[Discussion] Community issues + moderation

[kasumicc.livejournal.com]

I thought it would be good to bring this to discussion. For a while, I've been hearing people having issues when posting to this community. Either their posts remain forever in moderation queue or, for one reason or another, their post just won't get in.

I really don't know if it should be blamed to Livejournal, or to some setting in the community itself. But I find this rather worrying. This comm already gets a minimum amount of daily posts compared to some years ago. And the fact that these issues are happening only helps to the comm inactivity. Which brings me to another point: the comm's moderation. It's true that with such low activity, there's no need for permanent vigilance anymore. However, as this community still keeps a daily activity, I do think it's necessary to have a mod around, someone who has the time to check once a day or so. Not just to solve the post queue issues, but also, to reinforce some rules from time to time. Because I do see at times posts that break a rule or two (ex. questions that should go to aph_request instead, mature entries not being locked, etc), but in all honesty, no one takes issue with such things anymore.

And that makes me wonder if there's any point on keeping the actual rules anymore. These rules come from another time, and many of them are meant to lessen comm spam. Comms such as hetalia_events and aph_request were born for this. But said spam is nonexistent today. I'm not alone on thinking that having a decentralized community is rather inconvenient now, and bringing these posts back to the main comm shouldn't have a significant effect on your f-lists, as fandom nowadays does have little activity compared to some years ago. So I personally think that the comm's rules should undergo some revision, at least.

So that's it. Feel free to share your thoughts on this~

Comments

[osoroshia.livejournal.com]

The posting limits are, actually, 100% on Livejournal.
:/ They brought that in a while ago, when I guess there were a lot of spam attacks. So by default, any post to any community that contains a certain amount of external links, will fail.
I'm honestly not even sure posts that get hit with this problem can be seen by moderators.

It's the same with how at one point, comments couldn't contain pictures hosted on certain sites; they'd appear as screened to the commenter, go to the OP's email inbox, but never actually be visible to anyone else. Even OPs can't reply to them.


But, yeah, this comm itself is lacking active moderation. And even when I've seen mods replying anywhere, it's only ever been to pictures being 1 or 2 pixels too big. There's never any response to more important things.
What ever happened to the whole rule that RP requests made outside of the RP request post would be deleted?
:I Rules can only exist while someone's there to enforce them.


While it goes against what you're saying, and it's terrible when the community list is already so massive, I really prefer different comms for specific things.
You come here, you see everything. No order. No organization. Even half the tags are still "do not use" instead of deleted or replaced.
Thanks to the lack of moderation, some things aren't even close to on topic, either; Just recently, a user posted a sales ad here, had one Hetalia-related item in total, and didn't even link to it. :I

The rules themselves give this community the ability to handle six things:
-Discussions
-Fanart
-Fanfiction
-Doujinshi
-Media Downloads
-Translations

Even news isn't possible anymore, because of external links.
They need an entire rewrite of the rules to handle anything further, or have to start directing all other forms of posts to communities that are actually made to handle them.

[kasumicc.livejournal.com]

I agree we need specific comms for some things. Problem is that we seem to be using them the wrong way. We do have a community for doing requests yet everybody comes to post them here. Do we forget about that comm, or do we reinforce the rule saying that requests aren't allowed here? Do we keep out the discussion posts for events, or do we bring them back here where they belong (as I feel they do)? On the other hand, we've never been able to agree to keep RP or selling posts out of here. It's such a mess.

[osoroshia.livejournal.com]

I would 100% support kicking RP and sales related posts out-- And from a seller using their RP account to write this, that says something.

There's already a mod-supported thread for finding one-on-one RP. There's already a million dressing rooms out there for finding normal game-style LJ RP.
If anyone looks at the roleplaying tag here, 90% of the ads aren't even Livejournal. :I

Sales, well, there just isn't the moderation required to keep the buyers safe, or ensure the post is actually Hetalia related.

To bring events themselves back, we'd need to overthrow the mods that wanted them gone. While it's easier for the commenters to go where they've always gone, my sympathy's more for the OPs, and not wanting to see them get in trouble like that again. But then. At the same time it's one case where I agree with the mods. Ten posts in a row by the same user for the same topic, when at least half appear on the same page of the community, look terrible.
The main comm supporting events is basically like saying during events, we're not allowed to do anything not event related.
And that's seriously annoying for people just casually checking the community in hopes of something not about the event.


aph_request... I think I've been to once in my life.
Sure, if we brought back everyone who's posting there, the main comm would look even worse than it does, but if we banned "request" related posts in general, then suddenly anything with a question mark in it at all might get removed for being off topic.
I think leaving a suggestion that fanwork-specific requests will get more attention at aph_request is great,
but possibly things like "does someone have the translation of ___" or "I'm thinking of this scene, does anyone have the strip?" or other canon related topics should definitely stay 100% allowed.
:I It's useless if the main community itself just says "go ask __ instead" to someone trying to follow the series.