Right… It was a mess for the Mods to handle reports because they were using home made custom forums with a really terrible moderation system. It was very very hard to juggle. So reports did not get the results they should have. Although the comment section was helpful for patterns of abuse.
Nothing got hidden then (except with downvotes). Which they removed because people abuse it to hide posts… see the pattern? Blizz knows people abuse things.
Just because you did not know about it does not mean it was not a mess.
maybe it was from their end but the result on our end appear pretty much the same as we have now.
most people don’t false flag - there are very very few posts that are flagged that I can’t see why they were flagged. There is a huge subjective factor which will never be eliminated in this.
I do not want my battletag displayed on the forums. It’s why I don’t post in the other games forums.
I made the mistake ONCE of posting my battle tag. I woke up to someone spamming friend requests over and over and it didn’t stop for WEEKS after I deleted the post.
It’d be perfectly fine to include only partial btag numbers. Like the first 2 digits with XX or XXX after it.
Ugh! That is terrible! I just leave up the request and ignore it for a few weeks until I figure they lost interest. I only add people I have some sort of acquaintance with. WHY would anyone even bother!? It makes no sense to me.
Also, I adore those glasses as you might have guessed!
Just so you know, every other forum has a very, very easy way to get their full BattleTag, including the numbers. It’s literally as easy as a mouseover. WoW is a unique beast though, and has a lot more players than many of the other games combined at any given moment. There are some valid reasons for not wanting alts disclosed, though if unwanted behaviour persists to the point Blizzard deems it necessary to rein in, they may forcibly disclose alts, though that is going to be a last resort.
The current combination of in-game and forum ignore functions should suffice for the time being. And although we cannot see alts (easily) like we could with the old Cogwheel browser extension, Blizzard can in fact see them. If a poster becomes a problem, Blizzard can see if another character on their account has posted in the same thread and deal with it on a case by case basis.
I like posting on different alts for anonymity. It gives me the freedom to voice my true opinions without tiptoeing around eggshells.
I like being able to switch between my serious alts for when I’d like to discuss real issues, in-game issues or current affairs, and other alts for when I just feel like posting cute-sy fluff stuff.
Sometimes, the forum posters I disagree with in some aspects of the game or real life issues, I actually like in other situations like in the movies, music and entertainment threads or even in silly or benign threads where we all just get along and have fun anyway.
Posting on only one forumID can emphasize differences of opinions as well as grudges and possibly stifle feedback and enforce the whole echo chamber / majority gangs up on the minority posters and possibly single them out.
So you end up with an echo chamber, less people posting their thoughts and feedback (potentially helpful feedback too) because now they’re too afraid of being ganged up on again.
I agree with this. The amount of forum time you need to spend to get the high trust levels is absurd. I have it, I’ve lost it, I have it again. I spend way too much time with you nuts.
The trust system should be based on failure to meet that trust. Let everyone have those privileges and if you abuse them, then you lose them.
Ignoring malicious trolls has the opposite effect. They are free to vandalize the forums if all the concerned people put them on ignore.
I think they chose a forum that had the option of posting on alts for a reason. Why would they have chosen that feature and bought forum software that didn’t even have ignore if it wasn’t a priority for them?
What is “clickbait”, given that a lot of the people who use that phrase to criticize opinions they don’t like actually use clickbait titles themselves to draw attention to their threads?
While this could work I will note it’s not without drawbacks. As it is everyone is behind a fantasy character. It’s good and well to show battletags but what happens when people with female sounding battletags start getting harassed more? At least the characters are generally fantasy named.
This is a known and filed issue with the forum software itself. The devs are “looking into it” according to a blue post I saw a while back.
Ever heard of something called cogshanks? It unmasked people’s alts to allow harassment by using the ignore feature then seeing which other character’s posts vanished to determine who was who. It’s not reasonable to do that system on a web accessible site as it will result in scraping and alt outing and harassment. The only reasonable, privacy preserving, harassment preventing measure is your 1. point to move everyone to battletags. However this must be done in a way that leaves up all old posts and comments not pointing to any battletags, e.g. grandfathering in all old content somehow because if you remove character names of forums that have already been scraped and replace them with btags you’ve just linked btags to character names which is not acceptable.
4-5. All true, all could be addressed by tying limits and such on the backend back to the battlenet account and preventing say multiple heartings or silently ignoring them or keeping them across all characters but only showing to others either the first character or the last character to click the heart on your account. As to 6, true enough though I think it’s exaggerated the extent to which this happens as there just seem to be a lot of both trolls and people with contentious opinions.
Changes to forum ID won’t do anything about abuse reporting. Only moderation will. The fact is they removed the dislike button and people are using the report button as a standin. Also a lot of contentious stuff could be argued to be trolling by clever trolls who are not necessarily sincere or at least being inflammatory. Blizz almost always leaves this stuff up but I think we’ve all seen our fair share of posts that are obvious concern trolling bait.
This is actually likely an attempt to address 8 and force people to stick to cookie cutter reasons along with forcing moderators to do so. Also the more reading the mods do the less modding they can do. It’s about efficiency and not wanting to dedicate much in the way of resources to it.
