As staff have mentioned for the past few weeks, we’ve been working on improving the documentation for the site (alongside experimenting with various ways to curb down on issues such spam and toxicity).
Part of our plan was to roll out policies that help explain what the site is/isn’t for. Although we haven’t finished internal discussion regarding these policies, they are largely meant to showcase what staff have already always cracked down on (rather than to introduce new policies). We’ve largely upheld Reaver’s personal policies, and the Steam policies, but it’s important to make sure this can be shown on the SDG Forum properly.
We’ve chosen to expedite these internal projects, and with this site update we’re rolling out some of the things we’ve been discussing for a while now.
Category Moderators
Category moderators (c-mods) are a new part of the SDG Forum family. They are not necessarily proper moderators, and don’t have access to the larger admin dashboard or tools.
Instead, they have been given select tools for select categories, that will let them use the report/post queue system to moderate posts. All c-mods are granted TL3 (“Regular”) by default.
The “proper” staff team will continue to handle the bulk of issues on the site, alongside maintaining the backend. This is largely an experiment by us to see how well the system would integrate into the site.
All c-mods are currently a part of the @c-mods group. We’ve considered a variety of users for this opportunity, but have opted to only have a couple while we all get used to the changes. Welcome @Armaros and @GreatHeroJ as our first c-mods!
Forum Etiquette Policy
The latest policy rollout documents Forum Etiquette. It covers basic netiquette behavior, and defines some of the terms relevant to common issues on forums.
It should be noted that for the sake of “necroposting”, we often look at this behavior as spam. We don’t necessarily punish users for necroposting, but when reports are made regarding the behavior we look at it from the perspective of whether or not it’s a spam post (low-quality, one-liners, irrelevant to the topic, etc.).
Future Policy/Guidebook Rollouts
Other policy/guidebook stuff being is still being worked on – we just wanted to push out what has already been largely finished and formatted for you guys. Some of the stuff we plan to do is to document features of the site (e.g., TL3 tools), and to publicize policies that target issues more directly (e.g., spam).
Changelist
- Updated the Docker Manager.
- Updated the Discourse installation.
- Updated the following plugins: cakeday, solved, user-notes.
- Updated the Category Icons theme component (resolves some formatting issues).
- Tweaked site/group settings to facilitate c-mods.
- Added c-mods. They currently have privileges in #unturned:u3-discussion, #unturned-4:u4-discussion, #community-lounge (not the sub-categories), and #modding:modding-discussion.
