MOBAFire's first Mini Guide Contest of Season 14 is here! Create or update guides for the 30 featured champions and compete for up to $200 in prizes! 🏆
Let me save everyone's time right now.
This thread will go on for a week.
The first six days, random stuff will be spouted. Some opinions, some memes. Some people agreeing with you. If it's a good one, most people will agree with you.
On the seventh day, either Wayne or Psi will drop by to say basically nothing in a whole lot of words. If it's a good one, Mowen will drop by to basically say nothing in a whole lot of words. Either way, there will be no follow-up.
If it's a really, really good one, the thread will be locked. Either way, this thread will be deserted after seven days. Nothing will change.
I'm starting to think that, if you really want to do something with the forum community, you move it. For the price of two one year subscriptions of Prime you can get a forum running just fine for the few forum regulars we have here. Working, well-supported forum software with local time and all the other crazy non-League-related stuff you want (like working spam protection and properly embedded memes). The community would manage its own forum. The hosting bill would be paid by crowdfund, no freaky broken annoying ads. The community could fix its problems by itself. It's not like people ever talk about guides on here. Assuming people are actually willing to maintain a community about nothing. Which they probably don't. But let me just say that there is a whole lot more life outside the official channels than inside. MOBAFire is weighing this little irrelevant part of its community down.
Anyway. Start the timer.
For the record, I'm not placing blame on Wayne or Psi or anyone. I have no idea what MOBAFire's structure is, I have no idea why things go wrong. I have no idea whether things even go wrong. I'm just describing what I see right now.
EDIT: Did I mention I agree? I think you're being a great influence Fatel. I just hope you don't spend time on this you could have spent on important/fun things in life. Would be a shame.
This thread will go on for a week.
The first six days, random stuff will be spouted. Some opinions, some memes. Some people agreeing with you. If it's a good one, most people will agree with you.
On the seventh day, either Wayne or Psi will drop by to say basically nothing in a whole lot of words. If it's a good one, Mowen will drop by to basically say nothing in a whole lot of words. Either way, there will be no follow-up.
If it's a really, really good one, the thread will be locked. Either way, this thread will be deserted after seven days. Nothing will change.
I'm starting to think that, if you really want to do something with the forum community, you move it. For the price of two one year subscriptions of Prime you can get a forum running just fine for the few forum regulars we have here. Working, well-supported forum software with local time and all the other crazy non-League-related stuff you want (like working spam protection and properly embedded memes). The community would manage its own forum. The hosting bill would be paid by crowdfund, no freaky broken annoying ads. The community could fix its problems by itself. It's not like people ever talk about guides on here. Assuming people are actually willing to maintain a community about nothing. Which they probably don't. But let me just say that there is a whole lot more life outside the official channels than inside. MOBAFire is weighing this little irrelevant part of its community down.
Anyway. Start the timer.
For the record, I'm not placing blame on Wayne or Psi or anyone. I have no idea what MOBAFire's structure is, I have no idea why things go wrong. I have no idea whether things even go wrong. I'm just describing what I see right now.
EDIT: Did I mention I agree? I think you're being a great influence Fatel. I just hope you don't spend time on this you could have spent on important/fun things in life. Would be a shame.
********'s a pretty good fertilizer
Let me shorten your post for you
There
Latest Legend wrote:
Why don't we just take this community to 4chan?
There
Basically MOBAFire.
Latest Legend wrote:
Let me save everyone's time right now.
This thread will go on for a week.
The first six days, random stuff will be spouted. Some opinions, some memes. Some people agreeing with you. If it's a good one, most people will agree with you.
On the seventh day, either Wayne or Psi will drop by to say basically nothing in a whole lot of words. If it's a good one, Mowen will drop by to basically say nothing in a whole lot of words. Either way, there will be no follow-up.
If it's a really, really good one, the thread will be locked. Either way, this thread will be deserted after seven days. Nothing will change.
I'm starting to think that, if you really want to do something with the forum community, you move it. For the price of two one year subscriptions of Prime you can get a forum running just fine for the few forum regulars we have here. Working, well-supported forum software with local time and all the other crazy non-League-related stuff you want (like working spam protection and properly embedded memes). The community would manage its own forum. The hosting bill would be paid by crowdfund, no freaky broken annoying ads. The community could fix its problems by itself. It's not like people ever talk about guides on here. Assuming people are actually willing to maintain a community about nothing. Which they probably don't. But let me just say that there is a whole lot more life outside the official channels than inside. MOBAFire is weighing this little irrelevant part of its community down.
Anyway. Start the timer.
For the record, I'm not placing blame on Wayne or Psi or anyone. I have no idea what MOBAFire's structure is, I have no idea why things go wrong. I have no idea whether things even go wrong. I'm just describing what I see right now.
EDIT: Did I mention I agree? I think you're being a great influence Fatel. I just hope you don't spend time on this you could have spent on important/fun things in life. Would be a shame.
This thread will go on for a week.
The first six days, random stuff will be spouted. Some opinions, some memes. Some people agreeing with you. If it's a good one, most people will agree with you.
On the seventh day, either Wayne or Psi will drop by to say basically nothing in a whole lot of words. If it's a good one, Mowen will drop by to basically say nothing in a whole lot of words. Either way, there will be no follow-up.
If it's a really, really good one, the thread will be locked. Either way, this thread will be deserted after seven days. Nothing will change.
I'm starting to think that, if you really want to do something with the forum community, you move it. For the price of two one year subscriptions of Prime you can get a forum running just fine for the few forum regulars we have here. Working, well-supported forum software with local time and all the other crazy non-League-related stuff you want (like working spam protection and properly embedded memes). The community would manage its own forum. The hosting bill would be paid by crowdfund, no freaky broken annoying ads. The community could fix its problems by itself. It's not like people ever talk about guides on here. Assuming people are actually willing to maintain a community about nothing. Which they probably don't. But let me just say that there is a whole lot more life outside the official channels than inside. MOBAFire is weighing this little irrelevant part of its community down.
Anyway. Start the timer.
For the record, I'm not placing blame on Wayne or Psi or anyone. I have no idea what MOBAFire's structure is, I have no idea why things go wrong. I have no idea whether things even go wrong. I'm just describing what I see right now.
EDIT: Did I mention I agree? I think you're being a great influence Fatel. I just hope you don't spend time on this you could have spent on important/fun things in life. Would be a shame.
Heh that does sound like every criticism-on-mobafire-thread in history.
@Latest Legend, I just wanted to explain the time localization thing. The reason it is not currently localized is because we have a lot of heavy caching on the site, to offset the amount of load we have on the servers. If someone wants a different timezone, we can't cache that because then you'll get one timezone on one page and another elsewhere. There are places on the site where there is no caching, especially for members when browsing the forums, but we also need to keep it consistent across the site. If you get localized times in the forums and not on other parts of the site, it's confusing. We've always felt that consistency was better, and any solution we go with has to keep it consistent site-wide.
That said, I did come up with a solution some time ago, but never had time to do a proof of concept and it's not something that people have complained about very heavily in the past. I think it was you last week that mentioned it elsewhere, and the admins brought that to the team. Wayne and I had a long chat about it and I decided to set aside some time to finally try it. So it turned out my solution actually worked fairly well. It's up on our staging servers right now. I just need to do more testing before I put it up, since it affects the entire site. So you may finally have localized times site-wide in a week or so :)
Regarding the other two features you mentioned - spam protection and properly embedded memes.
For spam protection, we actually have so much going on behind the scenes it's ridiculous. We have a blacklist of IP blocks that spammers use. We have various checks in place to rate limit posts. We have myriad text filters to try and catch potential spam, as well as custom blacklists that all posts are fed through. We have a system in place to detect open proxy IPs. We have a blacklist on disposable temporary email services that are used heavily by spammers. We have an on-site reporting and issue tracking system to keep our mods and admins closer to what you guys are seeing. We've been careful to add things like nofollow on bbcode links to make us a less juicy target for spammers. I know I'm forgetting a lot of other things. We've spent years building systems on systems to deal with the constant barrage of attacks.
When spam gets through, as a user, it makes you wonder wtf we're doing, I know. But this is a war. Every little thing you do, the spammers come up with a workaround, and some are so persistent that they will manually do it when their bots can't get through. We have had people literally sitting there 24x7 manually creating accounts, responding to captchas, finding IPs that get through, modifying their posts to get by our myriad filters, limiting their posts to stay under our throttles. We're always fighting, and we're always trying to come up with new ways to foil them. It seems so simple on the surface but you wouldn't believe how difficult it can get when they are truly persistent.
Lastly, the meme embedding. I'm actually not sure what this would be, but if it's something manageable I'd love to take a crack at it. If you could describe in detail how you'd want this to work that'd be great. Right now you can pop in images from anywhere, so I assume this is something a little bit more specific to memes, like a meme generator or some kind of quick-meme thing where you don't have to look up the image?
Regarding Prime, we have done our best to prevent it from hurting the non-Prime experience, while offering nice rewards for those that want to try it. If you feel Prime is hurting the experience for non-Prime users, we'd love to hear the specifics, and we will definitely discuss them internally. It should feel like a completely optional system, that gives good incentive to try it out, but without making you feel like you HAVE to.
That said, I did come up with a solution some time ago, but never had time to do a proof of concept and it's not something that people have complained about very heavily in the past. I think it was you last week that mentioned it elsewhere, and the admins brought that to the team. Wayne and I had a long chat about it and I decided to set aside some time to finally try it. So it turned out my solution actually worked fairly well. It's up on our staging servers right now. I just need to do more testing before I put it up, since it affects the entire site. So you may finally have localized times site-wide in a week or so :)
Regarding the other two features you mentioned - spam protection and properly embedded memes.
For spam protection, we actually have so much going on behind the scenes it's ridiculous. We have a blacklist of IP blocks that spammers use. We have various checks in place to rate limit posts. We have myriad text filters to try and catch potential spam, as well as custom blacklists that all posts are fed through. We have a system in place to detect open proxy IPs. We have a blacklist on disposable temporary email services that are used heavily by spammers. We have an on-site reporting and issue tracking system to keep our mods and admins closer to what you guys are seeing. We've been careful to add things like nofollow on bbcode links to make us a less juicy target for spammers. I know I'm forgetting a lot of other things. We've spent years building systems on systems to deal with the constant barrage of attacks.
When spam gets through, as a user, it makes you wonder wtf we're doing, I know. But this is a war. Every little thing you do, the spammers come up with a workaround, and some are so persistent that they will manually do it when their bots can't get through. We have had people literally sitting there 24x7 manually creating accounts, responding to captchas, finding IPs that get through, modifying their posts to get by our myriad filters, limiting their posts to stay under our throttles. We're always fighting, and we're always trying to come up with new ways to foil them. It seems so simple on the surface but you wouldn't believe how difficult it can get when they are truly persistent.
Lastly, the meme embedding. I'm actually not sure what this would be, but if it's something manageable I'd love to take a crack at it. If you could describe in detail how you'd want this to work that'd be great. Right now you can pop in images from anywhere, so I assume this is something a little bit more specific to memes, like a meme generator or some kind of quick-meme thing where you don't have to look up the image?
Regarding Prime, we have done our best to prevent it from hurting the non-Prime experience, while offering nice rewards for those that want to try it. If you feel Prime is hurting the experience for non-Prime users, we'd love to hear the specifics, and we will definitely discuss them internally. It should feel like a completely optional system, that gives good incentive to try it out, but without making you feel like you HAVE to.
Matt wrote:
Regarding Prime, we have done our best to prevent it from hurting the non-Prime experience, while offering nice rewards for those that want to try it. If you feel Prime is hurting the experience for non-Prime users, we'd love to hear the specifics, and we will definitely discuss them internally. It should feel like a completely optional system, that gives good incentive to try it out, but without making you feel like you HAVE to.
The problem with prime is (IMO) the fact that it promotes a pay-to-win system for guide creators. With Prime, a guide author can hide comments that harm his guide, even if they comments themselves are simply pointing out errors or promoting different ways of thinking.
I'm not sure about the exact specifics of commendations (whether its only for prime or anyone can buy them) but are there any specific measures in place to stop someone from buying a couple and commending his own guide? If not, I could create an average guide and commend it multiple times to boost it, or have a friend on the site do it as I send them money. It doesn't make or break a guide, but it can easily sway someone trying to decide between using a couple of guides.
The same system exists on Reddit, and I don't agree with it there (Reddit gold). You pay to promote something and it is an easily abused system.
Thanks to jhoijhoi for the awesome PsiGuard-loving sig!
Actually we fully agree with you about the comment hiding, so much so that we already changed it several months ago :) This news post from May 25 explains the change;
http://www.mobafire.com/league-of-legends/forum/news/new-threaded-comments-prime-comment-control-rework-39309
On that update it was changed to a personal convenience feature. As of May 25 Prime authors could no longer collapse comments for their readers, only for themselves. If you are still seeing collapsed comments that you didn't collapse, it's a bug and you should post in the support forum so we can take a look.
Regarding commendations, they are not restricted to Prime members. Any member can commend a guide.
Our commendation system is similar to Reddit's Gold system yes. I think it's pretty widely understood on Reddit that a gilded comment simply means someone liked it a lot. Since it's another user gilding the post, and not any official highlight or promotion or general public opinion, it's not any indication that it's necessarily a better or more accurate post, it's just an indication that someone had a really strong opinion about it.
The same goes for commendations here, and we chose the word "commend" very carefully to fit with that spirit. You are commending the author, either on their hard work, their support in the comments, the accuracy of their guide, etc... The wording was chosen carefully so it wouldn't sound like it's the better guide, just that it is a commendable effort.
Additionally, the commendation displays are pretty subtle. We shot down a lot of ideas for additional highlighting and promotion for commended guides, because we didn't want it to feel like a pay to win system. As it is, you simply see a medallion indicating that there are commendations and how many. It's not overly flashy, it doesn't change the ranking/positioning of the guide in any lists. The guide is not ranked higher, their score is not directly affected. If someone got a friend to commend their guide, but the score was really low, people will figure it out pretty quickly.
If you spin through the champions, there are a few commended guides in the #1 spots, but there are also plenty of guides lower down in the rankings with commendations, as well as many many top guides with no commendations. If it really had a strong affect on scores, you'd see those guides working their way to #1 over time, but that doesn't seem to be the case. It may get more people clicking through to view the guide, but ultimately people won't upvote a guide blindly because it has commendations. It might get a guide some more views, but the guide still has to be good enough from there to convince people that it is worthy of an upvote.
http://www.mobafire.com/league-of-legends/forum/news/new-threaded-comments-prime-comment-control-rework-39309
On that update it was changed to a personal convenience feature. As of May 25 Prime authors could no longer collapse comments for their readers, only for themselves. If you are still seeing collapsed comments that you didn't collapse, it's a bug and you should post in the support forum so we can take a look.
Regarding commendations, they are not restricted to Prime members. Any member can commend a guide.
Our commendation system is similar to Reddit's Gold system yes. I think it's pretty widely understood on Reddit that a gilded comment simply means someone liked it a lot. Since it's another user gilding the post, and not any official highlight or promotion or general public opinion, it's not any indication that it's necessarily a better or more accurate post, it's just an indication that someone had a really strong opinion about it.
The same goes for commendations here, and we chose the word "commend" very carefully to fit with that spirit. You are commending the author, either on their hard work, their support in the comments, the accuracy of their guide, etc... The wording was chosen carefully so it wouldn't sound like it's the better guide, just that it is a commendable effort.
Additionally, the commendation displays are pretty subtle. We shot down a lot of ideas for additional highlighting and promotion for commended guides, because we didn't want it to feel like a pay to win system. As it is, you simply see a medallion indicating that there are commendations and how many. It's not overly flashy, it doesn't change the ranking/positioning of the guide in any lists. The guide is not ranked higher, their score is not directly affected. If someone got a friend to commend their guide, but the score was really low, people will figure it out pretty quickly.
If you spin through the champions, there are a few commended guides in the #1 spots, but there are also plenty of guides lower down in the rankings with commendations, as well as many many top guides with no commendations. If it really had a strong affect on scores, you'd see those guides working their way to #1 over time, but that doesn't seem to be the case. It may get more people clicking through to view the guide, but ultimately people won't upvote a guide blindly because it has commendations. It might get a guide some more views, but the guide still has to be good enough from there to convince people that it is worthy of an upvote.
I think 2014 was the Golden Year for MobaFire in terms of community engagement and participation. But I'm always looking forward to whatever new thing MobaFire brings in. I wasn't too fussed on Prime. The fancy profile page was cool but no-one visits profile pages (no incentive), so it didn't really phase me. If people could visit each other's pages and leave notes, or if people could post statuses on their pages and follow each other, more people would be getting into Prime to upgrade their space (maybe).
Localised time would be neat - it wasn't necessary, but at least now I'll be able to see the accurate time for us here in Australia.
Matt, so good to hear from you! :) Hope everything is going well for you and yours ^^
Localised time would be neat - it wasn't necessary, but at least now I'll be able to see the accurate time for us here in Australia.
Matt, so good to hear from you! :) Hope everything is going well for you and yours ^^
jhoijhoi wrote:
Matt, so good to hear from you! :) Hope everything is going well for you and yours ^^
You're so kind jhoijhoi! You as well! I'd like to spend more time in here, it's just sometimes hard to balance time, so many things going on these days. Hopefully you will see me in here a little more often :)
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I don't like it.