Metropol

I have to say Pete I agree with a lot of your comments. I help moderate on a forum on a completely different topic. The forum administrator actively posts to the forum regularly - on some days posting a wealth of information.

We have generic threads on the board - dealing with day to day postings but we people also create seperate threads to deal with special events. The generic threads on TVF make it almost impossible to find information that has been previously posted. The threads end up so long you can't find information that you know has been posted.

In addition the moderation on our forum is open and transparent. Users are initially warned in a private message but posts are only ever removed if they could cause a legal issue. In all other cases a mod posts a message pointing out the behaviour isn't acceptable and if necessary locks the thread. I can't remember the last time I saw moderation on TVF and they have a much higher post volume than the forum I moderate.

It's tough, I agree about moderation visibility being an issue, there does seem to be a disconnect. I notice many of the people posting the crap are seemingly oblivious to criticism though, they just carry on regardless, so I'm not sure having a moderator tell the to shut up would help or not. I suppose those few are the ones remove posting privileges from, whether temporarily or on a permanent basis.

Jake wrote:It's tough, I agree about moderation visibility being an issue, there does seem to be a disconnect. I notice many of the people posting the crap are seemingly oblivious to criticism though, they just carry on regardless, so I'm not sure having a moderator tell the to shut up would help or not. I suppose those few are the ones remove posting privileges from, whether temporarily or on a permanent basis.

Exactly. Warn (informally and in public) first, warn again more sternly and if they are still oblivious to criticism - or indeed hostile to the sheer concept that it isn't their personal forum - prevent them from posting for a week.

m-in-m wrote:We have generic threads on the board - dealing with day to day postings but we people also create seperate threads to deal with special events. The generic threads on TVF make it almost impossible to find information that has been previously posted. The threads end up so long you can't find information that you know has been posted.

I remember TVF from before the generic threads and we had the opposite problem - threads being created for the most minor of incidents (like "No subtitles tag on Neighbours ident") which would just have one post in them, and end up pushing all the interesting threads onto page 4. The problem as I see it is that without guidance from the management, we've ended up going too far the other way, especially as now where newer members will have a go at anyone who creates a new thread which could conceivable be put in one of the generic megathreads.

Case in point is the "New Broadcasting House, Salford Quays and every other new BBC building, tv show, studio or set thread", which half of it's nothing to do with the title, and the rest is copied into the BBC One / BBC News Channel / BBC World / BBC Breakfast threads, so nobody knows where the posts or their replies are. When the new renders for the studios came out, would it really have been that bad for them to have been posted in their own new thread?

As to moderation over there, I still remember the days where just posting a picture of a train would instantly get the thread locked and bans issued...

dosxuk wrote:Case in point is the "New Broadcasting House, Salford Quays and every other new BBC building, tv show, studio or set thread", which half of it's nothing to do with the title, and the rest is copied into the BBC One / BBC News Channel / BBC World / BBC Breakfast threads, so nobody knows where the posts or their replies are. When the new renders for the studios came out, would it really have been that bad for them to have been posted in their own new thread?

Excellent example, and one I wouldn't have thought of. I generally read all of the posts in that thread, so I didn't have a problem with the new set renders being buried in it. In fact it didn't even occur to me that they warranted their own thread. So I was guilty there of something I complain about all the time.

I also posted in this thread a couple of weeks ago to moan about a lack of replies I got to a post I'd made in the BBC News channel thread. I then rather hypocritically watched all of those nice clips itsrobert posted there a few days ago and didn't bother replying myself. I probably didn't have the time but maybe if they'd been in their own thread, a conversation would have developed that I felt compelled to reply to. In fact I'd say there would have been no problem starting a new thread for those clips.

By no means am I saying that the moderation doesn't need any changes, but a more proactive approach by those of us who would like to see TVF back to what it used to be wouldn't do any harm. The mods don't actually seem to object to people starting new threads, and the annoying newbies who complain can simply be ignored. Any of us could have copied those Broadcasting House renders into a new thread (giving credit to whoever posted them first) but none of us did.

The fake newsroom thread I started got a bit of discussion going. It was about a specific aspect of news presentation, and it went off on tangents with lots of screencaps posted. The discussion rightly withered away and died after a few days rather than continuing ad nauseum for 300 pages. This is another nice tightly-focused thread. So it is still possible.

Continuing with generic threads but the moderators transferring off posts to a new thread whenever something decent is discussed in over 10 posts would be the best bet, but would be time consuming to administer.

Those old BBC News clips were interesting but they soon got burried by no doubt lots of in-jokes about Tim Willcox doing a double shift.

On a similar note, transferring all BBC World chat into seperate threads away from domestic news would be my suggestion. I do take a passing interest in say an unusual presenter on the BBC News at Ten, but it's quite often in the middle of dozens of posts about a presenter that nobody has heard of presenting a show on BBC World that nobody has heard of.

I'm not the most active poster, lurking generally satisfies my geeky pres side. That said, I do agree the site is pretty hard to navigate these days and the bloated threads are really hard to follow. Almost want to give up visiting.

An example from earlier this week: It was reported on the BBC News website that ITV had f-ed up again during the football. This time it was a cutaway to ITV News during extra time of the Bayern Munich vs Real Madrid game on Wed night.

"Odd", I thought. "Why didn't I read about this on TVF, given it's a geeky pres mistake." In the old days, that would've got a new thread, a few replies, inevitable requests for caps and a link to video.

Went back to the site, and yes, the info was there. But it was buried in 'The Sport Thread' which carries the sub-heading "The slow demise of BBC Sport ..."!? The incident got a fleeting mention, then the thread went back to speculation about presenters and on-screen personalities.

You know something's gone wrong when a mainstream news website is giving more detail on pres mistakes than a forum dedicated to the subject.

To be fair the incident did only happen in the south east region and it wasn't like a goal was missed like the last couple of times.

Yes the thread subtitle is that because the user who started the thread ("bbcsport") seems to have a grudge against BBC Sport and any post in that thread seems to contain a bash at them for losing more sporting rights, even though Sport is one of the last things the BBC would want to spend money on securing rights for. After all it's not like another network can't pick it up, but they certainly can't create the same standard in other categories like the BBC does.

Grudges against certain things are another thing that irritates me on the forum. These things are quite sparse, but the few people that bare these grudges are quite annoying. There is, as prior mentioned, bbcsport and his idea that BBC Sport is slowly being destroyed as they lose rights. Also, there's that person who often complains about how 'STV don't care about the North', because they didn't have a new set when the south did. And then, there were the people who, five minutes after BBC Breakfast had started in Salford for the first time, were going 'Feels like a local news programme now'.

eoin wrote:By no means am I saying that the moderation doesn't need any changes, but a more proactive approach by those of us who would like to see TVF back to what it used to be wouldn't do any harm. The mods don't actually seem to object to people starting new threads, and the annoying newbies who complain can simply be ignored.

It's swimming against the tide though that's the issue. That and the fact that the level of moronity is of the sort that simply does not listen. DanielK's endless mocks a case in point.

Maybe I should launch a campaign to have me elected as all new overlord mod on tvf. I'd be like Rick Santorum with Phil as my Michele Bachmann.

Despite them all AFAIK being members here, the mods silence in this thread is deafening.