Allow Players to add their own reactions to Announcements

[nathan1e]

but to say the minute we disagree with you that we're not being open minded enough to look at a suggestion is a tad ridiculous.

This in itself can also be seen as ridiculous. There have been plenty of times when a staff member has disagreed with me and I have never said this until now. The reason I'm saying it, as said earlier, is because every staff reply so far don't nearly seem to respond to the things that were said in a reply to the original thread as much as players. Most arguments that are being presented by staff members in this thread ignore what have been said by players thus far, and that gives off the impression that they do not care about the replies. I of course do not believe that this is the case, but that is at least the impression that is being given; talk about professionality...

 

[Pankakes]

scrolling through every announcement every day to make sure no one's posted anything inappropriate in the reactions (or spelled anything) is too much work for something with so little payoff.

I already asked a question about it but it went under the radar, so I'll post it again.

Players can already use external emojis and add any emojis to any message in other chats.

Does the staff check every single message that was posted in the server in order to find if someone hasn't reacted something inappropriate ?

I would say we're open minded to most suggestions, but looking at the evidence provided by (most notably Sunnya) other staff members and even a player or two, adding more work (and a lot more work at that) for 20 emojis seems a bit far fetched to ask us to do.

From my perspective, this means that many things that could be changed won't change, due to the fact that IF the staff team is being so overworked that simple reaction emojis would be so hard to do, other, much harder things aren't probably worth it either.

 

[Callie]

Does the staff check every single message that was posted in the server in order to find if someone hasn't reacted something inappropriate ?

We do our very best to do this like we do in-game, so I'll say yes to this.

due to the fact that IF the staff team is being so overworked that simple reaction emojis would be so hard to do, other, much harder things aren't probably worth it either.

Not that we can't do it, just that our time would be better spent in other areas doing what we do best and what makes the players most happy, which is good gameplay, events, on my end a roleplay storyline and having a good, appropriate server to come back to, not 20 emojis under an announcement that we would have to consistently moderate for the few people that would lose their manners if we were to allow it.

 

[Pankakes]

Does the staff check every single message that was posted in the server in order to find if someone hasn't reacted something inappropriate ?

We do our very best to do this like we do in-game, so I'll say yes to this.

I meant in the Discord server, if you check the messages posted 2 months ago in #general for example, in case someone reacted with inappropriate emojis.

what makes the players most happy, which is good gameplay

Well, a change in direction would be nice to "what makes the most players happy"...

Travel issue
Players asking to rever to old travel system. 5 players think it's amazing, most players (21) hate it, yet the feedback to it was Declined. Staff responded that they will look into some viable alternatives, but they didn't discuss it further with the community.

Polls
Players asking for polls, since they feel like the staff doesn't make decisions on behalf on what the community wants. No answer from staff since August until last Saturday, until a player asked if they forgot. Staff asnwered that they didn't forget, but don't yet know how to implement it. Again, not discussing it further with the community.

Both of these suggestions are more than welcome by the players, yet for some reason there seems to be an invisible wall in going further with these

having a good, appropriate server to come back to, not 20 emojis under an announcement that we would have to consistently moderate for the few people that would lose their manners if we were to allow it.

I'd rather come back to a server that "has a human face", rather than a sterile enviroment, but maybe that's just me.

 

[Ashh]

Unfortunately, sometimes it can be a fairly slow process in bringing cards up to the various department leadership teams because of the fact that they are busy and we are also busy, but I am actually currently looking for the best way to speed this up! We also want to take time to discuss it properly and also give the various leadership teams time to discuss it, and we want to take time to come up with good responses. Again, a thread or suggestion is never forgotten about and we will always respond with an official response, but it may take a fair amount of time. There is a lot that goes on behind the scenes, and this thread, as well as any threads, are very important to us.

Polls are something that we have been considering doing for a while. We have recently been discussing the best way to go about this and how it will work best, and as soon as we know how we are going to do this, we will begin sending out polls. In future, we will use polls to get opinions from the community on certain matters, and this will be our way of discussing things further with the community. We need to figure out the details and specifics and this may take some time.

We definitely recognise when things are well-liked by the community, but there are some things that we unfortunately cannot do due to a number of genuine reasons, which we are trying our best to communicate in our responses.

 

[Aviforma]

The reasons being provided here aren't very... reasonable. The two I've seen so far are that it's
A:
A burden on staff to moderate. If you moderate every message on the server and Discord, will it be that hard to do a 5 second check through the announcements channel to see if someone happened to put an inappropriate reaction? Furthermore, if this is such a big worry you can easily disable outside server reactions and only have native Discord ones. This would take no effort to moderate. Literally less than a minute per day. Saying it would be a large burden on the staff team is outright silly.

B:
It's unprofessional. As seen in this thread, we'd rather have this sort of community involvement than robotic professionalism. "Community Engagement" events aren't the answer to resolving this staff/player gap. Little things, like allowing us to add emotes to announcements, are.

 

[Chriss]

A:
A burden on staff to moderate. If you moderate every message on the server and Discord, will it be that hard to do a 5 second check through the announcements channel to see if someone happened to put an inappropriate reaction? Furthermore, if this is such a big worry you can easily disable outside server reactions and only have native Discord ones. This would take no effort to moderate. Literally less than a minute per day. Saying it would be a large burden on the staff team is outright silly.

Some staff members might not know how to moderate places if they haven’t been train for that or are outside of the moderation sub-department. Also, staff positions have due dates and they might want to work on those projects and get it done instead of watch for announcements and look through the reactions to make sure they are appropriate for the server.

 

[Aviforma]

Some staff members might not know how to moderate places if they haven’t been train for that or are outside of the moderation sub-department. Also, staff positions have due dates and they might want to work on those projects and get it done instead of watch for announcements and look through the reactions to make sure they are appropriate for the server.

It's a simple 5 second check. That should not interfere whatsoever with your due date. And I don't think training staff to moderate reactions would be that hard.

 

[Chriss]

People don’t apply for moderation for a reason, because moderating doesn’t suit them. In my opinion it kinda dumb to make people outside of the moderation sub-department to have to moderate somewhere. If you make the whole moderation team moderate reactions, why not just make them all discord moderators then.

 

[Cate]

"Community Engagement" events aren't the answer to resolving this staff/player gap.

Gonna step in on here. Keep in mind: these events are very new, started in September. Us inquisitors are working very hard to make these events as inclusive as possible and invite more staff to join us in these events. However, we cannot force them, and nor can we force non-staff to join as well. It is a choice whether someone wants to get involved or not.

Adding the ability to use own reaction emojis would do more harm than good. It would be directing staff's attention from their own responsibilities to moderate a new system of emojis. We're all human and have our own responsibilities in and out of staff. And incorporating this new system would only put a further issue (the one I stated above).

It's a simple 5 second check. That should not interfere whatsoever with your due date. And I don't think training staff to moderate reactions would be that hard.

It is not a simple 5 second check. As Sunnya mentioned earlier today, if we remove an emoji, who's to say the player isn't going to re-add it? It won't be as simple as you assume, It really won't.

 

[Pankakes]

It is not a simple 5 second check. As Sunnya mentioned earlier today, if we remove an emoji, who's to say the player isn't going to re-add it? It won't be as simple as you assume, It really won't.

If you remove an inappropriate message from a player in Discord, who's to say the player isn't going to edit his previous message to the same message that was deleted ?

 

[Salmandingo]

I'm not trying to pick sides here but I genuinely don't think it's that difficult to moderate a few reactions, especially that we as staff members moderate thousands of messages per day. If we do this, as @Aviforma mentioned:

if this is such a big worry you can easily disable outside server reactions and only have native Discord ones. This would take no effort to moderate.

I think there's negligible harm in letting players put native Discord reactions and there's several good benefits to allowing them to do it. It certainly can't be that difficult to take a glance at the announcements especially that we get tons of rapid reactions to them and by the 1-2 minute mark we'd have like 30+ players already reacted, so the 20 emoji's slots would certainly fill by then. All it takes from there is a quick glance and the announcement is good to go.

I do however see the professionalism side as well but I'm pretty sure we can find a compromise here and not completely shut down one side of the perspectives we have on this topic.

 

[Aviforma]

Gonna step in on here. Keep in mind: these events are very new, started in September. Us inquisitors are working very hard to make these events as inclusive as possible and invite more staff to join us in these events. However, we cannot force them, and nor can we force non-staff to join as well. It is a choice whether someone wants to get involved or not.

Adding the ability to use own reaction emojis would do more harm than good. It would be directing staff's attention from their own responsibilities to moderate a new system of emojis. We're all human and have our own responsibilities in and out of staff. And incorporating this new system would only put a further issue (the one I stated above).


It is not a simple 5 second check. As Sunnya mentioned earlier today, if we remove an emoji, who's to say the player isn't going to re-add it? It won't be as simple as you assume, It really won't.

The emoji slots will fill instantly. If a reaction is removed, the player *will not* be able to do it. It's barely even a responsibility, and it would take no time at all. To say it will is silly.

 

[Deniz]

Hey everyone, looks like this discussion is going in circles a bit, so I’m going to overrule the Poltergeist routine for this thread, and make the call on behalf of the CM and head staff department - before I reveal the decision, there’s a few points I want to mention:

It’s worth noting that adding reactions to messages in the announcements channels was enabled in the past, but due to continuous misuse of it, we disabled it. If we can't trust our entire community to use it properly, then we'll have to take the tools away, unfortunately. As much as I personally dislike the phrase “the few ruin it for the many”, in this case, I think it’s justified.

• This is e.g. why we disallowed typing and reading channels without having linked your Discord account. Players were abusing it, so we changed it.

Another thing I want to quickly mention is that I’m in a server that recently reached 100.000 members. That’s a lot of people, but since the day they reached 5000 members, adding reactions has been disabled in the majority of the channels, and now, it’s disabled in every single channel. It gets abused, is annoying to moderate, and gives up to no gain. Sunnya mentioned other Minecraft communities (that are way bigger than ours, even though our Discord has 6000 active users) doing the same too.

Something that seems to be forgotten is the differences in how many people read the messages sent in the announcements channels, and the rest of the channels. These announcement channels represent the entire server, because the messages sent there are always from staff, and never from players. We mention @Announcements and the other roles continuously there, and hundreds of people have those roles - and there’s still a large number of users that don't have the roles, that only check those channels. It would be a lot worse to have inappropriate emojis there, rather in a channel like #general.

At the moment, only staff are disagreeing with this thread. Maybe in this case, what the community wants should outweigh staff's opinions.

I think you’re misunderstanding a few things by sending this message here:

• You don’t represent the entire community, we’ve had 330.000+ players join the server, and this thread has only received 8 likes. This isn’t “what the community wants”, it’s “what a handful of players from the community wants”. I think making this distinction is important.
• At the end of the day, we see a lot more things than players do, and we have a lot more experience and generally have a good idea of how things will roll out. This is why we are the ones who make the decisions, with your feedback kept in mind. A weird example, but: If the community wanted a thousand gold, would we give it? No, that’s not how it works. We make the decision based on what the community wants, though.

Stop looking into a crystal ball trying to know the future. Player emotes have not yet been enabled, yet you all know that every single troll on the server is waiting specifically on that and how that everyone will forget their manners once such thing is allowed.

We’re not looking into the future, we’re in fact looking at the past - where the amount of users in our Discord was less than what it is now, and yet it was abused frequently there.

Travel issue
Players asking to rever to old travel system. 5 players think it's amazing, most players (21) hate it, yet the feedback to it was Declined. Staff responded that they will look into some viable alternatives, but they didn't discuss it further with the community.

Polls
Players asking for polls, since they feel like the staff doesn't make decisions on behalf on what the community wants. No answer from staff since August until last Saturday, until a player asked if they forgot. Staff asnwered that they didn't forget, but don't yet know how to implement it. Again, not discussing it further with the community.

I don't disagree that we can include the community more in these discussions, and it's something I'll bring up to the team. Thanks for raising this concern.

Okay, that was a lot of text, but let me include some more points real quick:

• A player is generally more likely to scroll far up in announcements to find old announcements, than they are with a channel like #general. This would become an absolute headache for the moderation team, if they routinely had to check all messages in these channels for inappropriate emojis. It's easy to remove, it's annoying to find before a player sees it.
• If I make an announcement about bug fixes, I don't want players to react with eggplants, zany face, vomting face, or any other emojis that don't fit the announcement. It has to fit the announcement, and that is better left for the people who make the announcements.
• It really seems like that to some degree, we all agree that this will literally gain the community up to nothing, and the whole intention behind this is to make the community more involved? There's a million other ways to do that, being able to react with a smiley face is not one of those ways - at least not one that we want to take.

Because of all the points mentioned above, we're unfortunately not going with this idea, and I'll be closing this thread now. If you still disagree with this decision, even with all the points mentioned above, that's fine, you're in right to do so, but unfortunately, we have to protect our players, and we think this is the best way.

I honestly really appreciate that you guys are looking for ways to make the community feel more involved, and that you are all this passionate to get your idea through. It's easy for us to lose our temper about things we're passionate about, and come across in ways that are not so okay. If you want a pro tip, people who come across as calm and explain things in a calm, understanding manner, have a higher chance of getting others to agree with them. Trust me, I'm speaking from experience unfortunately : - )

Best regards,
Deniz