If you’ve been to the official forums recently you’ve no doubt noticed the fallout regarding T0ggle and his guides. There was the usual threadspamming and mass downvoting from multiple accounts by several parties, all of which led to a pretty interesting thread on forum moderation. A lot of LoL’s moderation is done by community upvoting and downvoting. Too many downvotes and threads get locked. I’ve posted my take on the situation below.
The biggest reason I don’t spend more time posting in these forums is that the community moderation system seems to heavily reinforce mob mentality. As many others here have mentioned, upvotes and downvotes are often made carelessly or targeted at threads for disagreement rather than an actual rating of the content.
I hate to bring it up, but the queue dodge penalty was a prime example. Almost all of the discussion around that was severe polarization on both sides of the issue and a back and forth of upvotes and downvotes.
That said, most of the locked threads I read deserve it. My concern is that the system too easily discards minority opinion simply because it is unpopular. I’ve read enough decent locked threads to know that reasonable discussion gets downvoted because users don’t agree. That’s not a “forum” at all.
I would also love to see a more robust set of user features – PMs, a small profile, etc. That would give players the option to start/continue discussion between a more focused set of users than the public option allows.
So what do you think? Is community moderation working? Do we need dedicated admins or would that just be the same problem on a smaller scale?
