I'm sure the game is good, but (not to say it's bad, just haven't had the time yet) the only part I've browsed for a significant period of time so far is the code of conduct, which I think is absolutely amazing and helped form a lot of my thinking around online communities: https://www.improbableisland.com/coc.php
Edit: HN user drewzero1 also linked a long Mastodon thread written by the admin, https://mstdn.social/@ifixcoinops/109354147264054179, which is equally critical reading. I cannot recommend both highly enough.
A few years ago the admin Dan ("Caveman Joe") wrote a massive thread [1] about what he's learned about online communities, moderation, and dealing with users in general (both good-faith and bad-faith varieties). I thought it was worth a read for anyone thinking about creating or moderating any online community. It felt kind of like a peek behind the scenes of that code of conduct.
There were some hard-earned pearls of wisdom there, and I'll have to read through it again when I have some time.
I'd rather my CoC not try to replace a mental health advocate or psychologist.
'Appendix A' is particularly egregious.
I understand the dark patterns of psychology that an administrator should be on the look-out for; it's another thing to task the player-base with the witch hunt through explanation.
P.S. I think it's noble that you read the CoC before product usage, and I wish more people -- including myself at time -- would do that.
The CoC explicitly tells you to go see a mental health advocate or psychologist instead of taking it out on the game.
That aside, the general population absolutely must be educated on these behaviors. The admins can't be everywhere at once, and the amount of surveillance to replace players' eyes and ears would have to be enormous and the very definition of a nanny state.
From running my own community for a while, the most important part is the community itself, not the rules or moderators or whatever; the best communities are self-policing, and give an atmosphere where people don't want to be trolls/dicks/etc. Content moderation does not scale.
Id go further and say the CoC has 0 impact. The first rule by itself is absurdly long. No one is reading that. Its not shaping anything. It’s for the writer.
Well, the writer is the community manager, so at the minimum they are reading the CoC. That in itself shapes their moderation, which shapes the community.
However, in my experience core community members will read things like this CoC, at least partially. They also be fairly involved with discussions about it, which go a long way to shape a community.
> No one is reading that. Its not shaping anything.
That may well be the case.
But in any online community, eventually some people are going to get banned. And many people - even those who aren't getting banned - prefer it if the banning is conducted according so some sort of written document, even if they've never read that document in detail themselves.
Other online communities with far more lightweight rules are also available, for people who prefer that :)
Improbable island used to have more or less only one rule, outside of "underage shit will get you reported to your ISP", and that was "don't be a dick".
It worked well, on the surface, but as the CoC says, there were a lot of issues that cropped up that went mostly unnoticed, even as they were impacting a surprising number of players.
I prefer the new CoC. Lists of rules are never something that someone will regularly reference. You'll read through it once, get an understanding of the ground rules and community expectations, and then fit into the community and get up to speed by experience. Sometimes, people make mistakes, and someone can say "hey, maybe don't do that, Code of Conduct has a bit about that", and that someone can go "ah crud, thanks".
(Un)Just In Time Code of Conducting to be even more hilariously capricious: your "ban user" button has a "reason" field that then appends that "reason" to your Code of Conduct.
In the 1000-active-user forum I managed, the small subset of ppl who feel ownership of the community (maybe 20 in my case) ABSOLUTELY read the CoC. it's a small minority, but those who read it are often prominent and engaged ppl, and they lean on it to make decisions and advocate for actions under their spheres of influence. Not everyone needs to read something in order for it to be impactful
Wow, I'm the opposite. I probably sunk triple-digit hours into this game, and never bothered to interact with another soul on it. The code of conduct is great now that I'm reading it.
As you have played it, does it have player owned places/shrines which can be built via some drag drop interface? I couldn't find any more info on it except what's there on the About page.
It has player-owned places that are done with a fairly clunky interface, but the focus is far more on the writing that you put into your place. It's a callback to the MUDs of old, to my understanding.
I think the record for a group-written player-made place was something on the order of tens of thousands of words.
Poke your head into Banter sometime! I'm almost the exact opposite, having barely touched the mechanical side of the game in ages, and I always like to say hi to other players. Especially if they've been around and love the setting!
A dissertation as CoC. Great. Impossible to read and then keep in your head. In their desperate attempt to be as inclusive as possible, they actually created a framework under which everyone will eventually become guilty of something.
> Support of Gamergate, racial supremacist groups, the redpill/incel movement, or any other hate group - including, and especially, hate groups that have gained political power such as the Donald Trump administration - is a direct challenge to the lives and well-being of other players and will result in a permanent ban.
I don't know man, I don't care about your TDS, this is just eyeroll-worthy. Pure political soapboxing.
You say it's hyperbole, but there's communities (like kiwi farms) who actively doxx people with the intent to cause harm. They are responsible for the suicide of at least three of their targets: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kiwi_Farms
No tolerance for intolerance. Your last sentence implies you've never been at risk or a target yourself.
The CoC doesn't ban supporters of specific political agenda or party line but it is a banned topic. Anyone who's been on the internet in the past few years knows how passionate these supporters can get. That's a magnet for heated political discussion that very quickly gets uncomfortable for everyone else. It's impossible to be inclusive to certain minority groups while allowing promotion of politics directly against them.
> Like or hate Bush/Clinton/Obama, nobody was kicking you out of a community because of your political affiliation. I miss the inclusiveness of the 90s.
The 1990s weren't more inclusive, quite the opposite. But the groups you are talking about just all at least tried to work with the community. They actively sought out common ground and were willing to compromise. Today's populists, e.g. Trump, say the aforementioned community is not the real community, they are all crooks, or pests, and in fact only the populists and their followers are the real community and everybody else is the enemy and needs to be locked up, denied citizenship, or be exterminated. There can't be compromise. It is a big part of their sales pitch.
Witness how so called moderate Republicans are treated -- you know, the ones who seek to work within the community and are willing to compromise -- they call them RINO "Republican In Name Only", i.e. they are not _real_ Republicans. There are more examples you are probably aware of. I, for one, can see how this makes it really hard for all involved to find some common ground to work together, don't you?
I mean, it's not particularly surprising that it's a lot easier to manage a community if you just find every political split point, pick a side and then remove the people on the other side.
I think we used to call that sort of thing "gatekeeping"?
Of all the things you could label as gatekeeping, I don't feel that excluding hate groups is one of them. We should never be tolerant of the intolerant, otherwise intolerance wins.
The code of conduct immediately made me realize that this place will be cliquey and run by rules lawyers who take delight in making a billion subcategories for the sake of empowering themselves to ban. I've never seen an instance where this was not the case.
Anything that needs to write paragraph after paragraph for what could be summarized in 4 to 8 rules, especially with weird, no doubt completely irrelevant to the game itself "DRUMPF GAMERGATE VACCINE" clauses on top of that, is not something anybody who values their time should involve themselves in.
Or it's a community that's successfully kept itself alive for a very long time and "simple" rules get interpreted wildly differently so over time you're naturally going to build up at lot of explicit rules around edge cases.
The game used to have one rule: "Don't be a dick."
The game used to pride itself on having banned fewer players than the number of players who met and got married in real life.
Eventually the community realized that wasn't a good thing. If you've banned almost nobody, it doesn't mean that everyone in your community is being nice and wonderful and not harming anyone else, it means that you've only been told about the most egregious and obvious cases.
It means a dozen different cliques can decide for themselves on how people "ought to" interact and play.
A big CoC doesn't mean everyone's a judgmental lawyer. Traffic codes in the US have thousand and thousands of words for different edge cases. But it doesn't mean everyone goes around with a camera and a lawyer in their backseat, people generally understand "hey don't speed and don't run red lights and don't drive drunk".
I'm quite convinced that the person who wrote that code of conduct is entirely happy with turning people who take issue with that rule off the game - see the linked Mastodon thread and it's linked thread giving the advice about any community management to "remove the people who don't like being there", and it would seem that in this case would include turning off people who are unable or unwilling to figure out the community norms without a detailed set of explicit rules that leave them plenty of room to push past the community norms by exploiting ambiguities or loopholes.
Would you be happier about it if they didn't try to explain how they operated? Because most places mods finds way of "working around" the rules for behaviours they don't like but that may not technically violate rules. There's slack and ambiguity in any wording.
> That's precisely the kind of thing that turns people off codes of conduct.
I don't know if you've ever moderated a large community, but if you do it by the letter of any law, people will endlessly probe for loopholes and argue over edge cases. I'd imagine the wording you quoted is there to head off such issues, not because the moderator loves vagueness for it's own sake.
Seconded. I was a moderator for a subreddit with 120k readers. If you want to see what the outer limits of your rules are, enforce them as written and the community will be more than happy to show you.
It's much better to be flexible and operate case by case within some common framework. The people who look would accuse you of subjective favoritism also do it when you enforce to the letter of the rule, so you're going to get flack for it either way.
That's another of the unwritten rules of moderation, I think: You WILL get flak. There is no scenario where you get no flak. Therefore, you must not treat not getting flak as an end goal, or you might as well just turn the moderation power over to your biggest assholes and cut out the stressful process of being the middleman for their asshole decisions.
The question for a moderator is, who is giving you the flak? If it's the sort of people you don't want in your community, whoever that may be for your community, then you seem to be on the right track.
A private message to the mods from an asshole pulling every psych trick out of the book to hurt you in that private message is not a sign of failure; it is a sign of success. It can take a bit of emotional adjustment to feel that as a success and not a failure, but it's doable. The more vicious they are in that post the more they are proving you didn't want the there anyhow.
> The people who look would accuse you of subjective favoritism also do it when you enforce to the letter of the rule, so you're going to get flack for it either way.
No matter how precise the rule, it's possible for someone to make the baseless accusation that you're deliberately singling them out to apply the rule to them, while letting the behavior of others slide.
I don't see that post as a convincing argument for codes of conduct. Indeed it's a pretty good argument for avoiding codes of conduct, e.g. the below:
> That’s why I mostly now make quasirules like “don’t be a dick” or “keep your vitriol to your own blog“. The general expectation is still clear, and it’s obvious that I reserve the right to judge individual cases — which, in the case of a small community, is going to happen anyway. Let’s face it: small communities are monarchies, not democracies.
> I do have another reason for this, which is based on another observation I’ve made of small communities. I’ve joined a few where I didn’t bother reading the rules, made some conversation, never bothered anyone, and then later discovered that I’d pretty clearly violated a rule. But no one ever pointed it out, and perhaps no one even noticed, because I wasn’t being a dick.
> So I concluded that, for a smaller community, the people who need the rules are likely to be people who you don’t want around in the first place. And “don’t be a dick” covers that just as well.
> The person didn’t break any of the rules — how dare you ban them?
Very simple: articulate new rules which cover the behavior, and publish them.
Alert the user that their former behavior is now against the rules.
Have a meta-rule that anyone who triggers the above workflow more than twice will be banned.
There is also this alternative: say that there are hidden rules that are completely unrelated to the written rules, even in "spirit". You can be removed from the community for any reason, without any explanation, by the powers that be, due to any behavior they find displeasing.
Very simple: articulate new rules which cover the behavior, and publish them.
You essentially argue for common law: an enormous corpus of precedents that is impossible to navigate without dedicated lawyers, is a pain to arbiter and still does not preclude injustice.
To continue the comparison, some of common law's shortcomings can be overcome with an entity like the UK's law commission, eg, rewriting statute (or the code of conduct) to incorporate changes based on new precedent. Which does appear to somewhat be what has happened.
Even if so the arguments can get settled, any agreed upon changes made, and the discussion archived. Next time someone runs into it, you have that to point to.
Why would you possibly want a contract of anything enforced by the spirit instead of the letter? The whole point of a contract is to be explicit, to spell things out. If you're going to enforce social norms according to their spirit (and you should!), writing out a pseudolegal code is a waste of everyone's time (and, in my experience, actively harmful to the social health of your community).
I don’t know if you’re actually looking for an answer, but after having managed a small 1,000 person community I think the “spirt of the law” makes a lot of sense. You’ll get a few community members that are great, but then they want to be helpful and will start trying to micromanage other community members. They’ll see a rule like “Please keep discussions on topic for the channel”. And then if somebody asks a question about C++ in the programming channel (instead of the C++ channel) the “helpful” member will tell the person that they’re posting their question in the wrong channel.
As the manager/moderator of a community, I appreciate that this person is just trying to help. However, having somebody disregard your question and then tell you you’re doing stuff wrong can be a major turnoff to newcomers. In this specific case, it’s against the spirit of the rules because it’s a one off scenario. Now, this rule is helpful for the members that like to post memes everywhere, or talk about school or politics or religion in random channels. For these repeat offenders, I can point to the rule and politely ask them to move the discussions to a more appropriate channel. As with all laws in even real life, the rules are great for the black and white areas, but the majority of situations are gray. And it’s in those gray situations where we can operate within the spirit of the rules rather than the letter of the law.
Edit: also, to respond to your last statement. The code of conduct is there so that moderators have something to reference to repeat offenders. It’s much easier to tell somebody they’re banned because they repeatedly broke a specific rule rather than ban somebody because of personal distaste. I don’t see how having a code of conduct could ever be harmful to a community? How would that harm a community in any way?
> The code of conduct is there so that moderators have something to reference to repeat offenders. It’s much easier to tell somebody they’re banned because they repeatedly broke a specific rule rather than ban somebody because of personal distaste. I don’t see how having a code of conduct could ever be harmful to a community? How would that harm a community in any way?
It harms the community precisely because it's easier. A moderator will ban someone they don't like, blame it on something ambiguous they twist into a code of conduct violation, other people will point out that there's a double standard because they didn't ban someone else who broke the same rule much more clearly, pretty soon allegations of discrimination are flying.... And you also get the opposite problem where a moderator won't ban someone who's doing a lot of harm to the community because "well, they technically haven't broken the rules yet...".
Actually applying human judgement and taking responsibility for it is psychologically harder, but it's vital for moderation that's actually going to work and be respected, IME. I think we're pretty much on the same page about what moderators should actually do with what you said about "grey situations" and "spirit of the rules". But if you pretend you're following a clear written code when you're actually expecting to have a lot of ambiguity and exercise personal judgement, you're creating a mismatch of expectations that causes problems (like your example of community members micromanaging each other). Better, IME to make it clear that while you may have some agreed guidelines, moderation isn't going to be according to a legal code.
> Better, IME to make it clear that while you may have some agreed guidelines, moderation isn't going to be according to a legal code.
Yes. Some would say, it’s almost like using the spirit of the rules ;)
In all seriousness, your theoretical example of why code of conduct can be harmful to a community has nothing to do with the code of conduct. It sounds like it’s just an unhealthy community with unhealthy moderators. Remove the code of conduct and the same scenario would play out. The only difference would be members crying out about how one member was banned for such a reason and another member who did the same thing wasn’t banned.
And lastly, in my community at least, it doesn’t come down to personal judgment. Unless a user is spamming or spewing racial slurs, the moderators meet and discuss whether or not the behavior of the user is ban-worthy, temp ban-worthy, or inconsequential (in the former case, the moderator who notices such abrasive action can take immediate action). This way we can at least remove some level of bias by ensuring that there’s consensus.
Who knows, my community might just be small enough and inactive enough that I haven’t run into the flaws of the code of conduct. This is all off topic anyways though, so I’ll leave it at that.
> Some would say, it’s almost like using the spirit of the rules ;)
Well, yes, but if your "rules" are intended to be applied more as sort of guidelines, then better to call them that and have everyone be on the same page.
> In all seriousness, your theoretical example of why code of conduct can be harmful to a community has nothing to do with the code of conduct. It sounds like it’s just an unhealthy community with unhealthy moderators. Remove the code of conduct and the same scenario would play out.
It's not a theoretical example, it's a real experience from a community I was part of, and the breakdown happened immediately after the code was introduced. Bad moderators will be bad with or without a code and good moderators will be good with or without a code, but in reality most moderators are somewhere in the middle, and these details can make a difference on the margin. Just like even though locks don't stop professional thieves, locking your door makes a big difference as most theft is opportunistic.
> Unless a user is spamming or spewing racial slurs, the moderators meet and discuss whether or not the behavior of the user is ban-worthy, temp ban-worthy, or inconsequential (in the former case, the moderator who notices such abrasive action can take immediate action). This way we can at least remove some level of bias by ensuring that there’s consensus.
That kind of process sounds like a good thing. IME thinking through and tuning the procedures of how you moderate is a lot more productive than spending time codifying the "what" that you think you're moderating.
Because the spirit is always in conflict with itself. Humans cannot be reasoned with.
This is not even anywhere near settled either, thats why various legal experts apply multiple different interpretations of the law, which is the ultimate form of this argument.
And no, just because you say it is so, does not make it so.
To see if I could create a thoroughly well-debugged, robust set of rules that accurately distinguishes unwanted behavior, yet minimizes the amount of subjectivity.
Minimizing subjectivity, is subjective. English is lossy and interpretation is subjective. There is always going to be a spirit vs word issue, in any contract.
> Brits, please don't use the word "fag" in reference to cigarettes (or at all).
This highlights (in a small way) one of the issues with codes of conduct in an international context. A lot of things are culturally, linguistically or generationally specific.
So a code of conduct, unless it is very loose, has to pick a dominant culture that sets the rules.
The rule he wanted was, "Don't use the word 'fag', even if you're British and obviously referring to nothing but a cigarette".
The rule he wrote literally does not prohibit a non-Brit from using 'fag'; it addresses itself to Brits and thus doesn't apply to anyone else. That is left to the "spirit", presumably.
If I see a rule like "pregnant mothers, don't smoke weed", I can ignore it, since I'm not a woman.
LOL whoever wrote that CoC has a worse case of snowflakism than the local college reading club and a Trump rally combined, yet has the audacity to tell others to go see a therapist? That's bold.
The game's wiki is amazing! It cleverly manages to avoid excessive spoilers while staying (mostly) useful by mandating that 20% of all content must be lies!
thats.... actually incredible?
I think more game wikis should strive to something like that. Whole genres of games have been irrevocably changed by omniscience.
This is cool. I really enjoyed choose-your-own-adventure books when I was a kid a long time ago, part of the fun being that as you were flipping to the page you were supposed to go to, you'd come across wild sections of text you hadn't quite visited, and it became a game to see if you could navigate all possible paths of the book. The really clever ones would have tantalizing pages that were unreachable paths just to frustrate you, or would trap you in infinite loops.
A while back, I had multiple people respond to my support request, with impeccable results, no back and fourth responding to automated messages. Which easily puts the game well above the bar set by many others.
KoL really scratched an itch for me for many years. It's too much of a time sink for me these days (I've replaced it with other time sinks...), but the studios newer single player games are quite fun with the same charm!
Was this maybe meant to be a link to the "What even is this website, please help me" in the bottom right? (Which it doesn't seem to be possible to hyperlink to).. as it is this just throws you into.. that mess.
It's kind of got MUD energy to it from my understanding, but it's purely browser-based. There's a whole game to it, but the draw for me is the roleplay and the player-built places.
There are rooms but without directions, because they can be arbitrarily connected to each other by doors! Fun fact, rooms USED to connect only directionally because at the time I think they were implemented as linked lists. But now, it's arbitrary and you can do hidden passageways and shortcuts and cool little things like that.
It talks about building your own shrine as a player owned place using some drag drop interface but I can not find any more info on that. Not in the wiki or image search on Google.
The wiki is very, very out of date and it's something that's undergoing an overhaul (when Dan can get time to do so).
Player-owned places are fairly straightforward to learn once you're in there, but the drag-and-drop is a reference to the programming aspects of a place. They're mostly conditional things, like being able to display different descriptions for different times of day... but they go all the way up to being able to set up logic chains sufficient to set variables based on past events, displaying different things depending on what room a player came into a given room from... there's a lot of depth to it that I've never mucked with.
From what I can tell 'shrine' is being used metaphorically to describe a player 'Place', and the drag-drop part might be a Place Program? There's not a lot of documentation without jumping in.
I haven't played but I've read way too much about it since following Dan on Masto/Fediverse. Someday if I ever have time and bandwidth again I've really got to get on there.
Some basic searching says this is based on an even older game called Legend of the Green Dragon. Looks kinda cool honestly. Anyone know if the writing is okay?
The writing reads like tolerable fanfiction, so it's not stellar, but cringe moments and needless cussing are still present to some degree.
As someone who used to write room descriptions on MUDs, I can say I I remarkably difficult to strike a balance between immersive writing and functional prose that English speaking persons of different comprehension levels can engage with. We also had to be mindful of screen readers for sight-impared players, the idea being keep your descriptions informative and short without being boring.
I'm not a big fan of Impossible Islands writing, but they have my respect for it because it is quite the task to please an audience like that.
I'm heavily biased, having been an avid player of the game for ages. It's got a very distinct style, and I can definitely see how it's changed over the years, but I quite like it. The world that's been built in it is a delightfully quirky and fun one, but the writing also delves into some interesting territory both in darkness and in philosophy.
I'm also somewhat biased because one of the most well-fleshed out stories hits a nerve for me in how it confronts the horror of the loss of one's identity, enough that I can't comfortably read it. I say that in an absolutely positive way, much like a horror movie might be so unnerving that I can't bear to watch the whole thing.
It's generally light-hearted, with some dark humor, odd humor and silly humor, and I highly recommend giving it a go. Meet the community! Discover the setting,! Fight your own tongue, an ambulatory pair of pants, your past self, and a Panthzer (50% jungle panther, 50% Panzer tank, don't ask questions)!
Hundreds of thousands of words, and that's not counting the fantastic roleplay community and the places that they've built.
Some of which have programming.
Some of THOSE have created miniature games inside of those places, complete with events, character statistics, and a character creator. I've been on this site for ten years and never come close to that level of creative madness, and I will always deeply respect those loveable maniacs.
Edit: HN user drewzero1 also linked a long Mastodon thread written by the admin, https://mstdn.social/@ifixcoinops/109354147264054179, which is equally critical reading. I cannot recommend both highly enough.