I've been running/developing browser based games for several years now, and the one complaint I get over and over is that the mods are terrible. I even did a survey recently, and while my support ticket response time is only a couple of hours, the rating of customer service severely suffered, specifically due to the dislike of how the moderators handle things in the game.

I'm wondering if this is just how it is with these type of things and that the people speaking out are just the trouble-makers (which I know this is obviously some of it). I really want my customer service to be known as high quality, but there's no way to get there without improving the moderation situation. I hear everything from mods being "tyrannical" to abusing power to not doing anything and playing favorites.

I have selected highly regarded players in the games that have been around a long time and volunteered to do the job. I've got rules outlined that the moderators are supposed to enforce. What else can be done to improve the situation?

Do you require your moderators to log any moderator actions they take? Can you automate such a logging process? That is, can you track behaviors to independently gather data that might reveal patterns of abuse?

Are you talking about community moderators or purely QA stuff?

If it's a community site you're worried about you should be able to spend time on the site(either silently/covertly or openly) and be able to get an idea of whether the moderators are to your liking when you aren't around.

It should be noted that being highly regarded doesn't necessarily make you a good moderator. I've been on forums where moderators were chosen purely based off of how active they were, which resulted in more than a couple incidents where moderators turned out being worse than the worst members (banning people for disagreeing with them, mass deleting threads for no reason, one even deleted the whole forum once).

Back when I more or less 'ran' a gaming community, I also discovered that people really, really, REALLY liked complaining about the rules, the moderators, and then by proxy also me for having created said rules and moderators.

The thing I did, was doing a little digging in who were comlaining, how many were complaining, and how big the complete userbase was.

Numbers found?

Roughly 2000 players just silently playing on a weekly basis and enjoying themselves as they were there (could be somewhere else, but they didn't, so they must appreciate what I did?). They didn't praise me or anything, but they didn't complain either. xD

Roughly 20 players that actually caused a fuss. Very vocal. Usually friends of each other.

Conclusion?

I felt I could ignore the complaints =) Well, ignore, ignore... Always listen to a complaint, always speak with the moderator causing the 'problem', and then pick the smart thing to do, which usually is 'ignore'.

I do log actions, and yes it is community based. I try to watch as well, but I'm the lone developer so I do all of the programming, graphics, etc so it is hard sometimes to keep track of it all. Any tips on choosing good moderators? I had interested players fill out applications, but most of the responses were pretty similar so I ended up just having to go off of who was most active, etc.

Quote: Original post by PouyaCat
Back when I more or less 'ran' a gaming community, I also discovered that people really, really, REALLY liked complaining about the rules, the moderators, and then by proxy also me for having created said rules and moderators.

The thing I did, was doing a little digging in who were comlaining, how many were complaining, and how big the complete userbase was.

Numbers found?

Roughly 2000 players just silently playing on a weekly basis and enjoying themselves as they were there (could be somewhere else, but they didn't, so they must appreciate what I did?). They didn't praise me or anything, but they didn't complain either. xD

Roughly 20 players that actually caused a fuss. Very vocal. Usually friends of each other.

Conclusion?

I felt I could ignore the complaints =) Well, ignore, ignore... Always listen to a complaint, always speak with the moderator causing the 'problem', and then pick the smart thing to do, which usually is 'ignore'.

Yeah I sort of think I have the exact same situation. So you had favorable results by just ignoring those few "complainers?"

You're always going to run into problems when people "fill out an application". You end up hitting the truth-isms about people who want power. Which means you're going to experience at least a little bit of turnover no matter what you do.

Quote: Original post by lithos
You're always going to run into problems when people "fill out an application". You end up hitting the truth-isms about people who want power. Which means you're going to experience at least a little bit of turnover no matter what you do.

So if you think applications are a bad idea, what would you suggest?

Quote: Original post by alias_bob

Quote: Original post by lithos
You're always going to run into problems when people "fill out an application". You end up hitting the truth-isms about people who want power. Which means you're going to experience at least a little bit of turnover no matter what you do.

So if you think applications are a bad idea, what would you suggest?

I don't think they're a bad idea, just that if you use them you can expect a bit more turnover(and drama). You'll end up finding "reliable" people eventually.

I'm not sure how much of my experiences apply to being a moderator for a browser game, but I've been a moderator at a very large gaming website for a while now. Either way, here's some random thoughts:

1. One thing that we do that's pretty effective is we have an "initiate mod" phase for new moderators. During this phase (it lasts a month or two) the new guys are given limited mod powers, and are watched pretty closely by the rest of the mod staff. They also have their own forum for asking questions about how to handle certain situations, and they're usually paired with another older mod that can give them 1 on 1 support. Admins can pull moderation logs for each user too, so the senior mods can make sure they're making good judgement calls. If someone looks bad, we cut them loose.

2. In my experience 95% of users have no or little trouble with the mods, or moderation in general. It's usually just a small group of obnoxiously vocal repeat offenders that harbor the extreme negative opinions, and use the tools available for providing feedback. The big problem with these guys is that they're often prominent, well-liked members of the community. This makes dealing with them even more difficult, and also helps build an anti-mod sentiment among the rest of the users (especially when they finally get banned).

3. We have a dedicated forum where users can ask the moderators about specific moderations, so that they can understand why it happens. Many times the threads made are "OMG you mods suck and your rules suck", but most of them are people asking some sort of question. Often they are rather angry, but when a moderator nicely explains why they were moderated they calm down. We also reverse moderations when a user points out mistakes. These two things help to break down the wall between mods and normal users, and even leaves a lot of the users thinking that we're actually nice people and not just robots programmed to ban on sight.

4. Picking good moderators is pretty hard. You definitely don't want just the most active/prominent members on the site. A lot of times this gets in the way of them being a good moderator, since they're more concerned with being cool and being friends with everybody than actually enforcing the rules. To me the best candidate is someone who's fairly active and cares about the site, but is pretty good at maintaining a lot profile. It's also important to have someone who's not doing it for some kind of status symbol.