

 

As I said, when people people pull shit like that, ban them for 2 months. The mods don't have to tolerate childish garbage posts. People will quickly learn this way.

There is no need for implementation of anything (although that would be the optimal solution) , just assigning someone to keep an eye on the thread is all you need.

 

Really nothing ever changes here, its the internet, so you either get used to it or get tired of it leave in the end tbh.

 

Congratulations OP, you finally learnt what happens when you let kids run amok on a forum.

 

It is a rule, but I don't think I've ever seen it enforced at all...