OTC Thread Culture

Fighteer and Septimus do the most OTC modding and they are both on break, yes. Meanwhile, I was primarily brought on for my project forum work, not forum moderation skills. Personally, I don't have a particularly lengthy OTC posting history, and I enjoy moderating it even less because of how complex it is beyond the obvious rule-breaking posts like contextfree links or insults.

So, a non-OTC regular who doesn't interact much with the OTC regulars, this is what happens when I chance upon a holler for, say, some political opinion that the holler-er thinks is crappy. I read back 1-2 pages to make sure the post is even relevant, that they're the only people offending, dig in their history to decide whether or not they have rule-breaking or envelope-pushing tendencies, research what people are even talking about to understand the dang post, and only then can I decide whether it's worth thumping or not. That's not fun, and it's not what I signed up for.

Promoting OTC-specific mods has come up a couple of times, though I wonder if it's (a) on-mission and (b) not a band-aid solution.

Right. And then it's a question of, "well is this even worth thumping now or would doing so just relitigate the row?"

Edited by Synchronicity on Jan 17th 2023 at 11:18:45 AM

I agree, forcing mods to moderate OTC is a bad idea, especially since they are volunteers. It's not like we can put it in their contract.

I think recruiting mods from OTC would be a good idea, though I understand actually finding people both willing to do so and having the right qualifications is quite a challenge.

I think another issue with that is that it takes a lot of time, and these topics tend to move fast when things get heated, so that mod action only comes after the damage has been done (start a heated argument, for instance).

Edited by Redmess on Jan 16th 2023 at 12:30:48 PM

I remember hearing that Blue Ninja 0 was recruited as an OTC-specific mod. I believe they vanished in 2019 though.

I have the same experience as Synchronicity with OTC modding. I only do it because it's something that needs to be done and I was also primarily hired because of my work on the wiki and project fora.

Yeah, Blue Ninja 0 hasn't been on the site since 2020. Best Of was/is also an OTC mod and I think he was pretty good at it when he was active on the site.

I kinda feeling modding just OTC would be a lot for a new person to just jump into as it isn't easy. As for being in a mod just for OTC being on-mission...probably not. I think I'd prefer to have more forum moderators in general.

Edited by MacronNotes on Jan 16th 2023 at 6:44:52 AM

I feel like having "More OTC mods" sort of puts the onus on the mods to be the ones keeping the subforum under control anyway. If the issue is that people are more likely to be toxic and volatile, then it should be up to the community to be more active in reporting problems, but more importantly, people should be able to moderate their own behavior. That's just how I feel.

Like with the CM / MB stuff, the solution wasn't "we need more mods on those threads", it was "the culture itself needs to change".

How can tropers enforce civility in discussion on their own? There's a loose attempt to do so at present, but it usually comes at the end of blazing rows where someone decides to go off for the night and cool off.

Well... just by chilling out, stepping away, self-thumping, etc. Basically, by not letting the discussion get toxic in the first place, and by having the self-awareness to stop if it does.

I wonder if we should institute a curfew /lock on some of the more volatile threads at least temporarily to at least get people to talk about and you know personally curb the issues.

I usually just take the thread environments for granted, because they are such real, touchy subjects. But after the Fighteer fiasco, it has gotten me rethinking how the forum section works.

RE: Hiring a mod from OTC to moderate OTC, while you would have someone with a better sense of the community and how it works, there is the danger of bias and favoritism. It's a problem I saw brought up in another thread about users electing moderators, and the dangers of voting for their friends and letting them ban who they don't like personally, that kinda thing. Part of Fighteer's problem is that he was a mod that also engaged in OTC discussions, and his behaviour went unchecked because he still seemed "above" the other users even without the mod hat on.

Is it an improper time to reintroduce the "engineers" to moderate the OTC? We haven't have engineers since the new admins ran.

The dilemma is that we need mods who are willing to follow OTC discussions without participating in them, which may be a tough call.

Yeah. Having to sit and read through protracted, vitriolic discussions that you either 1) don't care about or 2) care about but can't saying anything lest you be seen as biased in how you moderate it sounds, well, miserable.

Engineers aren't supposed to moderate things like OTC. The position was supposed to be for grunt work like locking threads/wiki pages, hooking crowners and the like. Thumping, banning, and general moderation was something that was going to still be restricted to mods. To be honest, by the time engineering actually gets considered, we would probably enough mods to render it moot.

Edited by MacronNotes on Jan 17th 2023 at 12:19:05 PM

Okay considering the Death penalty thread got bumped today to talk about how the more someone suffers during an execution the better? I really want to find some way to handle OTC if we're getting stuff like that. And the mods say they don't want to moderate it.

Edited by miraculous on Jan 17th 2023 at 9:07:30 AM

Well, stuff like that is pretty clear cut. It's the long and unpleasant debates and existing grudges I don't have headspace for.

I thumped that post as soon as I saw the holler so I don't really think we have an issue with rule violations like that.

EDIT: We can moderate stuff that breaks site rules just fine for the most part. It's just keeps threads in-line with the OTC guidelines is not easy if you aren't involved in the section

Edited by MacronNotes on Jan 17th 2023 at 3:17:37 PM

Yeah, those are pretty clear cut cases, but the ones we have problems with are not so clear cut, and often go more into how things are discussed rather than what.

I actually think what we need is mods able to participate in discussions without participating in fights, which is something plenty of the OTC regulars manage.

I’d say that OTC sits on the extreme of the least enjoyed part of moderator activity, thus why it runs into issues.

As I see it there are three pillars to TV Tropes moderation

• Technical activities to support the functioning of the site, this is the stuff that engineers will do if they ever become a thing.
• Wiki conduct moderation, so vandals, edit wars, and the Edit Banned stuff where people need to be taught the wiki rules.
• Forum moderation. This means resolving personal and personality disputes between users, looking at extended threads of activity to determine what’s going on.

Because we’re a wiki with a forum attached my understanding is that the mod team’s interests and recruitment is focused on the second item (as it should be), but I do wonder if that’s to the detriment of the team’s ability to manage the third item. We don’t recruit mods for their ability to moderate the forum (outside of the time we recruited specific OTC mods), we recruit them for their ability to moderate the wiki, and then hope they can do alright moderating the forum as a side thing.

If we honestly feel that the tone in OTC has gotten out of hand and that the current mods aren’t in a position to correct it, then I think the best course of action would be to recruit OTC specific mods again, just as we did before. Or, even just a couple forum mods who are specifically focused on moderating the forum side of things.

Edited by Silasw on Jan 17th 2023 at 9:55:02 AM

Yeah, we are more focused wiki skills because the wiki is our first priority and it's easier to gauge wiki work. However, we have talked needing more forum oriented people because most of us were promoted for to work on the wiki and project fora. We have to do both wiki and forum moderation because there's not much of us to go around.

As I said before, I support the idea have more forum oriented moderators in general as opposed to OTC specific mods.

Edited by MacronNotes on Jan 17th 2023 at 4:35:58 AM

As do I. When I made that comment a while back that it would be great if we had around double the number of active mods, I was specifically thinking of this.

Edited by Willbyr on Jan 17th 2023 at 4:09:45 AM

What happened before regarding the OTC specific mods?

Edited by Scarecrow4774 on Jan 17th 2023 at 9:04:34 AM

I have only participated briefly in OTC, but while I can see the appeal, it does seem a bit... off topic. Like, wikipedia doesn't have a "casual off topic discussion" forum. Nor do any other wikis Im aware of.

I'm not suggesting we nuke it from orbit or anything, it just does seem like it's taking up a lot of time and effort for something that doesn't contribute directly to the wiki and the vast majority of visitors to T Vtropes likely don't know exists.

I agree with people who have said it could use its own moderators, that could work I guess

Edited by Tremmor19 on Jan 17th 2023 at 1:28:08 PM

It’s point has been made before, OTC runs somewhat similar to Yack Fest (but more structured) and has the same trait of being a side addition to a forum that is itself a side addition to the wiki (the entirety of Just For Fun falls into this actually).

I’d note that OTC does contribute directly at times, the Useful Notes pages have gotten information drafted or discussed in OTC.

Edited by Silasw on Jan 17th 2023 at 7:36:39 PM

From my understanding, OTC seems to serve the function of having a place for more serious discussion without interrupting or displacing media and site discussions elsewhere. Plenty of forums had (and still do) this same setup, where you'd have forums on the main purpose for the site and an "Off-Topic" section for people to talk about other things.

I don't think it's problematic enough to just be removed entirely, but just some moderation would be enough.

Edited by harryhenry on Jan 19th 2023 at 9:28:47 AM

Yeah but the issue is as noted. Our current moderators understandably don't want to moderate the big, divisive arguments that are spouting up?

So we would need to solve the issues with the actual users.