Been Watching the forums, sooo what's the deal?

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Seen no less than 74 posts go to the shadowlands in less than half an hour.
Most were just people having discussions, pretty chill or funny as well…But bam.
Trolls win too much in this game. I see it whenever I log in to classic, I see it on the forums.
You guys are kinda your own worst enemy, aren’t you?
I see why the game is “dying”. The community keeps slapping new players with toxic nonsense and nothing ever gets done to them.

Yet I can think of at least 7 of those discussions that were people just casually asking questions, but because ONE person gets heated and falls into a spat with somebody else, suddenly nobody is allowed to talk.

None of my posts have ever been affected since I never post…but I see it enough that it worries me. What is happening? Why so self-destructive? It’s worse than League of Legends, and I played that for over a decade.

So seriously, why are so many people just casually getting muted or whatever, over the most simple of discussions? I saw people talking about “what’s your favourite WoW fruit” and within minutes nobody was able to talk, but we could still see it.
Even people talking about cooking in game seems to be reason enough to go away.

I am fully aware of the social contract and EULA and TOS and none of these posts are violating any rules, or at least not more than any other post does…
So is…Is blizzard fully automating their report system? There is no way a real person could parse though all the data of a thread and determine that it’s bad, all in the span of like 15 seconds. It takes longer than that to read some of these posts, so how are the response times so fast there, but it still can take a month to get a hold of a gm over a potentially hacked account?

What is going on?

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Players can’t disappear a thread. Only Blizzard employees. They choose to be very active in their nannying of us. Some are happy with that, some are not.

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:chair:

whaaaaaaats going on (whats go in on)

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Well, take a seat right there, and I will tell you all about how I became the Thief Prince of Azeroth.

yes, I tried to do a fresh prince.
yes, I failed.

*as a side note, just since making this thread, I have seen 5 more go missing. Crazy and absurd.

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No. The players can flag posts. The most the software can do it grey out a post pending Mod review, but those can still be clicked on if someone wants.

The software does not remove threads, penalize people, etc. That is all human decisions. The GMs don’t moderate these forums. There are other people who do. Mostly the Forum Support Agents.

The forum Code of Conduct and policies are what govern posting, which are under the EULA. You can find them here.

Posting about moderation, esp specific threads, is against the code of conduct for the record.

Yes, if the thread turns into a dumpster fire, and the thread did not have anything else unique to offer for game feedback, the mods may just close it, close and make it non-listed (CMs can still read for feedback), or delete it.

We have no “rights” here, like it or not.

Yeah, if people can make dozens of posts in a min a mod can review it and see that it is a duplicate, off topic/spam, against the forum rules, trolling/flame bait, etc. They don’t need to mull over that any more than the people posting in it did.

You are free to ask them of course…

You can move your own thread to the CS forum by editing the first post and selecting the Customer Support forum from the drop down list.

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I have a hunch, in a theoretical setting, say a few reports being initiated for whatever reasons, and the LLM have certain weights to measure, which is either by burden of proof, or otherwise.

And imagine it was the otherwise situation, meaning it can’t find enough pointers that justify a post should remain, the decision is automated to remove it. The worst scenario is a false flag of burden of proof, where it wrongly dictates enough pointers, but due to the length of the thread, did not account such to be divided as an appropriate measure, and then automates for removal.

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Seriously, short of anti-spam measures on new posting accounts, they don’t have any automation in the software for this stuff. Greying it out and sending you a notification is the most the software will do.

The rest is humans. Not many of them, but def humans. Any thread locked, deleted, or penalty applied was done by the Forum Support Agents. Not everything in the world is AI yet, or even old fashioned automated.

Most of what you said makes no sense actually.

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Are you attempting to request a further explanation? Could you then elaborate on what requires clarifying? And I did say, it was a hunch, so don’t take it too personally.

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based on just that one line, I can tell you just gave me some weird copy/pasted response that doesn’t really address the concern.
I appreciate teh effort, but it’s not what I asked. I never said the threads got derailed except in a few instances, but even then most posts on here are a dumpster fire by my standard, does that mean I should go around reporting everything that offends me?

Or maybe I can accept that other people have the ability to express themselves within the confines of the rules. Going off topic or being an unpopular topic does not mean it’s invalid and should be removed.

not how that works at all. A short OP can let dozens of people respond quickly.
That’s my point. It’s too fast to be reviewed by a person.

again, do you really thing a forums buddy can read a whole thread and determine that the whole thing is worth deleting, in less than a minute? For crissakes, it took me that long just to read the posts and I can literally read the entire harry potter series over a weekend. I read hella fast, one of my only talents LOLOL. I can’t read it that fast, they can’t read it that fast and they sure as heck can’t take actions that fast as well.

The times are just too fast for a human. Or, at least too fast to be accurate and honest. I get the feeling they are overburdened because of all the layoffs and firing of all their staff.

I know for a fact that Microsoft automates most of their support and forums, so I can’t see why Blizzard couldn’t or wouldn’t.

Most of what you said doesn’t make sense.

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This thread is going to get nuked, too, on the basis that its discussing forum moderation.

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I used to do it for another company. You can skim through a thread pretty fast and determined if its derailed or not.

Even if people are just chatting, if its off topic, its off topic.
:dracthyr_shrug:

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Are you new or do you not know me at all? I have been here since before Wow and more than 10 years as an MVP green, short of tech support articles and some of the charts/tables I use I don’t copy paste anything. I also don’t work for Blizzard.

Your conjecture is just plain wrong.

The forum moderation is NOT automated. Yet. Not saying MS won’t ever do that, but right now it is not.

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The only problem are the people who cannot follow CoC or EULA.

I say this as someone that has been actioned before, I deserved every one of my actions.

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If AI ran the forums so many more threads would get deleted. We also would see better weekend moderation and not see mods constantly restoring flagged threads

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It depends on the level of off topic and other things going on. If its completely derailed, that can get closed. If people are fighting, obvious close.
Politics of any kind are usually an instant close.

It all depends. There are a bunch of threads that should get closed due to the nature of the comments, but because they remain more or less on topic. They stay open.

All depends.

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What are you even talking about? I was not responding to you in that post - unless you are an alt of the OP. MVPs are other players. They have just as much forum power as you do. Nobody has threatened anyone.

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There are only two “automated” systems in place, though neither apply any penalties without human intervention.

The first is a spam detection system that we have in place that helps us to deal with potential forum spam such as phishing scams and similar advertisement. This doesn’t impact the WoW Forums as much because this forum requires an account with game time on it in order to post in most areas, but it does look out for potential spam. If the system detects what it considers spam it will quarantine the post until it can be reviewed by a Moderator. The Moderator will review the post and determine if it is spam or not. If it is, we’ll usually delete the post and ban the user (advertisement/phishing accounts are usually not legitimate players), if it is not, we’ll mark it as not spam and restore the post.

The second is the flagging system that the forum community uses. If there are enough reports the system will temporarily hide a post, generating a report for a Moderator to review. The post is otherwise still available to be seen by other users and a Moderator will review that report to determine if a violation is found or the post it otherwise problematic and moderate from there. If we believe the post is fine we’ll disagree with those flags and restore the post.

Without an idea of what threads you are referring to I can’t say what the issue was, but it is rare that we have to review an entire thread in order to determine that we may not want to keep it active.

As much as folks try to sell this narrative, it just doesn’t make it true.

If by trolls you mean those who report posts that may or may not violate our Forum Code of Conduct… they “get away with it” because players are allowed to report any post that they feel may violate policy. As long as they are not otherwise exploiting the reporting system, they are allowed to be wrong.

If we find evidence that they are exploiting the reporting system, such as by using alternate characters and accounts to submit multiple reports on the same post, they are usually hit with a suspension. I know of at least one person in this thread that should have experience with the repercussions from that. :wink:

We have never shied away from negative feedback or that there are issues here and there. What we have an issue with is how that is conveyed on our forums. The posts that are removed tend to include insults or aggressive language, targeting staff, etc… Those that remain constructive, focused on the game and game systems generally remain open.

Hmm, that doesn’t seem to be entirely true. I see penalties going back to 2022. It’s a little hard to track them all easily since a lot of them are separated by character, but I’m looking at around twelve.

Looking through the history of those penalties it seems that you have a habit of insulting other posters, and creating threads that tend to fall under Trolling.

Examples:

  1. A thread about how you are right. Prove you wrong. No context, nothing constructive brought to the table.

  2. A “fake anger” thread disparaging a specific class, which is text book “Creating threads for the sole purpose of causing unrest on the forums”.

  3. A thread calling our Community Council members.

Mostly, it’s just insulting other posters.

No, given the number of reports that this thread had, that is what drew attention to it.

Unfortunately, you continued to create additional threads and jump into multiple other threads causing a disruption.

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