Monday, June 05, 2006

How not to Mod a Board

Citizens of the Imperium had gotten a bit more flamey than usual recently, but nothing that couldn't be ignored for the most part. But apparently moderator MJD has had it up to here and he's not going to take it any more.

Topic: READ THIS NOW
As I said some time ago, I do not have time to police these boards and right now I'm the only moderator.

If you want to have personal arguments and hate each other, just go do it somewhere else. I do not appreciate having to waste my time moderating a board that's supposedly a friendly forum for adults.

Yes, I'm annoyed. I've been here before and it seems that courtesy towards me has been forgotten along with manners in general.

By flaming one another, some people are making work for me. You want me to police flame wars or produce Traveller materials? Choose.

As much as I don't like the modding at RPGnet sometimes I don't recall a moderator over there attempting to hold the whole board hostage. I'm not sure how effective this threat of withholding Traveller material really is going to be. As far as I can tell MJD is Martin J. Dougherty, the Traveller d20 guy. I had to figure that out myself because user MJD has no sig or anything to indicate that he probably owns the board. So if the guy really wants to threaten to stop cranking out T20 stuff, I'm not sure how effective a motivator that's going to be for all the folks who hang out at the various non-T20 sections of the board.

But more importantly, I'm trying to figure out why this guy is modding the board at all. With over six thousand member accounts, you'd think that someone would be able to take on some of the modding duties. I don't understand why that isn't a possibility. Yet those aren't one of the options available to us. MJD gives us the Lady or the Tiger. There is no "C: none of the above" for us to pick. I dunno, maybe the guy is just venting at the prospect of actually having to mod his board. But guess what? Message boards have moderators for a reason. Human discourse, especially on teh intarweb, is a messy business. Once many years ago I was asked to consider modding a board and I turned it down flat because it's obvious to me that it is a thankless, unforgiving task. There will always be drama on message boards and someone will always have to handle it. If MJD doesn't understand that he doesn't just need an assistant moderator, he needs someone to take over the job completely, thereby allowing himself to get back to writing his T20 stuff.

BTW, I heard that they restored the search function over at RPGnet, if anyone cares.

4 comments:

  1. Anonymous1:32 AM

    Hmmm...I e-mailed them the other day regarding some questions I had regarding their product line (for a site feature I'm working on), as well as a query into their possible-vaporware Honor Harrington RPG. I'm curious to see if they respond, and how quickly.

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  2. I'm pretty sure they no longer have the Harrington license. Ad Astra Games now has a license to do a ship-to-ship game:

    http://www.star-ranger.com/SITS.htm

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  3. Anonymous9:16 AM

    What, did it lapse, you think?

    I knew about Ad Astra's ship-to-ship. But I really thought of the Honorverse as a great setting for a RPG...hopefully, it'll be picked up by someone else.

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  4. Yeah, I think it lapsed. This Dougherty guy may have a his shorts in a knot over the modding at CotI, but he's not a moron. As I understand it QLI has had this license for a while and apparently little or nothing has been done to get a product out the door. Renewing at this point would be throwing good money after bad.

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