Factorio Forums

It's obvious these forums need a clear set of guidelines. A set of rules which all participants must abide to. It should help keep threads stay on topic and everyone feel comfortable. It should also help keep moderation consistent and predictable.

Here are two examples of what I mean:

Bay12 Forum Guidelines
Towns Forum Rules

The guidelines should include what is acceptable behavior and what is not. They should also state the expected punishments for breaking the rules, and how things such as warnings and bans are utilized. They should also explain how users (and moderators) are supposed to deal with conflicts.

We need this.

We had quite a bit of chatting on IRC about this. Given that Factorio will only grow and that'll make problems with troublemakers a lot more common. Without proper rules it will be really hard for moderators to keep the forum clean. And it will easily cause different moderators to moderate differently. Thus rules wouldn't be same for everyone.

In a good environment it is easy for people to share their ideas and talk about various things. But if there are malicious people coming in to troll and try to cause flame wars and such. It will distract the discussion, intimidate others from posting and generally make a hostile environment. And even if there might be good conversation going on in such environment, it will often get hidden by offtopic or otherwise useless posts.

As moderator I will of course support the opinion of the majority.

Personally I think, that rules are the last border. The point, to where you can go, but no step further or the hand is cut I came always very good through my life with the motto: contracts are useful, when we cannot talk anymore.

But, well, some of the posts last weeks shifted my thinking a bit...

EDIT
Example: Where guidelines would be useful: https://forums.factorio.com/forum/vie ... 381#p31381

ssilk wrote:Personally I think, that rules are the last border. The point, to where you can go, but no step further or the hand is cut I came always very good through my life with the motto: contracts are useful, when we cannot talk anymore.

That would be ideal, sure... But it is only really going to work on very small scale. When you go to large scale, you will not have time to talk with each individual to go around what is acceptable and to play the peacekeeper getting everyone to come along.

This forum is still quite small. Not that many problems so far and such. But the certain activities that have been going on lately are bound to happen often on large forums. And for Factorio.. It is only a matter of time when that happens.

The rules at 12bay and towns forums imho express general "good online behavior guideline". Having them could be useful as a reference - for the moderator to say I ban this thread because that and that in the rules. On the other hand I have enough trust in our moderators to handle questionable situations based on their judgment without predefined set of rules. Maybe this will change in the future as the community potentially grows and then we will need a set of rules, but for now I think we are good with the "moderator decides" approach.

Well, as said, there are about as many reasons for that, as against.

Some more suggestions - to straighten the line, where we don't need guidelines - in the order of usefulness:

- A moderator-board. We definitely need something like that.
- Perhaps more moderators? Per board? I think one reason of the current issues are that: One can barely follow all threads and naturally not so interesting threads are not so watched.
- Some more administrative jobs. Installing new boards, installing new software/plugins (the bug-reports-problem, the suggestion forums), updating existing, configuring. There is always something to do.

I think more, and category-specific, moderators would be an improvement. Of course, you always need to keep a few (trusted) global moderators.

And I think a moderator board is pretty much standard for any forum that gets a lot of users. Not only a hidden board for internal moderator discussion, but also a feedback forum, where people can give feedback on moderating or make a request.
For example: This topic could be in that board instead of in the (game) suggestions board.

someone has found my hidden intention...

I'm always surprised when someone posts something vulgar. If you want factorio to be a game geared at people of all ages, even people below 18, you need some basic rules about swearing, calling people names and flamewar-ing (stupid, ugly, loser, gay etc), and you also need some rules about sfw (safe for work) vs nsfw (not safe for work) content.

I am an adult and enjoy adult content especially jokes, but I just find the factorio forum to be a really odd choice of scene to get drunk and talk about that time I saw a donkey show in Tijuana. I'v got no problem joining into a more adult nsfw discussion, I'm downright vile when I want to be, I guess I'm just surprised because forums for video games typically try to keep it clean for the sake of their wide audience. I always kind of begrudged the nerfing of adult language and topics, but I guess this forum shows me how lame trying to act vulgar while talking about video games really is. If you like to get nast-tay check out stuff like http://www.efukt.com (camwhore awards 1 & 2 are hilarious).

Well, when I see posts like that I would say: Yes, rules are needed.

Thanks to all those people, that don't understand, that the rules are made for them.

I hate forums that impose rules on what you should say and not say. What should be posted and not posted. I feel most of it is common sense. This is the factorio forums. For things to be discussed about factorio. Granted communities will spawn and will want to talk about different things from time to time which is usually remedied by an off-topic subforum. As far as swearing goes I couldn't really care. I sometimes swear. However I won't curse in an insulting manner. Like saying "f you". Not because it's a swear word but because I don't find any usefulness of degrading another human. Granted I'm human and I can sometimes lower my self to a state of rage and what I do after that is anybodys guess. Rare, but it happens.

As far as nudity? Don't care. Do I want to see nudity when trying to discuss a video game? No it's irrelevant. I'm typing all this but I'm gonna stop because it's common sense.

There are some grey areas. Like trolling. Sometimes I can be a bit serious. So in some situations it will take a couple of replies to realize the person is trolling. I'm not insulted by it. It's just more than likely I wasted time thinking it was a serious discussion. I call them ninja trolls lol.

Probably the worst is bad moderators. Where it depends on how they emotionally feel to make decisions. Or in general abusive moderators.

In the end it all comes down to what your forum attracts. If I go to the battlelog forums for battlefield. I skim through the discussions and within a couple of minutes I'm depressed and just leave the forum. Go to the symthic forums where I can find intelligent discussions. Honestly when it comes to forums like that I would probably ban half of them. No deleting posts. No closing threads. Just straight up ban them because honestly what they post is disgusting. No matter what you do they will come back posting the same disgusting things.

This community? So far it seems to have attracted the intelligent and well mannered gamers.

The second thing which is another reason guidelines are made is so members are not putting their posts in the right sub-forum. There are several reasons this becomes an issue. A lot of forums go a little crazy with the amount of sub-forums. The thing is humans by nature need attention. If you have a lot of sub-forums. No matter how many people are active on the board. Some sub-forums are gonna be dead. Nobody reads it. Therefore people are gonna post something in the most active subforum. Also when you introduce a lot of sub-forums you may think you are making it easier for the members to know where to post things. Another very common problem. I've been a member of overclock.net for years talk about a lot of confusion. Well since I've been a member it's not confusing to me where I should post my thread. But if I'm just reading a forum trying to find a question that may have already been asked. It's gonna be a nightmare. People don't put very descriptive titles, they post something in the wrong sub-forum. I end up doing a lot of digging. Usually coming up empty.

Right now this forum is very basic ( I mean that in a good way ). The only suggestions I would make is I tend to see in the Help Section about 50/50 split between technical help and gameplay help. So do you remove the help sub-forum and replace it with Technical Help and something like Guides & Tips. Or does that spawn the issue of two many sub-forums. Instead will people just post their gameplay help questions in the general discussion? As for the bug reports section. It has to be a nightmare for the developers. And posting duplicate bugs.

I'm thinking of a bug tracker. I'm not really sure how hard that is to implement. There are some good ones i've seen and bad one's. The open source chormium bug tracker is honestly confusing. Same thing with the google groups, circles, or whatever you call them. That thing is a nightmare I never have any clue how to even navigate it. The mantis bug tracker which you can find here: http://www.mantisbt.org/ is so far the most elegant and easy to navigate / find stuff I've found. Maybe because it has nice graphics, colors, and filters, lol.

Thanks. This is a good insight and hits most, no, all of my thoughts exactly.

And to mantis: https://forums.factorio.com/forum/sea ... rds=Mantis

@Drexir thanks for a nice overview. I agree with most of the stuff you wrote.

How about liability? I know that there ARE things that have to be monitored if the company/person/s responsible are German citizens. I'd check it from that perspective.

Apart from that I am all for Drexir's approach.

Well done, sir, this is a very nice necroposting, almost a year, really good performance
More seriously, I'm not German (worse : I'm French), but in France, there are laws to rule how personal data should be collected, stored, processed, ...

The key word is personal data (associating a way to identify people with cultural, social, financial, religious, ... informations). Bug tracking with pseudonyms does not belong to these categories, and thus should not be of any problem.

Merci beaucoup *curtsies* I am a huge fan of Anita Blake so I try to emulate her ... if only as queen of the zombie thread.

Apart from that I tend towards the nit-picky-ish and it seriously disturbs me that there seems to be a gap (and an expensive one at that, if it ever comes to legal charges).

In Germany, you will be held responsible for content (as well as the proper handling of personal data). I have no idea how other countries handle this aspect, thus my concern.

Personally, I am against censorship (because I think it doesn't work), but governments tend to see free speech with a very jaundiced eye.

i don't now where i can post this , but this topic is a french post ( i' m french )

it's a advertising to fake paper of identity in your forum

https://forums.factorio.com/forum/vie ... =6&t=13407

( you din't have report button to prevent you )

Gaiadragon wrote:i don't now where i can post this , but this topic is a french post ( i' m french )

it's a advertising to fake paper of identity in your forum

https://forums.factorio.com/forum/vie ... =6&t=13407

( you din't have report button to prevent you )

the report button is the "!" in the top left (in the default layout)

thank you