Not sure if this is the right place

[Banewulf-terokkar]

Armchair lawyering.

I remember a certain politician arguing the ambiguity of “is”.

Blizzard is the sole arbiter in this. You don’t get a vote.

Good news though! You can appeal

[Rufflebottom-bloodhoof (Rufflebottom)]

I saw similar at a company I worked at once. In their rulebook, it said if you’re caught sleeping on the job, you “may” be fired immediately. One guy got caught twice in 1 week, claimed he must have “partied too hard” and was never fired. Another guy was seen nodding off due to new medication and was fired that day.

And? What does that have to do with Blizzard. As well, you don’t know what other things may have come in to why one was fired and one was not.

I never claimed a mod couldn’t be. I said they can choose to. And people do that all the time. Mods are humans too. They have bad days. I’m not blaming them for that but with vague rules, it accommodates to someone and allows them to infract if they feel like it. It’s the company’s choice to make it that way but it’s a slippery slope.

You are. You are saying that they moderate based on how they feel on any given day. Most topics aren’t original, no matter what the poster thinks. The Mods have seen most of them before. They very likely have a list that says what was done about the topic previously. It would help keep emotions out of the decision. As any decision they make can be reviewed, and likely result in discipline if they have a habit of bad calls, I really don’t see them giving punishment because they are having a “bad day”.

[Vrakthris]

I know this has already been locked, but I wanted to cover a couple of things from your post, Greyhide.

Let’s be fair here. That would constitute well over 90% of the posts made on these forums.

Taking all forums into account, I don’t believe it is that high, but I get your point. While we do some proactive moderation the primary source of moderation is in response to reports that are made.

Which is correct, but if you’re not sure, why silence the person? Why not simply delete their post?

Technically speaking, a thread simply created to “give folks a laugh” isn’t necessarily adhering to policy either. Truth be told, we actually do delete posts instead of applying a penalty. It happens fairly often as a matter of fact.

Unfortunately, simply deleting a post doesn’t usually get the point across. You’ll often see reposts of the deleted topic, or posts questioning why it was deleted, etc… which ends up causing us additional work to then moderate the additional topics/posts and escalate the penalty from a simple warning to a more severe penalty.

All a mod has to do is be having a bad day, take a small joke someone made and now the person permanently has a “trolling” record when that was never their intent.

Contrary to popular belief, our staff bases their actions on policy, not mood. Of course, we are human, we do make mistakes on occasion, which is the entire point of the appeal process. If you believe a Moderator may have made an error you can appeal the decision, a second Moderator will review the post and the action taken and if they disagree with the original finding can overturn that penalty, expunging it from the record.

Why not just silence the ones that are blatantly obvious?

People tend to be fairly clever and can easily mask their intent so it may not look blatantly obvious. As I said, our Moderation team does more than simply silencing an account. They may delete a post/thread that they feel is slightly overstepping, they may edit out bad language to allow a thread to still continue. It depends on the situation.

How is that insulting? I’m not following you.

I believe it is because you are claiming that our Moderators cannot remain professional and act based on policy and are instead mercurial in nature and given to unpredictable actions.

They have bad days.

However, there is a difference between the phrase “made a mistake” and “having a bad day”. One denotes intent, the other is simply the circumstance of being human.

I think that about covers it. Thanks all.