nope

Mods, clear PE's mute list and then ban him

Pls no

if you agree with me please +1 the person who posts after me

Please

Whore

KC killin it

I will eat you

Banned players cannot use forum as well?

I didn't know I was on bo's profile. Took me a few years but I finally got there.

And as for bo himself, I honestly don't think we shared a thread before, but the fact that krellin hates him makes me love him

^^gotta agree with that one. Krellin is the only person I ever muted. We'll worth the effort.

Is there any reason why people the mods want to get in contact with don't get a PM saying something along the lines of "the mods are trying to contact you. Please check your email by (a date). Please do not respond by PM". Would that not save everyone involved a lot of time and effort?

Good question.

I don't blame the mods if they don't want to take a supposedly unnecessary step to contact you. In general they do not use PM for mod business and I think it should stay like that. Obviously this was a minor inconvenience to the player but it is fairly clear that email accounts attached to any other account, be it webdip or another site, should be read regularly. I think we found a case that shouldn't happen so often. It isn't like the mods did anything wrong and I don't think we should expect them to go beyond the set guidelines.

Of course I see the usefulness of it and I would support it too. Really, no one is at fault here.

I do blame the mods for not PMing people they are in the process of banning. As an extra demand on time it would literally take 20 seconds or so. Banning, for probably quite a lot of our members, is a pretty significant event and may well lead to valued players leaving in a huff. Adding a tiny fraction of time to the investigation process (that will likely save time in the long run) to avoid this seems a no brainer.

I'm not saying that the mods on the whole don't do a damned good job, because they do, but there are a few mod habits that are a little baffling.

I have Webdiplomacy up on my comupter 24/7 and i only take breaks from it to sleep and eat. sometimes there's overlap with those two even. I will be 100x more likely to see a PM, but I still need to check my email more often

Fair enough, and makes sense to me.

Mods, the people are complaining again. Make changes so you won't have to deal with angry mobs.

Grab your torches and pitchforks!

@Octavious "Would that not save everyone involved a lot of time and effort?"

There are many reasons not to. First off, it's more than 20 seconds, and it would be for a ton of cases. The overall time investment is quite large. Second, people are asked to have their email up-to-date for a reason. Basically everything we do as mods is in the email so that we can be held accountable for what we do.
Third, sending out PMs as mod business opens that channel for receiving too. But it's a bad channel. We're volunteers and we still come on the site a lot for playing a game (well, at least some of us do anyway *cough cough*). Getting PMs on site about cases is a bitch and tough to pass on to other mods. If I log in to put in my orders for a GB I'm in, I'm not on duty. PMs are a way to get in touch with TMOW the fellow player. If you want to get in touch with TMOW the mod, use the mail.

However, if you were to ask:
'Is there any reason why people make threads about every banned user the minute it happens. Would it not be better to just wait a while to see if the ban appeal is going to be granted and/or contact the mods if you really want to know? Would that not save everyone involved a lot of time and effort?'

Then I would answer yes. Yes, it would. ;-)

I'm not sure this thread did anything to get me unbanned. I responded to the emails and cleared it up. This just made me cry

@ TheMoW

How does it take so much time?

I'm picturing you settling down to an evening of high level modding. You've pulled up a cheating accusation email from an earnest member, and have started your investigation. With glass of port in hand, and pipe newly lit, you chuckle at the inept press and poor grammar of the potential cheat. Suddenly you straighten in surprise, startling the standard issue mod masseuse paid for by the latest round of donations. This chap may actually be a genuine cheat! You click on his username and copy/paste the standard alert message to his PM, and send an email demanding an explanation, before sending an all mod alert to keep calm and polish the banhammer!

In what way is that unrealistic?

It is realistic because they need at least one hand for mastur... never mind.

"In what way is that unrealistic?"

Most of us binge on cases when we get 2 or 3 minutes free here and there. I personally investigate around 100 people in 15 minutes, and open about 20-40 cases in that time frame. If I had send pm's to all those people I would have 2 problems, it would about double my investigation time, and the bottom pm's would be off my screen. The other problem is retaliatory abuse against the mod handling the case. We've seen many cases in the past where a member who gets banned or docked points will consistently harass the moderator in question for months. That type of thing leads to mods quitting, which is why nothing mod related goes through a mod's actual account.

Now I personally have sent pm's in the past, about 3 years ago to all members who didn't answer me. I probably did this for about 100 members, and I got under 5 answers. People who don't check email almost never answer a follow up pm. There are rare exceptions like this where people check the site more often then email. And in situations like this the member notices pretty quickly and we get the matter resolved asap.

To be perfectly blunt, I'm more interested in saving moderator time, improving how quickly we get rid of cheaters to reduce their impact on all members, keeping the team accountable by having all parts of an investigation in 1 place and protecting moderators then I am in worrying about people flagged by the system for significant suspicion of cheating.

Octavious, can´t you understand there is no Mod account on the game, so any PM would have to be sent from a specific mod and the answer would need to be read by this specific mod and if he need to share the info with other mods he would need to copy to an email, copy the original PM,etc, etc?
The email is used by all mods, so any of them could send the message, read the answer, deal with the matter, look old cases.
Have you ever moderated a game or a site?

By the way, I have never been and never wanted to be a mod here exactly because I know how hard and time comsuming is the task.

It's unrealistic because I've given up smoking pipe a long time ago.
Other than that, yeah.

The time investment is the least important of the reasons really. But to answer you, modding is quite time intensive as it is. Not only because of checklists, but also due to sheer volume. Adding anothing thing on the checklist isnt attractive, especially if it's the suspected players neglect that puts it on the list. Besides, most of the 'no reply' band are legit cheaters that stopped replying. Every once in a while there is a false positive, can't avoid that. So we ask people to keep their mails updated for a reason.

Anyway, enough about modding. More about diplomacy.

@rdrivera

You have missed my point entirely. The PM would not be used to have a conversation with the member under investigation. Merely to alert them, via a route that is obvious, that an email exists and must be dealt with. There would be no PM reply, nor any need to copy or paste anything to other mods. The only change would be that members would be much more likely to discover they are in danger of being banned before they are banned.

@ jmo

Your average cheating investigation lasts less than 10 seconds? What does that actually involve?