Minecraft Forums

This morning, I was thinking about posting a question here. (it had to do with the difficulty of getting endermen to stay put to be properly killed) My second thought was "I'd better not; moderators shouldn't ask stupid newbie questions!" And that got me thinking.

Why shouldn't moderators ask stupid newbie questions? I wasn't chosen as a moderator for my all-encompassing knowledge of Minecraft; I was chosen as a moderator because the admins thought I could do a good job of managing a forum. They're two totally different things. There are people who have never played Minecraft in their lives who could do a great job managing a forum, and there are people who know more about Minecraft than any three of us put together who would make the forum populace quit en masse. They're two totally different skill sets.

Another RL story: a friend of mine, many years ago, was fired by his employer (pardon me, he was "rightsized") because he wanted to stay as a programmer rather than accept a "promotion" to management. He had some management experience: he knew he hated managing and was terrible at it. He was an excellent programmer and sysadmin. Again, two totally different skillsets. (he wound up working for a company that appreciated his skills, didn't try to make good programmers into bad managers, and also paid about twice what the previous company had, so it worked out in the end) They wouldn't try to "promote" a really good janitor to programmer, because no matter how much he knew about building maintenance, that didn't qualify him to write code. So why did they have this idea that they should turn programmers into managers?

Okay, so what does this have to do with Minecraft?

Simple:

I see it all the time: "Help me do such-and-such and you can be an admin on my server." They might need help for anything from setting permissions to massive building projects, but the promised reward is an official position.

The problem with that is that the skillset for being a server admin is nothing like the skillset for being, say, a builder. I'd venture a guess that I'd be a decent server admin; I've had experience in similar areas, for one thing. But I know for a fact that I'm a terrible builder. You don't want to see my world -- it's full of 7x7x4 cobblestone buildings and my castle is lopsided. Giving a good builder a job as a server admin because of his building skills makes no more sense than giving me a job as a builder because I can manage users.

When you choose admins for their building skills, you get the same kind of problems, just in different ways, that you would get if you picked builders for their admin skills. You wouldn't want your server to have nothing but 7x7x4 cobblestone buildings and a lopsided castle, right? People would laugh at you. The same thing is true of the way all too many people choose their server staff. They get people who play favorites, people who abuse their power, or people who simply aren't really capable of, or interested in, the behind-the-scenes work of managing users. They may be very skilled in their specialty, but it's the wrong specialty for that job.

If you want to run a good server, then choose people for official positions because they are skilled at doing what those positions require. Don't pick people for that because they're good at something totally unrelated. Having power over other people isn't a reward; it's a responsibility. It's not a prize, it's a job.

Quote from th3ee3picstr

To be a moderator for the forums you do need a certain degree in Minecraft so you at least understand the context of the conversation.Other then that you could ask newbie questions

That's true to some extent, but you'd be surprised how little, really. I've experienced that myself with the MCPE mods/maps section. While I have no first-hand experience with MCPE, let alone modding it, the forum rules are pretty straightforward: this sub-section is for that kind of posts. No bumping your thread, no swearing, no duplicate threads, all the usual stuff. Aside, possibly, from sorting out posts to their proper sections, and some of the more esoteric content ownership issues, most of the rules that concern a moderator are pretty much independent of game details. Profanity, spamming, etc., are all what they are, whether the forum is about Minecraft or accounting.

But the reverse isn't true -- no matter how much you know about Minecraft, if you don't have the skills for forum management, you're not going to be a good moderator. Imagine a hypothetical applicant for the position: he knows everything about the game, but over the past year, he's gotten ten different infractions, most of them for things like posting profanity in images or advertising his commercial website. And he doesn't learn -- after he gets back from a suspension, a few weeks later he does it again. But he knows more about Minecraft than Notch and Dinnerbone put together. I don't think I even need to ask if he'd be any good as a moderator. Anyone who repeatedly breaks the rules for members could never handle the even stricter rules that apply to moderators (what, you thought we had it easier?). How much he knows about the game isn't relevant; what matters is whether he can moderate a forum.

Hence my comments above: Someone might be the greatest builder in the game, but if he doesn't know how to manage people, he's going to be a disaster as a server admin. They're two totally different skillsets. I used myself as an example because I have some degree of management skill (aside from forums, I've done it IRL), but absolutely no building skill (IRL either; 2x4's and angle brackets are my friends!). It would be crazy to appoint me as a builder on a server because I have some management experience, unless you really like 7x7x4 cobblestone buildings. It's just as bad an idea to appoint someone to server management because their builds look amazing. They might have both skillsets -- but neither mandates the other. They could just as easily not have the one you need, and that leads to disasters.

For someone who's looking at it the right way, management -- whether of a forum or a server -- is a job. It's more work, not less. You don't "pay" someone by making them do more work! So the kind of people you'll get when you offer them a management position in exchange for their work are not people who think of it as more work -- they're the people who think of it as less work, or as a way to get something they want. Neither of those is good for the server.

Quote from NXSXS

What is the point of this topic?
(I read it,and i din't understand it).

I'm trying to address one of the big reasons why we see so many "such-and-such server has horrible admins" posts in relation to how so many servers select their management -- by selecting for skills other than those needed for administering a server.

Quote from aurora1979

If "you" had more game knowledge then you could be a moderator that helps out with the answers rather than one that just polices.

A non-moderator can do the same. My hypothetical person with the arm-length list of infractions and the bad attitude could do that. There is no need for moderator (or, apropos of this discussion, server admin) abilities to do that. Some of the most helpful people in this forum are not, and don't want to be, moderators.

Knowing about the game in order to answer questions about it is not, in fact, a moderator's job. Sure, it's great if we can do that (and we do) but that's something that anyone, mod or not, can do. The specific things that separate a moderator from any other forum member are what you would think of as the policing abilities -- moving threads, hiding posts, and, yes, issuing infractions. And it is the ability to use those wisely, fairly, and judiciously that is one of the major things that is essential in a moderator. No matter how much someone knows about the game, and no matter how helpful they are, if they're in the habit of slapping infractions on people they don't like, or removing posts they disagree with, they're not suited to be a moderator. (and they'll be fired the instant an admin finds out)

And, again, going back to the topic, namely that of server management: if you pick the people who are going to be running your server for you -- who are managing the community -- based on whether they can answer your questions about setting permissions, or install a mod or ten for you, or build some really cool things, or anything, really, other than how good at community management they are, you're setting yourself up for a disaster. Again, no matter how good a builder someone is, that doesn't tell you anything about how good a server admin they're going to be, any more than how good a moderator I am tells you anything about my building abilities.

My theory though is that moderators are there to maintain a good environment, look out for their forum members and to assist as much as they can.

Other moderators feel that a mods job is to tell people off and have power and control over them.

I think the Powers That Admin try pretty hard to make sure we get the first kind rather than the second here in MCF.

The problem with the server-admin-as-reward situation is that the people who do it that way wind up with the second kind rather than the first. The results tend to spam up the Minecraft forums, not to mention leaving the poor server owner wondering why he set up that great server and everyone left. Administering a server, like moderating a forum, is a job. At least the people who feel the first way treat it like such.

DarthTrogo above commented that he'd missed my "Great Wall of Text" posts. Yeah, I don't really write up things like that much anymore, because I don't have any more time to spend on the forums than I did before I became a moderator, and the job itself takes up a fair bit of it. (I'm in Other Platforms, which means pretty much by definition, I have to read a lot of posts for hardware I don't own; we cover four different systems, pretty much anything that isn't a PC or Mac) I love doing it, but it's work; it takes time I could be doing something else, probably expressing my opinions at such length that I bore people into conceding. Server administration is the same, but more so.

When you trade something, the whole concept is that you make an exchange of equal value. Imagine if it went like this ... "If you build a good city for me, I'll let you build another city, too." That's not much of a reward, right? "You do work, and I'll exchange having you do more work." That's what server administration is, though: more work. So the only people who would make that trade are people who don't think server administration is more work. In short, the ones who want the powers -- who want the "police abilities" -- for the joy of using them, for what that's worth. They tend to be the sort of admins that cause server drama ... some of them coming to everyone's attention as the ones who give their buddies stacks of good stuff, ban people they dislike, throw their weight around, and generally act like jerks. Really, though, it's only to be expected when the reasons for picking them are that they're good at something unrelated, and they don't think the job is, well, a job.

Imagine being pulled over by a policeman who didn't actually know the law or how it operated, he just had a list which included jaywalking and arrested you for it.

That's not how moderators work, though. Aside from the fact that pretty much by definition we're all Minecraft players (being active forum members and all), what we're concerned about is more structural than content-oriented. We all know a great deal about the law (in this case, the forum rules) and how it operates. We would know, in that example, precisely what constitutes jaywalking, and whether a particular person was doing it or not. Go take a look at the MCF rules (they're here), and you'll see that most of them are not specific to a particular Minecraft element but, rather, to good forum behavior overall. They're things like "don't necropost" and "don't swear". Only in the section-specific rules do we find things that take any knowledge of the game whatsoever, and, really, that's mostly limited to things like knowing what a seed is. I don't think there's anything game-specific in the forum rules that I couldn't teach my mother in an hour.

We're looking at two different skillsets here: One, knowledge of Minecraft (or building, or setting server permissions, or installing mods, or whatever). Two, ability to manage an online community. Having the former is useful; having the latter is essential. Sure, knowing more about Minecraft will make someone who has the community-management skill a better moderator, but if they don't have that skill, no amount of knowledge will make them a good, or even acceptable, moderator. And in the case of server administration, not having that skill will cause anything from a few unhappy players to full-on server drama.

Hence the original point of my first post: Choosing your server management for skills unrelated to server administration, and further selecting those who don't think that administering a server is a hard job, is the road to disaster.