Prevented from reporting insults

[TheaLuna]

I guess it all comes under BGA's " No right to Reply" Policy ... not meaning to be rude... but its thats pretty ... er ... whats the word? lol

[xate]

"Sorry but the 5 last reports you submitted to moderation did not manage to convince our moderation team (no ToS violations, or not accurate enough). You cannot write any other reports for now."

I looked into this notification, and saw that it is from 2019. I agree that the wording "did not managed to convince our moderation team" is misleading. I have updated the wording to now read:

"We have determined that you are misusing the ability to report other players and have currently limited your ability to do so."

The information was not relevant to what happened, which was supposedly a result of the five most recent reports only. Even if it had been, I do not see where they get the right to publicise private user data in this way. And it was obvious from the non-relevance of the information and the omission of all relevant context that the intent was to make me look bad.

As explained above, the notification received was not completely accurate, and has been updated. This notification predates my employment at BGA, and I was unaware of the formulation.
However, I would like to object to your repeated insistence that I was intending to make you look bad. This was certainly not my intent! I apologize if it seemed so, but I was merely trying to provide a fuller picture of the reason for your restriction based on your initial post.

I would urge BGA or the mod team, whoever is calling the shots about this, to reconsider their policies. Those would be my suggestions:
- All users must get feedback about all their reports
- Any bannable limits to reporting must be documented
- Perma-banning people from reporting should be reserved to obvious bad-faith users, like submitting abusive reports.
- Restrictions based on submitting "too many" reports (but in good faith) should be temporary, if they exist at all.

We are in fact currently reviewing several things relating to the moderation system, and there will be updates to it in the future. A specific features I can mention at this point is that we do want to provide a way for users to track reports they have made and see the status, similarly to how the bug report system works. I am in full agreement that users should only be prevented from filing moderation reports for any amount of time if their report history has proven to be problematic. Similarly to how one can appeal a moderation against themselves, a player can also contact support directly to appeal any other restriction placed on their account on BGA. This has always been the case.

Did they explain how op last 5 reports were not accurate enough? Did they dispute op claim that they didn't receive an outcome on their reports? Did they dispute that these reports were over a duration of a year?

I could not speak to this in my previous reply, as I needed time to investigate the issue further. When a report is deemed not guilty, the report author should receive an email with a text written by the moderator explaining the reason. We have consistently moderated in this manner, filling out this information on all not guilty reports and sending it to the report author. Our investigation over the past week shows that in many cases these emails do not seem to be arriving at the end user (however, we have yet to determine the reason for this as some of them do and some of them do not). We are working on a solution for this issue, as we agree that in the situation is the report author should definitely hear the feedback the moderators wrote.

I see this complaint often, that people can’t get information from mods, so have to assume there’s some truth to it, but I have a hard time understanding it. On the two occasions I’ve needed help or to question something, I’ve simply found the email through the contact us page and emailed. Both times I received a response and remedy in less than 48 hours.

This is the proper way to contact the Admin staff. The forums are user forums: volunteer moderators read them and edit out inappropriate content to keep BGA a family-friendly platform; however, a moderator is not an Admin and should not be expected to speak on behalf of BGA.

A chat message report takes seconds to process. A single moderator would be able to handle them all easily.

The only reports that are work intensive are the cheating reports, and BGA has largely done away with processing them as far as I see. I don't blame them.

Users are explicitly required to include the offending chat messages in their report. Then and now, the only difference is that users were required to copy/past them into the report themselves while now they are required to select the messages to attach to the report.

Anything outside the report or duplicates thereof would be inconsequential.

No, even if they said something that would be moderated elsewhere, it doesn't matter. If the users at the table took no issue then, then there is no issue.

I was a moderator. I do mean seconds, as in 10 seconds.

This is definitely not the case. We have completely rewritten the moderation policy over the past three years, increased the moderator team in by 300% making sure to include moderators from various cultural and linguistic backgrounds, and created a new moderation panel with advanced features (such as adding lines not initially marked by the report offer to the report if they are deemed inappropriate). In addition, we require the moderators to not only read the full table chat, but to also review the past reports made about a player before posting their verdict. This is to both ensure that a player will not be moderated twice for the same offence and to see whether similar warnings have already been issued by moderators in the past. If any of the moderators were closing reports within 10 seconds, it would be a serious issue and we would reprimand them and remind them to slow down and be careful with their reports. Most moderators spend between 1 1/2 and two hours a week doing the required 30 reports.

Also in regards to duplicate reports. In many cases a user may be reported multiple times for the same offense by multiple people, after it has been processed, 1 report will be 'guilty' while all other reports will be closed as 'not guilty'. I'm unsure if this was altered not to count toward the 5 'not guilty' limit in the end. And may be a point of review in regards to OP.

No, duplicate reports are now marked guilty, but with no additional penalty or message sent to the guilty party. They've already received their penalty notification of it.

[Kayvon]

Excellent response, Xate. Thanks for giving us some insight into the process and the work you are doing behind the scenes. I'm looking forward to seeing how it evolves.

[Ceaseless]

I could not speak to this in my previous reply, as I needed time to investigate the issue further. When a report is deemed not guilty, the report author should receive an email with a text written by the moderator explaining the reason. We have consistently moderated in this manner, filling out this information on all not guilty reports and sending it to the report author. Our investigation over the past week shows that in many cases these emails do not seem to be arriving at the end user (however, we have yet to determine the reason for this as some of them do and some of them do not). We are working on a solution for this issue, as we agree that in the situation is the report author should definitely hear the feedback the moderators wrote.

I don't think I've seen any replies to my reports, or at least none are coming to mind. I can't say I'm a fan of e-mail being the method rather than BGA messages, as users might not use their e-mail much and there's no reason to expect them to. (Users might not use BGA much, but given this is BGA, and the issue is related to BGA, there should be some expectation regarding the usage of BGA involved.) There's also lots of less relevant messages being sent by BGA such as "x has messaged you" etc that would easily flood things.

I'd definitely be interested in seeing all of the replies to my reports on BGA.

[ErikLevin]

Appreciate the response, xate. The clarifications are largely reassuring.

[ChiefPointThief]

"Sorry but the 5 last reports you submitted to moderation did not manage to convince our moderation team (no ToS violations, or not accurate enough). You cannot write any other reports for now."

I looked into this notification, and saw that it is from 2019. I agree that the wording "did not managed to convince our moderation team" is misleading. I have updated the wording to now read:

"We have determined that you are misusing the ability to report other players and have currently limited your ability to do so."

So can you fully explain what the current policy is? Is it triggered by the last 5 reports and then you take into consideration the player’s history? What things do you look for when making your decision? Is it a certain % of guilty/not guilty, total reports, games played, etc? If you can answer thoroughly that would be great. Also you should’ve addressed the notification being misleading in your initial response because the entire rest of the thread would’ve been different.

Similarly to how one can appeal a moderation against themselves, a player can also contact support directly to appeal any other restriction placed on their account on BGA. This has always been the case.

99% of appeals are not considered due to “not being convincing”. Even if the op were not guilty they would still have their appeal dismissed because there is no way for them to provide the proper evidence to overturn this ban without all the necessary reports. This is very problematic.

I see this complaint often, that people can’t get information from mods, so have to assume there’s some truth to it, but I have a hard time understanding it. On the two occasions I’ve needed help or to question something, I’ve simply found the email through the contact us page and emailed. Both times I received a response and remedy in less than 48 hours.

This is the proper way to contact the Admin staff. The forums are user forums: volunteer moderators read them and edit out inappropriate content to keep BGA a family-friendly platform; however, a moderator is not an Admin and should not be expected to speak on behalf of BGA.

I mentioned that mods view these threads often and never clarify simple things about the moderation policy that can’t be found anywhere but I was referring to the bga staff as a whole (admins included). I don’t expect admins to respond to every single post but when there are entire threads (like this one) about a particular topic that no one can seem to find answers to it would great if people can get a response. You’ve already acknowledged that the current way of contact is having severe issues. I don’t understand why all contact can’t be done on the bga website anyway.

I have seen moderators edit out content that is completely family-friendly under the guise of “challenging moderations”. It appears that anyone who has been moderated cannot speak on the policy in which they were moderated without the possibility of an unfair severe punishment of being permanently banned.

We are in fact currently reviewing several things relating to the moderation system, and there will be updates to it in the future.

Continuing on with punishments not matching the crime there are a few things in the current policy that concern me. I am confused as to why someone being guilty of using multi accounts only receives -30 karma, no chat ban, and can play again within no time. As a user it tells me that bga’s values are extremely off considering that bad connection or bga site problems gives you -20 karma, an insult gives -50 karma plus a 10 day ban, and what bga considers challenging a mod in forum can lead to a permanent ban. Furthermore it appears that only offenses with chat bans show up in players report history so something as severe as cheating doesn’t even show on offender’s record but “light” insults do. Why can you only view player’s report history if they have a current chat ban and why are players own report history not available to them?

Under your current policy if someone is saying inappropriate things to you in the chat bga expects you to not engage with them for the rest of the game or take a karma hit (behavior hit) and quit. The victim in the situation is being wronged either way. Bga needs to install an option to mute the chat especially in 1v1 games. https://boardgamearena.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=35961

One last issue I will speak on is that players can do bad things and there is no way to report them under the current policy. But if the opposing player speaks on their bad actions they can be reported by the person doing the bad action. Because this policy is so bad confused players come to the forum an advocate for a change. This only gets them (they victims in this situation) a further punishment. I understand that you don’t know how to handle the people committing the bad act but taking it out on the victims isn’t the way to go. How these situations are being handled is even more concerning to me now that you have stated mods are reviewing games and taking time on these cases. I assumed they weren’t.

[Lady_Jane]

I have seen moderators edit out content that is completely family-friendly under the guise of “challenging moderations”. It appears that anyone who has been moderated cannot speak on the policy in which they were moderated without the possibility of an unfair severe punishment of being permanently banned.

There are all sorts of threads/comments in the forum with penalized users speaking on the policies they were moderated with, which are not deleted. There’s a difference between speaking on the policies and challenging the moderation. It may be how they’re addressing it that is the point of clarification here.

Under your current policy if someone is saying inappropriate things to you in the chat bga expects you to not engage with them for the rest of the game or take a karma hit (behavior hit) and quit. The victim in the situation is being wronged either way. Bga needs to install an option to mute the chat especially in 1v1 games. https://boardgamearena.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=35961

I do like the idea of a mute option on chats.

One last issue I will speak on is that players can do bad things and there is no way to report them under the current policy. But if the opposing player speaks on their bad actions they can be reported by the person doing the bad action. Because this policy is so bad confused players come to the forum an advocate for a change. This only gets them (they victims in this situation) a further punishment. I understand that you don’t know how to handle the people committing the bad act but taking it out on the victims isn’t the way to go. How these situations are being handled is even more concerning to me now that you have stated mods are reviewing games and taking time on these cases. I assumed they weren’t.

What type of bad things can’t be reported? I may just not be thinking of something, but there is an option for “behaved inappropriately in the chat.” I would think this could be a catch-all for something that doesn’t fall perfectly into one of the other options.

I’m not a fan of how casually people throw that victim word around. There are really horrible things in the world that people are exposed to on a daily basis. These are games. With rare exceptions, we shouldn’t really have such a hard time not engaging. Most of learned how to do this in real life as part of becoming adults, and do so daily in situations with much higher stakes than what we’re discussing here. And again I would point out that these situations and related policies are discussed all throughout the forums, with this thread being one of them. As far as we know op hasn’t received further penalties for it.

[ChiefPointThief]

I have seen moderators edit out content that is completely family-friendly under the guise of “challenging moderations”. It appears that anyone who has been moderated cannot speak on the policy in which they were moderated without the possibility of an unfair severe punishment of being permanently banned.

There are all sorts of threads/comments in the forum with penalized users speaking on the policies they were moderated with, which are not deleted. There’s a difference between speaking on the policies and challenging the moderation. It may be how they’re addressing it that is the point of clarification here.

Considering that I have literally seen the same one question be raised and deleted numerous times with my own eyes I'm not going to go back and forth with you on this topic. Like I said maybe these people were moderated for this situation which gives bga the authority to say they are challenging their moderation when all they asked is a simple question about the moderation policy.

What type of bad things can’t be reported? I may just not be thinking of something, but there is an option for “behaved inappropriately in the chat.” I would think this could be a catch-all for something that doesn’t fall perfectly into one of the other options.

Almost all cheating outside of playing with multi accounts cannot be reported. Kingmaking, sharing private game information in chats, purposely losing in coop or team games, just skipping your turns in coop games, ruining a game, etc none of it can be reported. But considering that the policy is so strict on chat these people can report you for the slightest of things if you respond to their actions. Lets not forget saying "play" is reportable.

I’m not a fan of how casually people throw that victim word around. There are really horrible things in the world that people are exposed to on a daily basis. These are games.

Yes! Considering that the conversation is games you should know that this situation doesn't compare to whatever things you are thinking of. Substitute any synonym if it makes you feel better but the point still stands.

[wrldtrvllr]

"Sorry but the 5 last reports you submitted to moderation did not manage to convince our moderation team (no ToS violations, or not accurate enough). You cannot write any other reports for now."

I looked into this notification, and saw that it is from 2019. I agree that the wording "did not managed to convince our moderation team" is misleading. I have updated the wording to now read:

"We have determined that you are misusing the ability to report other players and have currently limited your ability to do so."

So, you've changed the message from something that was at least specific and factual to something that is vague, false and highly offensive. I have never misused the ability to report other players. And retrospectively changing the reason for a sanction is really outrageous.

The information was not relevant to what happened, which was supposedly a result of the five most recent reports only. Even if it had been, I do not see where they get the right to publicise private user data in this way. And it was obvious from the non-relevance of the information and the omission of all relevant context that the intent was to make me look bad.

As explained above, the notification received was not completely accurate, and has been updated. This notification predates my employment at BGA, and I was unaware of the formulation.
However, I would like to object to your repeated insistence that I was intending to make you look bad. This was certainly not my intent! I apologize if it seemed so, but I was merely trying to provide a fuller picture of the reason for your restriction based on your initial post.

How could you possibly have been "unaware of the formulation", if it's been that way throughout the entire period of your employment at BGA? The details of my account activities that you decided to publicise were over two years old. If the situation two years ago was not related to the ban on reporting insults that you have now imposed on me, then you had no good reason to share it. If it is in fact relevant to the ban you've placed on me, then you have decided to punish me in 2024 for a report I made in 2022. Why exactly have you done that?

Did they explain how op last 5 reports were not accurate enough? Did they dispute op claim that they didn't receive an outcome on their reports? Did they dispute that these reports were over a duration of a year?

I could not speak to this in my previous reply, as I needed time to investigate the issue further. When a report is deemed not guilty, the report author should receive an email with a text written by the moderator explaining the reason. We have consistently moderated in this manner, filling out this information on all not guilty reports and sending it to the report author. Our investigation over the past week shows that in many cases these emails do not seem to be arriving at the end user (however, we have yet to determine the reason for this as some of them do and some of them do not). We are working on a solution for this issue, as we agree that in the situation is the report author should definitely hear the feedback the moderators wrote.

I have never received any such email, even though according to you I have submitted 33 reports over the past four years, so should have received 33.