So, as of the last few months, we have been able to observe pretty large problems with FEU; both the Forums, and the discord.
I’ll try to keep this short, so allow me to start with the forum changes I’d like to see.
First off, as of recently, there has been an abuse of the badges and like system by some users. They have been spamming and using up their 50 daily likes for badges. The problems with that are:
-That the badge system is basically useless, and brings nothing of importance to the FEU forums
-And that all that did was that posts that deserved no likes and weren’t of importance got liked anyways; to fill a daily quota.
Now, I propose for FEU to remove the badge system(because, as I stated, it’s basically useless); and to at least, reduce the number of daily likes to a more reasonable number, like 10 daily likes. that would reduce the incentive for people to spam likes, and fill up people’s notifications(you can disable like notifications; but is that really a fix?).
If we decide to keep the badges system, I have another proposition : Make the badges designed so it makes people want to improve themselves as hackers and impress people with their works. Rewarding people for being great at the community’s main focus should be the way to do it, rather than rewarding people for some random threshold of a button being pressed x time.
Now, onto the Discord specific issues:
One issue is the way that channel locks are handled. 2 channels come immediately to mind, but there may be more that we are unaware of: #spell-academy and #l33t-h4x1ng. Those 2 channels are pretty special, as they are both locked in some way to specific roles. Now, I can somewhat understand the reason spell academy is writing locked to apprentices, as to prevent spam(however, you could argue that preventing anyone without the role to chim in and give potentially important information can be problematic(though most people who would be able to do that would already have the appropriate role, so that lightens the issue))…
However, I cannot understand why leet haxing (and also decomp, while we’re at it) cannot be viewed by anyone but apprentices and wizards. Why would you lock potentially interesting information to hackers without that role(because, let’s be real; even if there are some people who don’t hack, most people would join the FEU discord because they are interested in hacking in some way, and having all of our hacking info available to even new members would make much more sense, as we’re supposed to be a hacking focused community.) In general, we should not be supporting a structure that artificially segregates the community.
Now, let’s talk about the main problem, one we have been able to observe in the last few days: We have a clear lack of strictness in moderation.
Now, I understand, too strict a moderation can be bad and lead to more problems than anything; However, a complete lack of moderation is even worse.
First off, albeit that’s a lesser issue, we have no EU mods; Secondly, and much more importantly, most of the mods we do have are very… lax at moderation, and that can lead to very passive moderation, or even inactive moderation.
The current channel situation in FEU is very hectic; general, the main channel, almost always gets into a shitposting spree, and same with most other channels. I will reiterate that FEU is a hacking community at first, and we should strive to focus more on hacking than we are right now. right now, most of FEU’s activity(mostly on discord; still can be seen on forums) is shitposting rather than hacking. And while sure, outright forbidding shitposting would remove the fun out of FEU, we still need to moderate it more strictly.
I believe the mods should either start getting stricter; By punishing shitposting when done several times in a row(by giving the person revenant ; for example, and making revenants not being able to talk in general as punishment(since right now, removing image posting rights still doesn’t prevent the person to shitpost via text.)) and encouraging topicality more(by actively participating in discussions regarding that mods’ skill set, so that the mods can show the example and not just be unknown guses that are barely active)
Maybe we should get new mods, people more involved with the community, actual faces of respect for people. Maybe holding some form of moderator votes(just like we did back when arch got demoted) would be a good idea ?
