Board Thread:Support Requests - Community Management/@comment-24040319-20140907080203/@comment-1267828-20140918153636

I remember discussing this point with a few people here and this is the information I was told.

In the event a user comes to staff stating: "I was banned and this person is abusing their power because they're terrible admins!", staff has two option

1. Take that, on faith, the user in question is A ) Correct, B ) Not blowing their situation entirely out of proportion, C ) the admin in question is entirely evil

2. Assume that both sides have a story to this and that no side is completely 'right'.

This does tie into a staffing and a monetary issue of paying new staff members whose job is to do nothing but investigate claims, but boils down to, in essence, investigation. This is where things can get insanely difficult to prove. You can give 10 human beings the exact same question and get 10 entirely different answers because every individuals response and reaction is entirely based on their own personality and perception, resulting in people sometimes breaking rules they were unaware were rules because they misunderstood even though it was very clearly written, or admins enforcing rules based on their own interpretation resulting in users becoming irate as they don't see the issue (this isn't necessarily a negative as the Supreme Federal Court does this with the US Constitution).

The rest here is my interpretation but, as a result, involvement in local disputes runs into a myriad of problems including, but not limited to, staff now enforcing either a new set of rules or enforcing them based on their interpretation of the rules created for that community, staff/admin disputes where admins feel less empowered and thus unnecessary, anarchic communities due to aggrivated admins no longer continuing their position, and staff now needed to investigate every individual claim. Additionally, this also runs the problem of verbal -> text communication. While you can hear what you're saying in your head as you type, all a person can see is the words and interpret them without tone or voice, making comments that were initially harmless seem almost unbearably insulting. The problem then comes up figu tore out what the intent behind such a message was. As well, some bans happen over chats, pages, message walls, and so forth, and determining what happened with limited visual evidence beyond "He said/she said" and history buttons and blocks with little information becomes incredibly difficult. This is only made worse when you consider what some people in a communiy I belonged to on Team Fortress 2 called "Revenging", essentially when a user or group of users use their collective voice to create overexaggerated or falsified claims to get revenge against an admin for whatever it is they did, trying to appeal to the highest authority first and bypassing everything below it. This isn't the same as a legit claim of admin power abuse, but rather falls into a situation where staff would have to determine whether they are indeed being lied to, mislead (as in its a legit claim but is unintentionally exaggerated), or being told the truth.

The most important aspect, in my opinion, is that if you take control of the community, enforcing rules every which way, then the local admins of said community will likely begin to interpret themselves as far less important, leaving the community or not wanting to fulfill a job they could be ousted from almost immediately due to a single user complaint much the way an American retail job works, where one single, even unjustified, complaint can result in serious consequences. This makes every community not only have to follow the exact same style of rules and behave the same way, but it makes them far more formal, less room for informality and closeness in varying degrees. I'm not saying, in any way, that CC is super formal and cannot be approached, it has a great and thriving community all its own, but this style of community may not work for the Borderlands community, or the Spongebob community, or the Creepypasta community, and would likely cause those communities to fold once they felt undercut or controlled by staff. With the community likely go the admins, leaving the community possibly abandoned, or free game for vandalism for anyone due to lack of overseer's, with only a few believers of the wiki trying vainly to use their minimal user powers to stave off vandals.

Now this isn't true 100% of the time, but I do feel it would be a greater delve into consequences of staff taking control of every dispute.