Because that thread did not violate coc. But if something does violate coc they will not restore it. They will remove it. The flags you got were false flags
Gotta be extremely insensitive but curious
Why did you guys pick April Fools for Trans awareness day? Is it still the 31st in the US? If so it would make better sense
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the world doesn’t revolve around the US. trans awareness day is the 31st
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Ah I see
Well, it is April Fools where I’m right now. And since I don’t know and this is the first time I heard of this, my brain just connect the 2 together into … well, that
yeah. I didn’t mean for my reply to sound so aggressive. my bad
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Directly quoting from here: Welcome to General Discussion - Please Read!
"The Overwatch forums are for discussion of topics directly related to Overwatch.
The forums were designed specifically for discussions about Overwatch and related topics. Any topics not related to Overwatch, or Blizzard Entertainment are subject to deletion."
The mods will often choose to keep posts up regardless of the fact that they violate COC, likely because the mods themselves agree with the content.
Nothing in the post directly relates to OW or even tries to. Again, you can hurl insults at me all you want but my point is this:
People who flag that thread which violates the terms of the forums might not be doing so because they are bigots, homophobes, or anything else. Treating this like an issue of, “oh, this just shows how awful and bigotted the forums are” is silly. I am fully against people who are racist, biggoted, homophobic, sexist, and the like on these forums, and I will gladly call them out. But if you post a thread that breaks COC, you really aren’t in a position to complain about it being flagged.
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It’s not about politics; it’s just obnoxious.
Imagine how you would feel seeing a “Glasses Awareness” thread. Nobody cares about your preferred glasses in the Overwatch General Discussion forum.
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Hey, I had a simple thread noting the untimely death of Chad Bozeman and it was flagged and removed I kid you not in under 20 mins… 
But we can leave other political things up with 3000+ posts in them for days that literally have nada to do with OW… 
The moderation here is in left field somewhere.
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Out of curiosity, in what way is your life affected if someone presents themself as e.g a woman?
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Off topic threads avoid the ban all the time, I think you just got unlucky my dude. I count 3 threads (not including the “trans day” ones) on the main page rn that are definitely ‘off-topic.’ There’s just some inconsistent moderation happening.
Some places force you to use preferred pronouns. I don’t personally mind, but it does directly influence me.
Yeah i know many people get mad at that, i still don’t understand why it is so horrible to call someone he/she/they. When im talking about being affected i want to know how they are affected in an actual way. Cause obviously they would have no problem calling someone who presents themself as a male for “he” so it seems to me that they do not suffer from using pronouns per se.
That’s my entire point, the moderation here is the most inconsistent I have ever seen on a board.
Right, sorry, I believe I misinterpreted your original comment.
The inconsistent moderation does indeed suck. Imo they should ditch that rule seeing as they often don’t enforce it anyway. And I don’t think the occasional off-topic post is really destroying the integrity of the forum.
This!
If you need awareness or change, take it to real people not the i-net. Here, there are only monsters.
Remember: the only world you can truly change, is the world in arms-length.
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What’s the bet there’s a significant overlap between the group of people that complain about ‘Cancel culture’ and the group of people that flag threads about trans people?
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For the thread being flagged: I moderated the forum of a gaming server with a couple of thousand daily users (still do, but the forum is down atm) and if a thread violates the rules for the specific sub-forum, it doesn’t matter if the intention was good or not, the thread has to go.
If possible, I tried to correct the users’ mistakes by moving the thread to the right sub-forum (usually Offtopic), but whenever that didn’t fit either because it was a topic that violated the coc for the entire forum, there is nothing I can do, even if I myself agree to the topic being important.
So, no matter the reason, the people flagging the topic were right, as it is not OW-related. But, as moderation in this forum is inconsequential to put it mildly, the mods were right in my opinion to remove the flagging from the threads, as it is an important topic.
The discussion we should have instead is, if the flagging system is good, as it can hide bad content faster than manual moderation, or bad, as it is abused to hide unliked but allowed content, which has to be unflagged manually by mods.
There don’t seem to be strict rules about what is acceptable and what is not. Final decision is up to specific moderator.
While you’re right in principle, there are two things to consider:
- There is no off-topic forum here
- Blizzard can’t be seen to be deleting trans-rights threads from their platform, even it’s simply because they’re off-topic. The optics aren’t good, and it’s probably not something a lot of people at Blizzard would want to be happening, either.
Having been a forum mod (not these forums) in the past, I agree with you. Standard practice is to move/delete off-topic threads. It’s a little different in a community forum vs. a corporate forum, though.
The best solution would be for Blizzard to create an off-topic forum (where things still have to either loosely pertain to the wider Overwatch community and/or the forum community itself) where threads like the one OP is talking about could be moved to. Either that, or just clarify that those sort of off-topic discussions are allowed here.
The best solution is more/better/more consistent moderation and less reliance on the terrible flag system.
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Which is why I said that I think it is the right decision by the moderation team to remove the flagging of the thread this thread was created about, making it visible again.
I could understand if a company tried to keep a game-related forum free from off-topic as to not confront users who just want to relax from rl stuff with it, but as this doesn’t seem to be the case with these forums, looking at the number of off-topic threads we see on here, letting the thread stay up only seems right.
At the same time, I can’t really blame people for flagging off-topic threads, even if it is an important topic to talk about.
I agree that creating an off-topic forum would probably be a good thing to do to separate OW-related topics from other topics and give them the possibility to create a specific ruleset for that forum to further elaborate, what kind of threads they want to see there.
I also agree that the flagging system in its current state is pretty bad, looking at how many posts/threads are hidden just because people disagreed with what was written.
A first step would be more consistent moderating, sometimes it feels really bad to see content not removed that was removed in other instances (and probably should be removed), while other things that shouldn’t violate any rule get removed (be it with flagging or manually). I know that it is hard to judge in some cases and you as a moderator have to try to keep things in a balance, but it just doesn’t look good when decisions seem to be made by flipping a coin.