Initial Changes to the Forums and Moderation Team

[proffrink]

Hello all,

 

This is a big one. I've tried to summarise each heading for those of you who don't have the time to read through a big ol' thread of bureaucracy for a toy gun forum. Just read the stuff in bold to get the gist of the changes.

 

Context

Jedi will become an administrator and will lead moderation of the forums; I will continue to be in charge of the root forums and keeping stuff running

We're coming up on a week since the forums were transferred to my possession. I promised an announcement on my and the staff's intentions for any changes to the forums rules, how we organise and any enforcement. When I say 'we' I'll mostly be referring to @Jedi_Master, who will become an administrator with a mandate to make any changes necessary in my absence. I strongly feel that - though he had good excuses - Devastator's general inactivity was detrimental to the forums health, and so I feel having delegation of these responsibilities (i.e. leading the moderation team and making administrative changes when I'm not about) will help if I'm ever unavailable.

 

New moderator(s) will be sought after

Jedi will comment on this. It might happen this month, but it could be a little later.

 

We will be clearing the backlog of forum change suggestions from the Forum Feedback subforum

In addition, we will be going through the last years worth of threads in the Forum Feedback subforum and will answer each appropriately. Many have already been earmarked for implementation below, but you may wish to comment on or add your own thread to the pile before this happens. We'll periodically check them anyway though so there's by no means a cut-off for this. We'll try and clear the backlog of suggestions within a month.

 

Please contact us/post below if you have anything to add from this thread, need clarification on something or if there's anything you disagree with

We've discussed many of these changes before putting them out on the forums, but will make changes based on feedback. I would therefore implore you to PM me, Jedi or just post in this thread and let us know what you think. Nothing is set in stone and I hope you'll agree that most of these changes attempt to formalise a set of set of unwritten rules that have been enforced for some time, or to roll back rules that were mostly ignored by the present moderation as they were dates and didn't reflect what we feel makes AFUK a different strain to many other airsoft forums out there.

 

The old moderation team has been wiped

Almost all of them were inactive so we're rebuilding the team from the ground up (minus Jedi of course, who actually did things). I'm sure they had their reasons and every one will be given honorary 'Supporter' tags, but we need some fresh eyes.

 

 

Rule changes

1.1 We will relax rules on what you can and can't say (and to whom); swearing is back on the menu

This rule change will take effect immediately

For some time we've felt that the forums have - to a certain extent - relied on self-moderation through its core membership. These core members (who are both reasonably knowledgeable and also active make up a good chunk of the valuable content providers for the forums) are ultimately one of its biggest assets. Putting it lightly, some choose to 'point out' when another forum user could be being perceived as being lazy (i.e expecting spoon-feeding of information), being an 'askhole' (i.e asking for opinions but dismissing them until they land upon one that supports a decision they made in their head before even creating a thread) or - frankly - speaking a bit out of their arse (offering second-hand advice on legal advice they heard in the safe zone comes to mind). These are what I personally feel make up someone who is unlikely to stick around for long, and this is reflected in the fact that these traits do not often appear in long-term core members (though there are exceptions and I'm certainly not innocent of this either). It is our belief that these kinds of people are - in many cases - fair game for a bit of poking fun at. However, though this clarification has been made it should be stressed that we do not have an expectation that this will happen much at all. The vast majority of harsh/bad language is usually between friends on these forums, and we expect it to stay that way or we might have to revaluate this rule change.

 

As such, we are - officially - allowing swearing again as a means to more freely interact with mates in good fun, or - as above - for the expression of frustration at another member (if it comes to that). This rule change will - like all the others - be evaluated carefully over then next 6 months or so to ensure it's not being abused. Racist or otherwise discriminatory language of any kind is still a reasonably instant ban - this will not change.

 

Once again, please exercise some discretion and measure yourself especially with new members. Though we will not moderate (except in the most extreme of cases) in arguments etc. quite as much, you should of course bring into consideration whether your language might get the desired effect across. Speaking in text is a lot different from verbally and many easily understandable tones are lost when translated into word form. Ultimately you as members will be in charge of how this rule transposes itself as we will attempt to be as hands-off as possible for the duration of this test period of 6 months.

 

If you feel the need to get clarity on 'what's ok' then feel free to report a post and we'll respond with our thoughts, but - again - will only take action in the most extreme cases.

 

1.2 The one exception to a relax on language is that of offering legal advice; trying to offer up advice to circumvent VCRA might land you with a warning

This rule change will take effect on the 24th April, 2018

Anyone who's been in airsoft for more than a couple of months knows the obvious holes in VCRA, how it interacts with UKARA (and other skirmisher registration bodies) and many flaunt it (quite rightly in some cases, but perhaps stupidly in others). Starting the end of this month we will be giving extra scrutiny towards posts made in the 'UK Law' section around VCRA and specifically how to 'dodge' it and get an RIF without really having played.

 

This will be rather lax at first, but moderators will weigh in over the coming months to build up a picture of what can and can't be said about how to circumvent laws meant to ring-fence airsoft as a safe and legal sport/hobby. Many suggestions in this forum aren't made in the spirit of the law and - although case law for airsoft is basically non-existant as it applies to skirmishers - we don't want to be the flashpoint for any litigation that could harm the game. As one of the premier airsoft forums for the UK we should not be surprised to know that it's possible journalists or even government officials may read (or even go as far as to cite) content from these forums in the future. We should be careful in the advice we give out and er on the side of caution instead of sending out new players to test the law to its limit in a way that might put them in jeopardy legally should they ever come a cropper.

 

Again, though this hasn't happened so far and although the forums are very good at providing this kind of information already, we wish to formalise our intent to weigh in occasionally if things are getting out of hand. We recognise that a lot of the time it's the poster of a thread trying to get affirmation that their scheme of obtaining an RIF is legitimate (when it may be questionable) and these will be treated in the same way as those giving a response. We will also be putting a banner up in this particular subforum indicating a stickied thread containing many of the common questions on VCRA. This should mitigate stupid questions (we hope).

 

Once more: This change will be incremental in enforcement and - much like the 'swearing' rule, will be on a longer 12 month evaluation. We will be lenient to start of with and will only step in when things are getting very grey indeed (and even then will likely only offer clarity that indeed the suggestions being made are not backed up by case law and might be slightly risky). Overall we simply don't want new players with little context of airsoft to go out there and test the rules on our behalf because of a few replies to a silly question.

 

 

Other changes that aren't really rules

2.1 Posting in the classifieds forum will be restricted to only the thread's creator (and moderators if necessary)

For a long time unnecessary thread bumping in the classifieds section of the forums has taken up - with no exaggeration - over 2/3s of all moderation time. We aim to slash this in half by only allowing thread posters to post in their own thread. Careful consideration was given to this as it's recognised that a couple of you do see value in calling out bogus listings and silly pricing. However, ultimately, the lesser of the two evils is stopping these threads getting bumped into people's content feeds.

 

However, as a part of rule change 1.1 there will be no longer be restrictions against discussing AFUK classifieds within the Airsoft Dreamers thread.

 

2.2 Bumping a classifieds listing can now only be done once every 7 days

Although the rule for bumping only once a week has been in force since 2013, by the time a moderator enforces this rule the damage is already done (the damage being the 'view new content' feed getting spammed up with people selling their gear). It's now impossible to bump a thread more often than once a week (and a notification will be displayed if one tries to). Threads can still be edited by the poster though if they've forgotten some information.

 

You will still be allowed to post for 30 seconds after the thread has been created, but your posts will simply be merged (see 2.3 below).

 

2.3 Making two posts within 30 minutes of each other will result in them being merged into one post

Simple one: Double-posting is a bit annoying and disrupts the flow of a thread. From now on if anybody making multiple posts within a short time span will have them merged. You won't lose any content as the merged post will simply appear below the content of the first post. This will only happen if both of these posts are made within the same thread.

 

2.4 Image/attachment storage sizes are changing slightly

Members will now be able to store 256mb of attachments. Supporters will get 1gb. Believe this is actually a marginal increase.

 

Images will now be resized so that no dimension is exceeds 2000px. This will save server storage space but also - usefully - will stop quotas filling up so fast with those huge ugly, uncompressed phone pictures that are 3000px+

 

2.5 Conversation recipient limits are being being increased

At great financial expense, PMs can now have up to 10 people in them simultaneously (up from 5). You're welcome.

 

2.6 Reputation bands have changed

There's no way to actually lose reputation on here and many of us have contributed enough posts to accumulate thousands of reputation point thingies. Whilst meaningless, trying to make them mean at least a little has meant adjusting the bands so that not everyone can get an 'excellent' rating within a week of joining the forums. The new reputation bands are:

 

Reputation title	Points required
Good	100
Great	500
Excellent	1000

 

 

Future intentions and unfinished thoughts

The forum layout (i.e. the names and locations of the forums) will be tweaked

Expect a submitted list of these changes some time later in the month (perhaps at the start of May). These changes should mostly affect the Classifieds, Other Airsoft Stuff and Advice & Technical Help subforums. The core content areas should remain the same.

 

Something is being figured out with regards to patches

Forum patches will become a thing again, but the logistics need discussing. More on this in the next month or so.

 

Access to being a Supporter might be changing

Though decisions are yet to be made on what being a 'Supporter' will entail right now two things have happened:

• Supporter posts get a cool outline
• Becoming a supporter now won't require buying a patch. Right now if you have 2000 positive feedback on your posts you'll get an automatic promotion and - in the future - you'll get a supporter-only patch.

Again, undecided on how the supporters will work, but really any ideas will centre around rewarding meaningful content. Members who are already supporters (irrespective of your reputation) will stay as such and be treated the same as any other supporter. You'll also get that patch if it happens.

 

Discord

It's 2018 so every community needs its own Discord that nobody uses and we'll be no different. Expect this to happen in the next couple of weeks.

 

 

 

A closing note

Hopefully the running theme through this has been bringing back some of the old AFUK rules and just enforcing some of the very oldest rules or unspoken standards. I don't expect we've got everything right so please feel free to discuss below or PM me if you want to discuss privately. Again another thing I'd like to improve is transparency from the staff (including me) so I'll make every effort to be candid.

 

Thanks.

 

[proffrink]

fuck

[Gepard]

Firstly, thank fuck for 1.1. I think it's great to see some steps to improve the forum. You guys must have years of ideas to implement. 

 

In regards to reputation, I think the new emotes have grown on me. I see there's been a new one added, which is good. I'd like to see a "Disagree" one if possible. 

 

As I've mentioned in the past, I'd like to see new user have to go answer some basic questions about Airsoft in order to post. Like take 3 or 4 points from each pinned post and then make a user read through them and answer correctly in order to submit posts. I think it would cut down on the number of FAQs by up to 100% 

I don't like that only the OP can reply to their own thread in Classifeds. Could it not, instead, be configured to ignore any replies that would 'bump' it to the top and then, if OP wishes to keep the post up, they would have the option available after 7 days that would 'bump' it? Just floating thoughts, I'm no forum dev and haven't got a clue if any of this is even possible. It's just when I buy on this forum I like to see a bit of discussion going on about the gear that's being sold in the thread itself. I don't want to have to go to another area of the forum to talk about it. I can totally get why the change has been made though with 2/3 of moderation time taken up by the classifieds. Tedious..

As @L3wisD has already made the effort into creating a new custom patch, perhaps we should make this the new official forum patch going forward? That is unless you've already got a surplus of the old ones already made. 

Ugh, Discord. I must have 100 servers at least in my list and everybody wants to use their own. Ah well, it's free. Somebody might use it I guess. Could be a good place for  PMs as I've noticed people's inboxes get full now and then. 

It's a small thing, but any chance we could get a profile banner area for custom photos? I'd like to display my pride and joy on my profile but instead it's just a boring black bar. 
 

[L3wisD]

1 hour ago, proffrink said:

It's 2018 so every community needs its own Discord that nobody uses and we'll be no different

 

Made me properly laugh out loud. 

 

Looking forward to seeing this place improve.

 

In regards to patches, mine were only meant to fill the void of there being no official patch.

I gather proff has quite some experience in patch design in the past, so a new official patch would probably look much better than mine anyway, plus the money generated would actually benefit this place rather than my "at cost" pricing.

 

And obviously, I've already offered my help in moderating in the past. So the offer still stands.

[ImTriggerHappy]

Yippee now I won't have to put up with @Jedi_Master deleting my fucking posts. 

 

Let me be the first to say congratulations on a new day and to anybody I have offended lately please get fucked 

 

 

Sorry couldn't resist 

[proffrink]

Big thing I forgot to add to the opening post. I've edited it in now.
 

Quote

 

The old moderation team has been wiped

Almost all of them were inactive so we're rebuilding the team from the ground up (minus Jedi of course, who actually did things). I'm sure they had their reasons and every one will be given honorary 'Supporter' tags, but we need some fresh eyes.

 

 

 

26 minutes ago, Gepard said:

Firstly, thank fuck for 1.1. I think it's great to see some steps to improve the forum. You guys must have years of ideas to implement. 

 

In regards to reputation, I think the new emotes have grown on me. I see there's been a new one added, which is good. I'd like to see a "Disagree" one if possible. 

 

As I've mentioned in the past, I'd like to see new user have to go answer some basic questions about Airsoft in order to post. Like take 3 or 4 points from each pinned post and then make a user read through them and answer correctly in order to submit posts. I think it would cut down on the number of FAQs by up to 100% 

I don't like that only the OP can reply to their own thread in Classifeds. Could it not, instead, be configured to ignore any replies that would 'bump' it to the top and then, if OP wishes to keep the post up, they would have the option available after 7 days that would 'bump' it? Just floating thoughts, I'm no forum dev and haven't got a clue if any of this is even possible. It's just when I buy on this forum I like to see a bit of discussion going on about the gear that's being sold in the thread itself. I don't want to have to go to another area of the forum to talk about it. I can totally get why the change has been made though with 2/3 of moderation time taken up by the classifieds. Tedious..

As @L3wisD has already made the effort into creating a new custom patch, perhaps we should make this the new official forum patch going forward? That is unless you've already got a surplus of the old ones already made. 

Ugh, Discord. I must have 100 servers at least in my list and everybody wants to use their own. Ah well, it's free. Somebody might use it I guess. Could be a good place for  PMs as I've noticed people's inboxes get full now and then. 

It's a small thing, but any chance we could get a profile banner area for custom photos? I'd like to display my pride and joy on my profile but instead it's just a boring black bar. 
 

Thanks. Actually there's not an absolutely huge amount. It's really not an exaggeration when I say that two thirds of the moderating was done in the classifieds section. Being optimistic I think I've just reduced that by about 80% with the two simple changes we've made to posting and bumping. That will bring the moderation load down by about a half (if not more). Other than that the forums are pretty good at the core but many didn't know where they stood with regards to language and their interactions with others. Everybody has much freer reign now, and we'll see how it's used. Most of the longer term stuff though I do have some ideas for - these are more 'new' features than changing what we have though, and will be more transparently proposes to the membership than these initial changes.

 

Adding a 'disagree' emote is on the cards, but I think it could become a lazy way of expressing your disagreement rather than engaging in discourse. I dare say it'll get its day at some point though to be tried out.

 

We're looking in ways to poke people towards the right place. Unfortunately there's a correlation between people who're too lazy to use the search and those who won't even bother to read a big banner pointing them to an FAQ. We'll see what we can do about making it more obvious though and - like you say - an FAQ. The secondary issue is maintaining that FAQ.

 

We could potentially implement this. The issue would then be it cluttering people's new content. Most people leave this at the default despite it being filterable, and certainly for new members it can look like these forums are 70% classifieds (which, by number of posts, they are) but we don't want it to seem that way. The forums attract new members with classifieds but hold onto them through actual meaningful content.

 

For the patch: We'd likely be releasing a new design. I'm pondering changing the logo itself, but it does have a certain degree of nostalgia. Lewis has been given the ok to sell the ones he has though and - frankly - I have no issue with anyone making any sort of unofficial patch so long as it's not a clear rip-off of a current official design (which doesn't exist yet so open season).

 

Right now the Discord already exists but Jedi and I are using it to log PMs. Like you I have very little hopes for it taking off but who knows.

 

Profile banners might be a Supporter thing. I enabled them for supporters yesterday. Depending on how the decision goes on what Supporters should get, we might just enable this site wide.

 

21 minutes ago, L3wisD said:

 

Made me properly laugh out loud. 

 

Looking forward to seeing this place improve.

 

In regards to patches, mine were only meant to fill the void of there being no official patch.

I gather proff has quite some experience in patch design in the past, so a new official patch would probably look much better than mine anyway, plus the money generated would actually benefit this place rather than my "at cost" pricing.

 

And obviously, I've already offered my help in moderating in the past. So the offer still stands.

Thanks.

 

I think we all appreciate what you did with the patches. This is just bad timing unfortunately as patches is - as you know - something I'd spoken to Devastator a couple of times before. I can tell you now that I don't want any extra money from anything we sell (be it patches or Supporter access - if that happens). The forums already run quite lean despite high traffic. Any excess will feed back in (a big year-ends raffle is one idea we're having right now).

 

Can't comment on the mod stuff. Jedi's area I'm afraid.

 

4 minutes ago, ImTriggerHappy said:

Yippee now I won't have to put up with @Jedi_Master deleting my fucking posts. 

 

Let me be the first to say congratulations on a new day and to anybody I have offended lately please get fucked 

 

 

Sorry couldn't resist 

Believe me he was as on board as I with opening things up. I think you might have been worrying him about repetitive strain disorder with the number of times he was having to hit that hide button.

[Arwen]

I'm new to the forum, so no idea what it was like before hand. But I do like to see forums that are willing to change rather than stagnate, so well done for taking on the hard task of forum administration/modding to all involved!

 

I'm not too keen on the no posts in the For Sale section... I see the reasons for it, but I can't help but wonder if it would be easier to simply exclude the whole For Sale sub forum from the default activity stream? 

 

Looking forward to the changes, the discord comment made me laugh too 

[Guest]

Absolutely brilliant team, thank you

[Sitting Duck]

All I need to know.....

 

What is the character limit in a single post ????

[proffrink]

Minimum is 1. We'll see about setting the maximum higher for you, but it's going to be expensive.

 

1 hour ago, Arwen said:

I'm new to the forum, so no idea what it was like before hand. But I do like to see forums that are willing to change rather than stagnate, so well done for taking on the hard task of forum administration/modding to all involved!

 

I'm not too keen on the no posts in the For Sale section... I see the reasons for it, but I can't help but wonder if it would be easier to simply exclude the whole For Sale sub forum from the default activity stream? 

 

Looking forward to the changes, the discord comment made me laugh too 

If there's enough interest we'll look into a more elegant solution. I do see some merit certainly to letting people discuss the details of a gun without bumping it, but I fear it will get cluttered by people commenting on the price.

[Arwen]

Yea true, maybe warnings could help with that, but I guess that then puts modding time back up 

[Jedi_Master]

2 hours ago, Sitting Duck said:

 

What is the character limit in a single post ????

 

That looks about the right length, similar to twitter so keep it TL;DR 

 

 

3 hours ago, Arwen said:

I'm not too keen on the no posts in the For Sale section... I see the reasons for it, but I can't help but wonder if it would be easier to simply exclude the whole For Sale sub forum from the default activity stream? 

 

1 hour ago, Arwen said:

Yea true, maybe warnings could help with that, but I guess that then puts modding time back up 

 

If the Seller fails to use the provided template, include pictures or price then we have a quick Moderator message.  Anything else can be done by PM. The Mods (currently me) have to read every post in the Classifieds so excluding a sub-forum is not an option. If a member has any reason for concern about a sales /swap post in the Classifieds then they can flag it to Mods by using the Report post button and include a message.

 

If a seller is being unrealistic in their price, then call them out by using the this topic:

 

4 hours ago, ImTriggerHappy said:

Yippee now I won't have to put up with @Jedi_Master deleting my fucking posts. 

 

 

True, there are some sensitive snowflakes out there.  I am going to have a special topic reserved just for you “Trigger’s Geardo and Games Workshop Discussion”   

[Sitting Duck]

I'll try n keep my posts a bit more concise

though believe me I get a bit miffed going into great involved detail

and wotnot trying to spoon feed & then it goes quiet or little response

(sod the massive thanks but a bit of feedback if after all that to lmk if crap helps)

 

couple of times I responded to seller post

ICS I ended up buying but "nothing in there" - how the heck was trigger suspended

( & then it went up £10 so should have kept mouth shut I guess )

 

L3wis RA motor suggestion of £20 cash at Mall instead of £23 posted

(just a genuine suggestion to save cash/hassle for both seller/buyer)

 

But will acknowledge to using PM's in future on sales stuff - my bad

( accept the bumps n stuff can get out of hand & rules are rules ( soz) )

 

Swearing - well I'll probably keep **ing $hit out a bit - more out of habit I guess

 

Soz if I act the prat at times, too many take stuff way way too seriously

Other than that thanks to admin/mods & all those decent mofo members

Just glad there is a fairly relaxed chilled out place for us saddo toy gun freaks

Great you are open to improvements, but it was pretty decent anyway tbh

 

Kudos to you two & all others on here as well - no seriously, thanks again sir

[Samurai]

Thank you. It's great to see progress.

[SeniorSpaz87]

I like it. If you need someone to troll through classified I generally read through every single one (I'm safe to browse as I know its literally impossible to buy any of the stuff I see haha), so if you need someone to work there I could do it

[steakandpotato]

Nice changes. Now I can swear without that asterix nonsense popping up. 

[Tracer]

I have been a member of many different forums over the years however each end up failing due to them stagnating over the years.

However looking at the above post it looks like this forum will keep going as we are willing to move it along. And stop it from stagnating.

[Albiscuit]

Glad for the changes, this place is useful for info and I like the community here. Met a few players and everyone so far has been sound, and im socially awkward so if I like you, you must be half decent  

 

The posts merging into one if you post in 30 mins may cause some issues, on some popular threads where a lot of dialogue happens and lots of people quoting each other and asking questions the posts will not read correctly if multiple posts are merged and will be confusing for all to see the flow of posts? or am i missing something??

[proffrink]

Posts will only merge if someone hasn't already replied

[Albiscuit]

Ah there you go... Makes total sense

 

Testing the above theory   (will it merge or wont it).......

 

 

 

[proffrink]

It will, but check now within the next 29 minutes.

[Albiscuit]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

ok it does  

 

Me likey!

Ah you ruined my third merge!!

[Lambster]

With the classifieds being much more active than before, especially since another forums has closed, do you not think that only one bump per 7 days is too long? I came back to find my For Sale thread on page 3 or 4 after only a week a while ago. 

[proffrink]

There are a few things now related to the classifieds that I'd like to put to a vote to give people an opportunity to change stuff like this. I don't feel that it would be fair for me alone to make this kind of decision.

 

Hopefully the new formatting of the classifieds will mean less of an emphasis required on bumping and more on having a nice first picture to show up in the wall of thumbnails.

 

I'll put up some of those polls in a few days once people have a feel for the next system.

[Gepard]

6 minutes ago, proffrink said:

 Hopefully the new formatting of the classifieds will mean less of an emphasis required on bumping and more on having a nice first picture to show up in the wall of thumbnails.

 

But then where would the pixelated, compressed .jpgs taken on a phone (in portrait mode) in the dark with a light behind the item go?