Ask the Mods questions about the Forums!

[Red Iron Crown]

42 minutes ago, GenPage said:

Hey folks!

Is there anyway I can get the SpaceDock Admin member tag or do I still need to build up my community reputation first? Thanks! 

You can edit your user title in your profile settings once out of the probationary period (which I think you're clear of now), simplest would be to change it to "Spacedock Admin" yourself.

[GenPage]

Figured as much. Thanks @Red Iron Crown

[KerbonautInTraining]

I have a question about how physics calculations will be handled in 1.1, who should I ask?

Apparently each ship in the physics bubble will get their own thread. What happens if they touch? Do the ships start sharing a thread, killing performance?

Edited March 4, 2016 by KerbonautInTraining

[Red Iron Crown]

4 minutes ago, KerbonautInTraining said:

I have a question about how physics calculations will be handled in 1.1, who should I ask?

Apparently each ship in the physics bubble will get their own thread. What happens if they touch? Do the ships start sharing a thread, killing performance?

You'll have to wait and see. Anyone who knows would be under NDA and couldn't tell you.

[KerbonautInTraining]

Just now, Red Iron Crown said:

You'll have to wait and see. Anyone who knows would be under NDA and couldn't tell you.

Oh. Squad mentioned 1 thread per ship upon somebody asking, but I guess they aren't willing to go into more detail.

[Red Iron Crown]

Just now, KerbonautInTraining said:

Oh. Squad mentioned 1 thread per ship upon somebody asking, but I guess they aren't willing to go into more detail.

I don't think I've seen that from an official source, just speculation. Not long until we know for sure at any rate.

[KerbonautInTraining]

1 minute ago, Red Iron Crown said:

I don't think I've seen that from an official source, just speculation. Not long until we know for sure at any rate.

Yeah, someone's gonna have to make a thread where people can ask open-beta testers questions about the update. 

[Red Iron Crown]

3 minutes ago, KerbonautInTraining said:

Yeah, someone's gonna have to make a thread where people can ask open-beta testers questions about the update. 

There's supposed to be a temporary forum for the pre-release, I guess that will be the place for that sort of thing.

[Dman979]

Are we allowed to know if other forumgoers have been banned? I ask because the Real Space Program is planning our next launch, and we need to know if we should find replacements for some members.

Specifically, @Gaarst and @Mods_o_joy. Can you tell us anything?

[sal_vager]

Sorry Dman, but no, these things are only discussed with the persons involved.

But I have no idea what makes you think Gaarst is banned.

[Nils277]

There is a red Tag in front of some posts besides the conventional tag one can add.
Is this feature disabled for common users? I only have seen it on posts from Squad Staff. 

[sal_vager]

Yes.

It's a tag for official stuff, hence why they say "Announcement", "Givaway" etcetera.

[Nils277]

6 hours ago, sal_vager said:

Yes.

It's a tag for official stuff, hence why they say "Announcement", "Givaway" etcetera.

Thanks for the info 

[Tex]

Is it a courtesy thing to ask another moderator to lock one of your threads, or would it be possible just to lock your own if you felt the need to?

[Red Iron Crown]

39 minutes ago, Maximus97 said:

Is it a courtesy thing to ask another moderator to lock one of your threads, or would it be possible just to lock your own if you felt the need to?

If the moderator is wanting to close a thread they started they'd generally do it themselves, this is a request we almost always honor from OPs, moderator or not. If it's being closed because the thread is "going bad" then generally we'll consult on it, especially if the mod in question is participating in the thread.

[Tex]

Sweet. Just wondering if it might be seen in bad taste if a moderator were to lock their own thread if they felt like they needed to for whatever reason.

[Tex]

Ooh, another question. How tightly-knit of a group are the moderation team? Obviously they're all on the same team and collaborate with one another when it comes to questions about which actions to take depending on the situation, but how far does that go? To what extent do different moderators work together?

[AmpsterMan]

8 hours ago, Maximus97 said:

Ooh, another question. How tightly-knit of a group are the moderation team? Obviously they're all on the same team and collaborate with one another when it comes to questions about which actions to take depending on the situation, but how far does that go? To what extent do different moderators work together?

Well it depends on each of us, methinks. Some of us are pretty private with our own lives, and others are kinda open with their personal lives. We spend quite some time on the modchat so we tend to know a bit about each other :p. 

As a rule, we should be on the modchat at any point we are on the forums, so we tend to collaborate on pretty much any rule breaking that means infraction points. Sometimes we are quite heated in our debates too . I think this is a good thing; I think for the most part we avoid "groupthink" and have different people with different mindsets and life situations so it's good

[Vanamonde]

And just now we were watching AmpsterMan in a crowd shot on a news show. He is one of the less private among us. 

For his protection, we will not identify him or the show. 

[Snark]

I'm curious about the report-a-post feature.  I gather that one of the important functions of moderators is to respond to the Bat-Signal reported post and take appropriate action.  But I have no idea how that works out in practice for the moderators.

In particular, I'm curious about two things:

First, how often does it happen?  Order of magnitude, how many posts a day get reported?  Or put another way, for a typical moderator on patrol, how many reports per hour do you respond to?  (My personal impression is that it must be very low-- I get the impression that the KSP forums are a freakishly well-behaved online community full of atypically nice people, and I very rarely see a post that I think of as "report-worthy."  However, I have no idea if that impression is an accurate one.  Maybe the forums where I spend most of my time just happen to be the most well-behaved ones.  Or maybe the moderators are so ruthlessly efficient that the "rotten apples" get cleaned up before I have a chance to see them.)

My other question is:  when you do respond to reported posts, what's the signal-to-noise ratio?  i.e. when you look at the reported post, I could imagine several possible outcomes:

• A "good report":  you decide that it's actually something where some sort of moderator action is indicated
• An innocent "false alarm":  i.e. the reporter meant well and was acting in good faith, but was a little over-eager and you decide that no action is required
• Abuse:  either someone's deliberately spamming the report feature to try to cause trouble or inconvenience (either for the reported person or for the moderators), or else a habitual whiner who just tends to be quick-on-the-trigger to report people all the time.

...What does the frequency breakdown look like for the above categories?  What fraction of the reports are "good" ones?  Are there enough false alarms (and/or abuse) that it's a problem for you, i.e. wastes too much of your time?

Edited March 10, 2016 by Snark

[Red Iron Crown]

4 minutes ago, Snark said:

First, how often does it happen?  Order of magnitude, how many posts a day get reported?  Or put another way, for a typical moderator on patrol, how many reports per hour do you respond to?

Typically half a dozen or so per day, but some days we get none and others we might get a lot more (especially if there are contentious threads ongoing). It helps that multiple reports of the same post are consolidated by the forum software.

4 minutes ago, Snark said:

My other question is:  when you do respond to reported posts, what's the signal-to-noise ratio?  i.e. when you look at the reported post, I could imagine several possible outcomes:

• A "good report":  you decide that it's actually something where some sort of moderator action is indicated
• An innocent "false alarm":  i.e. the reporter meant well and was acting in good faith, but was a little over-eager and you decide that no action is required
• Abuse:  either someone's deliberately spamming the report feature to try to cause trouble or inconvenience (either for the reported person or for the moderators), or else a habitual whiner who just tends to be quick-on-the-trigger to report people all the time.

...What does the frequency breakdown look like for the above categories?  What fraction of the reports are "good" ones?  Are there enough false alarms (and/or abuse) that it's a problem for you, i.e. wastes too much of your time?

I would say nearly all reports are made in good faith, there is very little abuse of the system (<1% for that category). Some people interpret the rules more strictly than we enforce them, so there is a significant fraction (maybe half?) that we decide require no moderation action.

There are also reports generated when someone clicks "Report post" rather than "Quote", happens more often than one would expect and can be confusing when the report text is "Thanks."

[Mister Dilsby]

1 hour ago, Red Iron Crown said:

Typically half a dozen or so per day, but some days we get none and others we might get a lot more (especially if there are contentious threads ongoing). It helps that multiple reports of the same post are consolidated by the forum software.

With so many users that's a darn good score. And I appreciate the attitude the mods have about reports, which is pretty much "Don't try to deal with it yourselves--report it! You're not bothering us! We get a lot more bothered when you lot go arguing with each other about the rules!"

Although they typically say that last part a lot nicer than I would  

[Spaceception]

I'm almost absolutely sure this has been asked before.... But there's 60 pages :/ So I guess I have to ask, Why only 25 likes? Pls double them

[KerbonautInTraining]

What exactly is a Fan thread?

[Red Iron Crown]

8 minutes ago, KerbonautInTraining said:

What exactly is a Fan thread?

It's a thread devoted to fandom of something other than KSP. That was before my time as a moderator, but as I recall there was some spillage of certain fan threads into the forum at large, and people hating on the fans of some things.