PROFIT'S DELETED POSTS FROM:

http://forums.achaea.com/discussion/9/new-forum-altered-rules/p1

POST 1:

In my experience, preventing discussion of problems and problematic individuals has never really served to solve those problems.

A better way to solve this issue would be to encourage your Gods to listen to players in game, or solicit opinions from involved parties, or just generally take into account player input (not saying everyone, or anyone specific is guilty of this).

When people feel like their issues are listened to, they rarely feel the need to 'rant' about those issues.

I will provide an example.

About a year ago, Tecton and another unnamed divine called myself and Silas to a meeting to discuss Shallam's direction and how to best approach it's future. After asking what we thought of the situation, the unnamed divine said, "Well, we have a lot of different ideas, but I'm not going to talk about them here!" and then proceeded to ignore every analysis and suggestion we'd prepared and made over the last half hour.

I can remember ranting about this situation, and I can remember Silas ranting about it. The rants didn't arise because of incompetence or a desire to hurt anyone, they arose because people asked us to prepare an analysis of a situation and propose solutions, then effectively informed us that our input would promptly be ignored.

POST 2:

[quoting Namino]I'm sure the Gods are likely going to be reasonable with how they respond to forum criticism, but I think the rule should be changed regardless; the game should not be encouraging blurring OOC/IC boundaries. I just can't see any good reason at all for having something that is, in principle, promoting lack of player-character separation. It's essentially just as ridiculous as, say, disfavouring someone in-game for sending you an email.[end quote]

Exactly.

This is a dangerous precedent to set and a slippery slope to commit yourself to.

POST 3:

[quote]That's going to do a lot more to hurt staff and player relations than help it, and you'll also lose the truest medium of feedback you have -- even if the feedback you receive isn't always positive, prior to this rule, it was honest.[end quote]

This. A thousand times this.

You should appreciate any feedback you get. Positive or negative, it all helps you guide the game in a more positive direction.

POST 4:

[quote]I'm glad to see -something- is being done to prevent the sort of extreme bitterness and negativity I'm used to reading.[end quote]

The thing is... if the negativity is that extreme and that prolific, it needs to be addressed and not covered up.

POST 5:

[quote]This is a form of addressing it. If I were a Divine and those rants were about me, I wouldn't become more motivated to fix things. I'd lose motivation and I'd probably quit.
Happens quite a bit in fact.[end quote]

I suspect differently but I suppose that time will prove one of us wrong. People are naturally resilient and though extreme instances of criticism might contribute to some degree to a volunteer quitting, I would wager that there are other, more major causes in the mix, as well.

POST 6:

[quote]You and your conspiracy theories.[end quote]

I have three (recently) former gods on AIM and Skype; none of them quit because people were being mean to them on the forums.

That's really as far as I'm willing to go on that subject.

POST 7:

[quote]@Sothantos: I basically agree with you except that people would complain at least as loudly if their posts were deleted or they were banned off forums. Hard to think of another OOC punishment.[end quote]

Instead of punishing people for publicly criticising, why not set up proper channels for them to constructively criticise?

It's easy to rant and depersonalize people on the forum, to go off the deep end and really lay into them because you can justify it by saying, "They probably won't even read it."

If a system was set up whereby you could be assured that your criticism reached the right ears, I'd be willing to bet that not only would the comments be much more pleasant and constructive, but you'd see a reduction in forum god-rants, as well.