In response to the latest vote, What would you change at Crossfire, and how would you change it, I've decided to write a column to express my personal opinion. All of the following is written from my subjective point of view and does not intend to offend or represent someone else's opinion.
First of all, I have to express the fact that I don't see a normal vote as an option to receive good suggestions and feedback for Crossfire.
Many people will just vote without putting thought into what they are actually clicking, and I'm also pretty sure many will click "The staff" simply because of the fact that they cannot agree with administrative decisions. We've seen drama as a response to a bunch of simple administration done (let's just remember the tears shed towards sol and baggiez as an example) and I believe a poll is the wrong way to go since it limits you on one option. I would greatly prefer a way to contact a responsible person with an E-Mail. The effort it requires, which is simply to open your E-Mail-Program or Website and type in the adress, is already enough to lure off most trolls.
That being said, I'll elaborate about two points that I believe are important.
Cheating policy
While there might be cheaters that sit through their ban and then are free to play again, we have all seen that it is not the case for most - "Once a cheater, always a cheater" applies for many, but not everyone. However, to play or not to play does not lie within Crossfire's responsibilities, and I believe that every CB ban doubled is quite an okay policy to go with.
On the other hand, with the search function currently being gone, I can not make research about the latest SLAC bustlist prominence actually being banned. Overall, I have a feeling that there's people going around who are ban evading or have actually not been banned.
However, this issue seems to be solved soon, as Krosan already said that things against multiaccounting will be done. For me, this concludes the cheating policy - I can't see where I can give constructive feedback to it, after all, supposedly the issues that I have seen are in the process of being fixed.
General policies
Since to some extent most points that I wanted to make outside the cheater's policy seem to be linked, they shall be put together as General policies.
The first thing that strikes my eye while browsing the site... Where are the rules? Right now, Crossfire surely does not give me the impression of actually having rules, but there actually are, hidden at the Posting Guidelines.
The only language allowed on Crossfire is English. Postings in other languages will be removed.
Seemingly, this only applies to news, articles and colums. Somewhere I've heard about journals being allowed in other languages if you tag them with the language beforehand, but if that is an actual rule, it seems to be cryptically hidden again. Therefore, I will freely assume it does not count for journals, and this rule seems to be working fine.
If a post is libelous, hateful, or obscene (not necessarily profane), the post will be deleted, and the poster notified. Further offenses may result in banning.
I do not see this happening. Half of the posts on Crossfire are hateful now. Make the rule clearer, since I've seen enough abusive and slanderous journals and comments to know that something isn't right here.
Posts promoting the initiation of violence, or racial hatred, or bigotry, will be deleted, and the poster notified. Further offenses may result in banning.
I'm interested in how many comments Crossfire has each day that go against the Jewish, the Polish, arabic and black people. This rule seems unclear, since "LOL POLAK PLANE CRASHED" and "nuke iceland" didn't seem to be neither racial hatred nor bigotry. When does this rule start to apply?
Posts that are obvious trolls will be deleted, and the poster notified. Further offenses may result in banning.
I have nothing more to add aside the fact that this rule is being completely ignored by both administrators and users.
Excessive advertising on this community site is not allowed.
This rule works fine, haven't seen advertising anywhere yet.
So what are you implying?
- Instead of having grey zones in your rules, draw clear lines and enforce your rules properly.
- Hire new administrators, even if it's just for a trial phase, to broaden the timezone that the content on Crossfire is watched and administrated.
- If your posting guidelines prohibit trolling, enforce them. If not, remove the rule.
- Add a rule against spamming to the posting guidelines.
Thanks for reading! :)
yes but many people aren't banned in here who should be banned.. I did some research a long time ago and these guys are already unbanned now on CB but they weren't in here at that time. not gonna do it again though cause krosan didn't mind to ban them
pointless to strict the rules since it kills the site imo
Give admin to reliable people on crossfire like killerboy and stuff, most of the admins are prolly not on the site anymore
hurr i can be popular if i hate poland hurr
As posted at the poll, I agree on enforcing the set up rules more strict.
I stop read.
im gettin bullied every single day and this makes me so sad. :(
why all the crying, flaming and shit.
just keep the fun, most important of all, if not, go play hockey
Fuck yea :DDDDDDDDDDDDDD
This.
i think some of this useless crap 'makes' crossfire
so 1 word + youtube journals should be deleted, but dont delete the good shit :D
"GO FUCK YOURSELF.
Dicuss."
definitely need to go :)
Gleiches Prinzip, Watson.
Sort of like the updates you get on esl streams during lans.
":D"
Stop jaymodding trickjenerd! distracted needs a revival match. :)
I'll respond to your other points when I have time!
The problem is two-fold: limited functionality within the site, and admin inconsistency, which is, in turn, exacerbated by said limited functionality. I can explain this with an example. At present, if a comment (or any piece of content) is deleted, it vanishes into cyberspace, and, up until quite recently, it was not possible for admins to see which colleague actually deleted it. Further to this, it is not possible for us to see what was deleted (other than the title), nor is it possible for it to be reinstated. This means that there is very little accountability when it comes to admin's actions, and is not possible for us to right a wrong as we cannot restore deleted content. This is relevant for most of your other points, too: a simple box for the journal creator to tick if his journal is not in English would be useful, but does not exist; moderators have very little power, and administrators have too much power, which makes it difficult to appropriately moderate those instances of libel, obscenity, racial hatred, and so on. The good news is that all of this should be changing in the near future, together with our anti-cheat policy (which I mentioned above). The proposed changes to the moderation of the site will make site staff far more accountable for their actions, and it will also introduce (what I feel to be) much more appropriate ways of dealing with spam. Feel free to ask any questions, but bear in mind that our plans are not yet set in stone.
First, are you planning to recruit more administrators / moderators, and if yes, on which base will you make the decisions?
Second, what will be the decision about the "obvious trolling" rule within the Posting Guidelines? Will it actually be enforced?
Third, regarding racial hatred and bigotry, will you change / stricten / loosen the policy on this? After all, Killerboy with the polandball bandwagon has been going through without a warning point for quite a while, which goes against the rules as far as I've understood.
Should there be any misunderstanding, please clear it up. Also, it would be nice if you would sum up what you said just here in kind of a newspost - if people see that progress is made and community thoughts are considered, admin flaming might go down a bit, which is definitely what you want since you will see more constructive help.
You're asking me to sum up the above, but a closer inspection of what I said will reveal that there's not very much to sum up; I was being deliberately vague, as I do not want to reveal too much. This is because our plans are not set in stone, as I said above, and because this is not the appropriate time and place to reveal such plans.
The user levels are going to be changed in order to create a more dynamic and functional team (in fact, the coding for this has already been done), and, as a result of this, it's possible/likely that we will be taking on more moderators. If this does happen, we'll probably approach people ourselves, but I can't imagine serious volunteers will be ignored, provided they have the right credentials!
It's likely that we'll be drawing a distinction between the journals (a DMZ), and the rest of the site, although, for all intents and purposes, this is already the case. The journals will be lightly moderated (of course genuine racial hatred will be moderated, but I don't think that "polandball" falls into this category), whereas everything else will be moderated more strictly. But please do not take what I say here as gospel, or as representative of Crossfire itself. It's possible that things may unfold as I detailed here, but things are very much still up for debate.
nuke iceland = racistic? hmkay
in general u have a point with the racistic jokes which have become part of normal behaviour in here, more strictness is surely needed to get rid of this situation.
its a bit different content- and structurewise, but after seeing sol's comment, ill rather wait first if cf improves by these changes