Lack of forum signatures is good but you might also want to re-educate your moderators. I had a post moderated that had a link to a search page on my site, in a thread that was asking about good search scripts/mods that could be added to sites. Some mod mistakenly thought I was ?advertising so removed it - and what’s even worse from a user’s point of view is that I put together a mail to this guy to ask what I’d done wrong only to find after typing the whole thing out that upon pressing send “sorry this user cannot be contacted”. This is really bad practise - you should always be able to contact someone.
You do see overenthusiastic moderation a lot on forums especially nowadays when they’re not as successful as they used to be so there’s a bit of pressure. Usually a pattern. Some guy becomes a mod then a supermod and then starts believing in his or her omnipotence and infallibility. Some people mistakenly indulge in zealous sterilisation of forums to proactively act against people thy think to be “bad people” or “bad practises that we need to stamp out NOW” based on the closed opinions hidden behind the walls of a mod-only subforum. But the best forums are where the moderators are invisible and perform a janitor type function in the background. Fyi this is based on moderating forums and newsgroups since about 1994, probably longer than even the longest moderating people here.
I think you’ve made an assumption there, but that both sides are at fault for that, and that’s something we can fix. The link wasn’t removed due to “advertising” but that it was irrelevant/unneeded. The same point is perfectly made without the link to your site. You use it, so you recommend it. The person could get to your site by visiting your profile – if you have it there, so linking to it, is unnecessary and didn’t add any value.
A PM should have been sent, but from what I can tell, the moderator felt sending it was necessary, as your link didn’t seem to for advertising, marketing, self promotion, spam, etc. So they silently did the change and didn’t act on it (so I guess you can claim this was an invisible action meant to be as a janitor type function in the background… ).
So although we are very keen to observations and feedback, let’s not make that feedback based on assumptions. Also, I have no idea why you couldn’t PM the moderator, none of us have settings that would block that (granted, your Trust Level must be 1 before PMs are available, so maybe you were still Trust Level 0 at the time?).
That’s definitely not expected behaviour. Only suspended members can’t be contacted. If you could PM me more details I’ll look into this for you.
Re the moderation practices, I am hearing you and it is something that we’re working on at the moment. The example that you give sounds more like a misunderstanding/mistake than active overmoderation, so I apologise for that. It doesn’t change the fact that you are correct, the longer people moderate the more strict they tend to become. I don’t agree with your take on the reasons for that though. In my experience with my staff here, it isn’t actually about abuse of power, but more about becoming jaded. There is only so much negative behaviour that you can deal with before you jump to the conclusion that everyone is doing it.
Having said all that, I don’t mean to disregard your feedback. It is appreciated, and I’ll certainly take it to the team.
[quote=“ingleslenobel, post:213, topic:742”]
probably longer than even the longest moderating people here.
[/quote] Not even close
If user posts code (without the code highlighting, so RAW) can an alert pop up when they submit and ask if the code was meant to be highlighted? Perhaps a view of what their code will look like upon submit, apposed to a view if they DID highlight it? Something like that? I feel like we need to cut down on people not highlighting their code.
I don’t know if that’s possible, but I’d hate to have a message pop up every time I post an <img src="/community/uploads/sitepoint/313/9eb5f860890698cc.gif" width="15" height="15">
Or <s>strike-through</s>strike-through or whatever.
Hopefully the problem will diminish as folk get used to Markdown and the new system.
Perhaps it could be be a “don’t give me this popup next time” sort of thing…or base it on Trust Level? 0 and 1s are pretty beginner at Discourse…2+ obviously know a good bit of Discourse.
My suggestion is purely to help new users or beginners…There is A LOT of people with malformed code which I / other users have to wait for them to be formatted before we can help. It’s more of a nuisance. I just feel like something extra needs to be done for awareness. I don’t really care what it is - I only wish to have the number of people uninformed about Discourse code handling reduced.
I have long thought that having a “help” eg. “?” on the composer would be a good thing, but unfortunately the idea is seen as either
too diffucult to code in
uneccessary
low priority but on the todo list
something else?
Personally I would welome anything that might help the problem. Fixing up posts where the member hasn’t used proper MarkDown consumes a fair bit of time editing them so others might be able to see what they need to see in order to be helpful.
Perhaps when users register, make them do a quick run through of Discourse? Highlight the important features? Or perhaps just link to a thread? Does something like that exist? Just throwing ideas out there.
It used to be Pinned but I guess it has since been displaced with the “Help by Flagging” topic.
(the number of Pinned topics limits what’s displayed in various lists so the number of Pinned topics is kept to a minimum)
Finding it is a bit more work now
FAQ link in hamburger menu → link in the FAQ
The problem is that you are relying on people to be bothered … which they just aren’t. They won’t put the effort in to learn anything new … it’s often painfully obvious from the formation of the message that even if we had put every possible effort into telling them how to code it, including sending someone round to press the keys for them, they would still just throw out any old kludge and expect us to figure it out from there.
The preview makes it pretty obvious what they can expect to see displayed, given their input. There’s a button marked </> on the toolbar, which for anyone who knows anything about web development is clearly the ‘code’ button. Even if they don’t figure that out, there are ways round it, like putting in spaces.
Why do you use light gray type on a white background? It really is almost unreadable. (http://www.sitepoint.com/community/)
I understand that black on white is used a lot but that is because it is very readable. If you must use something else please try to find a combination that has a good contrast ratio. Good choices would be:
white on red,
white on dark blue.
black on yellow.
Bad choices would be:
yellow on white.
black on black.
white on white.
light gray on white!
).
)