Every once in a while you run into a moderator. At first I didn’t think much about what they do. I was just glad what they did do when it was needed to be done. Slowly I became curious about what they did, why and how they did it. And started to discover certain patterns. Now I was hooked and decided to see what Discourse (OGS Forums is based on Discourse) could tell me about moderation.
Well, the Discourse Moderation Guide (DMG) could tell me a lot about moderation.
Much more tasks and activities than I had expected.
We owe the mods a lot. Thanks!
As a moderator, most of the work is on the main site. The kind of things moderators do there:
Answer questions about how Go works (usually about seki, positional superko or about area / territory scoring)
Answer questions about how the site works
Settle scoring disputes (usually seki or dead groups under Japanese rules)
End games that are stuck in scoring due to a timer bug
Reposition people who did not change in the Ladder due to the ladder bug
Rename accounts from people who want their accounts deleted
Annul games that aren’t scored properly (due to cheating, or due to the game ending prematurely without a clear reason)
Investigate sandbaggers / AI cheaters.
Tell people not to abandon games / demand undo’s / use offensive language / spam in chat / play wasteful moves to extend the game / cheat in the scoring phase / abuse AI / sandbag / etc.
Ban people who don’t listen to the above requests several times
Answer emails from people asking why they were banned
Unban people to give them a second chance (usually no third chance, though)
Ban alternative accounts made by disgruntled banned users / hardcore trolls
I think about 50% of the reports coming in are about users abandoning games, and 20% about suspicion of sandbagging / AI abuse. Unfortunately these are also the most time consuming to deal with. The good thing is that we’re volunteers: we only have to do things when we want to do it ourselves.
On the forum we barely have to do anything. It’s pretty peaceful here
Discourse has a pretty robust auto-flagging mechanism that hides posts for approval that meets certain criteria, so this makes moderating the forums much easier. Plus there are less people here.
But in general, the forum community are mostly really great people… it’s one of the first things that got me hooked on OGS <3
