[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

[sidneyfireblood.livejournal.com]

The rules should be have another look over as with all communities and not just this one.

Every once in a while a community needs to look back on their rules and go "Oh hey! Maybe we should change them"

I wouldn't know which ones would need to be changed since I haven't posted in here, but maybe you should think about it.

And I didn't even know there was a restriction on posting here. Heck, I think I just watch the community and I may not actually be in it. There are a lot of communities that I just watch because of posting restrictions and such.

So it should be up to thise who are mods and frequent posters and not just me.

Hope this helps.

[kecen.livejournal.com]

If you're just watching this community, you're seriously missing out.
There are many members only posts, including many doujinshi and "adult material" and downloads.

[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.

[uozaki.livejournal.com]

If there was any dividing to be done, I'd prefer fanworks in one comm and official stuff in another. I think questions would be ok in the Official comm, although there could be a strongly worded GTS note in the rules, because seriously. And except for the spam issue, I never understood why events needed their own page. I guess *just* for the spam.

Then again I suppose I'm probably the only one who's NOT here for the fanworks, so I should just figure out some way to filter my flist so I don't have to scroll through all of it. (Any thoughts on HOW?) Having everything in one place does make things easier.

[lovelycudy.livejournal.com]

I prefer a centralised comm where things are posted. I can't seem to understand how hetalia_events works, for example, so I don't know if there's been any blog update. I wasn't aware of any modding issue, though.

[bosscookie.livejournal.com]

Thank you for saying it! I honestly have gotten the feeling the past few months that no one even cares about this community anymore. Not even the moderators. There are things that are posted that are clearly against the rules of the community and a few years ago would not have been tolerated. It just feels like no one cares anymore and it is just causing a bunch of inactivity and the downfall of this place.

[osoroshia.livejournal.com]

@__@ No, I'm with you entirely.

Fan stuff's half the reason I don't like the main comm.


There's supposedly a way to watch only specific tags. But. Even then. People don't tag correctly.

[osoroshia.livejournal.com]

The event comm would make more sense if it had been brought in for an event that had actually had an announced end. :/
It's become just some pointless chat room, now, since fandom can't seem to understand it's over.

But basically it's event updates, since the last time an event happened in the main comm, the mods freaked out at everyone for posting too often.
Normal blog posts are still main comm material.

[lovelycudy.livejournal.com]

Cool. I understood that all oficial blog updates would go there and I despaired because I find that comm too messy. It's probably just me, but I had a hard time following the event (I ended up just reading it afterwards) and now it seems that there's nothing happening?

[osoroshia.livejournal.com]

o___o Yeah the organization is shit now.

When I made it, my ideal was for it to be like the halloween event. Just a few nicely made event pages, wrapped up and left alone after the event ended.

There is absolutely no logical reason for posts to be made while there's no event happening. .__.
But it's easier to abandon it than try to make people understand anything.

[lovelycudy.livejournal.com]

When you select your watch settings you can select which tag you want to follow. In your case, I guess it'd be "official". It works. There are some comms where I only follow one tag and I only get email notifications for those.

[sarepthegreat.livejournal.com]

I think the main concern should be finding active members to take over as new moderators and examine the current rules. I don't think we should splinter up the comm more than it already is. As it's been stated, it's not like there's been so many posts that it takes more than just scrolling through a few fic posts to find entries you are looking for. I think we just need to figure out what posts should be allowed and a few people to remind others to tag entries and member lock entries that contain mature content and download links. Active moderators could also see posts that go into moderation queues. I know a few comms have had LJ automatically turn on weird settings so it would be good to have someone who could keep an eye on those.

I also think it would be nice to have a few more community posts on the main comm. As long as it doesn't get into too much spam it would be a nice way to get to know other comm members.

[lovelycudy.livejournal.com]

I didn't know it was your comm, I hope I haven't been rude.

I'm not someone who can or will stay in an event post for too long... I think I only did it in Halloween because I wanted to see the USUK and FrUK stuff. I don't think the event comm is a bad idea for events, but following anything else there would be quite messy.

[uozaki.livejournal.com]

Oh goodie. (Also I totally agree with your post. I've relaxed enough about rules etc that I don't want to post snarky things on every post, but arrrgh sometimes.)

Yeah, and I'm OCD enough that if there is not active tag moderation/enforcement, I'd still end up scanning the main page all the time to make sure nothing's been missed.

[misty-rain.livejournal.com]

^^^^^ This is my feeling entirely.

Just my two cents, but I honestly wouldn't like to see the community further split up; I enjoy seeing fanworks posted here with everything else, especially as there is so little official news presently coming out. It makes the community seem more active, and the active atmosphere is why I like this Hetalia community so much. I agree that some renovations might need to be made in the comm, but I don't think it's so bad that fan works need to be removed when there is currently minimal posting as it is.

[uozaki.livejournal.com]

If there was some kind of auto-/forced-tagging, that'd be great. I don't have enough faith in people's tagging abilities to rely on tags alone, though. But at least it exists!

[lovelycudy.livejournal.com]

Yeah, taggings seems to be flaky... that's why we need more modding activity, I guess.

[sarepthegreat.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I've always seen this comm as the central hub of the community and fanfic, fanart and other fan creations have always been a part of it. I don't see how separating them now would do anything but make this place even more abandoned.

That being said, I think we should make a rule about how often people can post fic updates. We don't need three separate entries for updates minutes apart.

[uozaki.livejournal.com]

Seems that way. I used to rely on Hetarchive when it was still being updated, but there I totally understand not being able to keep up with it.

Of course, the solution here is pretty obvious: if they'd do a new anime season, interest would spike again and there'd be motivation to fix things up. I wonder who we have to influence to make this happen...

[lovelycudy.livejournal.com]

I assumed a new season was happening. There seems to be a fandom exodus to Tumblr, which explains the decline in activity. Still, I think this post raises very valid concerns.

[lovelycudy.livejournal.com]

You mean posting different chapters? Because I think those should be posted in a single entry, one per day.

[sarepthegreat.livejournal.com]

I agree. I've seen a few people update as they finish or one entry per chapter, though, and post every few hours or even within seconds. One a day is fine at the current activity level in the comm.

[lovelycudy.livejournal.com]

In my other fandom, my ship's comm worked like that.

[sarepthegreat.livejournal.com]

For a ship comm I can see that as acceptable but on a main fandom comm, I think it could just be seen as a little spammy. Once a day is enough to alert regular readers and not irritate people following the comm for other entries.

[lovelycudy.livejournal.com]

Oh, nono, I meant that the rule was "one updating post per day". I think it was logical and avoid spamming.