Whatever happened to Elitist Jerks?

[Eurhetemec]

To be honest, I don't think it was ever a place where you were supposed to to talk and ask questions. It was meant to be a "low-noise/high-signal" forum for the "elite" who knew their things around theorycrafting, and could do a bit more than just napkin math - it was not for common WoW-playerbase discussions/questions, that was always just "unneeded noise from the plebs". I don't think it ever aimed to reach the same crowd MMO-C has reached. In fact it tried to actively to get rid of that crowd.

Pros and cons with either approach. Sometimes I wish MMOC would move towards strict(-er) moderation, but not really sure I'd like to go back to EJ-levels, WoW is not a job for me, nor am I aiming to be employed by Blizzard.

You're precisely correct.

All the people whinging about "over-moderation" must have not read EJ's mission statement, nor the forum rules.

It was not a place for friendly discussion.

It was not a place for shooting the breeze.

It was not a place for casuals to SAY things, just to read things.

Finally, it was not over-moderated. It was moderated precisely correctly for what it was. However, it did have a big problem - that being that important information about a spec was sometimes:

A) Not at the beginning of a thread.

and

B) Not mentioned frequently as the thread went on.

This was a real problem, where "over-moderation" was not (how many people even posted there?!). It combined with the tight moderation to mean you couldn't just go "Uh but what about...", so it always had some issues as a place to find out about specs - this wasn't something that started later - this happened for the entire history of EJ. If a thread was properly updated and so on, with no missing info, it was wonderful, arguably quite a bit better than Icy Veins because it explained the theory - where Icy Veins often entirely skips the theory or makes wild assumptions about what you know about it. But if that info was hard to find... So as soon as there were more accessible alternatives, they were preferred.

[Kokolums]

Well ion is now fucking up the game at blizzard instead of just playing it. That's one of the bigger reasons.

Ion is on the raid encounter team. There's really been little to nothing wrong with raid encounters. His raids often get praised as excellent. The problems with WoW aren't things he works with.

[Kokolums]

Moderating forums is tricky. Its easy to say "just get rid of the trolls" but in practice that seems to be hard.

If I ever moderated, I'd go in a completely different direction. Looking at history, societies that thrive are dominated by people with low social status. What makes people evil is when they become obsessed with maintaining high social status. That is a powerful motivator to tear others down, flame, troll, disrupt, and cause chaos. People with low social status hardly do any of that. The types of players to ban are those that mostly talk about fellow posters (in a good or bad way). Nothing derails a thread faster than when someone tries to make a point and then 3 people jump in with personal attacks on that person. That's the core of the problem. Some people have this need to establish a social pecking order and those are the ones you actually eliminate to create a positive forum experience.

A real big problem is when you get a circle of high social status people in a forum and they spend all of their time not just poking fun at low status posters, but "grabbing popcorn" and egging those posters on because they want entertainment. That's when a forum hits rock bottom.

At first, moderators see everyone with high status attacking a low status poster and decide the obvious solution is to ban the low status poster for trolling. But it doesn't fix the problem because those high status just want to entertain themselves by attacking low status posters. So they move on to another target and the problem persists. After banning several low status posters they might catch on that the true trolls ruining the community are the circle of high status jerks bullying everyone around.

Some people may say EJ and mmo champ are totally different moderating styles but actually both forums get dominated by people with high social status so they aren't all that different.

If I had to boil it down to one simple rule, then anyone who calls out a poster or posters and does anything like a "grab popcorn" thing gets automatically permabanned. That is a pure of a cancer there is to any forum. It debases it to childish crap instead of actual discussion.