Serious question about how a convention changed my moderation style

At the ModCon 2023 in Chicago, I watched a panel where a mod from a huge gaming forum showed how their team uses a shared doc to track repeat offenders. It made me realize I was handling every bad user case from scratch, wasting hours on research. Has anyone else tried a centralized tracking system, or do you just rely on memory like I did?

2 comments

2 Comments

walker.robert4d agoMost Upvoted

Wait, you used to just keep all that in your head? That sounds like a nightmare honestly. I did the same thing for years on a smaller forum I help out with, and I was always mixing up usernames or forgetting who did what. A shared doc sounds like a no-brainer now that you mention it. I'm definitely gonna steal that idea, because relying on memory alone is a good way to burn yourself out and miss patterns. Good on you for picking up that tip, man.

christopher9524d ago

Are we really gonna pretend a shared doc solves the problem though? Because now you've got three or four people adding notes in their own style, some guy writes "user x is a troublemaker" and another guy writes "user x seems fine" and you've got more confusion than you started with. Back in my day we just trusted the senior mod to remember who the chronic spammers were and we all listened to him. Feels like a doc just makes everyone think their opinion matters equally when some voices are more tuned in than others, doesn't it?