The creation of this thread was inspired by your posts in a recent
thread where many of you left feedback about various topics. This new thread will work better as a permanent place to receive and discuss feedback. The staff have spent this past week discussing how we can address some of your suggestions, so we'll post our responses broken into several categories. Order/timeline of these responses TBD:
- Feedback and communicating with staff
- Collectibles market
- AI images on TBT
- Hateful content and controversial content
- Repeat winners and competitiveness
- Event rules
- Site staff
- Miscellaneous
Our first topic from the thread, feedback, has been summarized into five topics.
Create an official feedback thread similar to the Information Desk
As you can see, we agreed with this idea. Here it is!
Told not to give feedback during an event
Going forward, we'll welcome feedback to be shared at any time. In this particular case, it seems there were issues with criticism and arguments mixing into the goings-on of the event, which caused some of it to be missed. This new thread will help keep the feedback organized into a dedicated place where it will be easier to track. Giving feedback privately should also be an option at any time, and I'll talk about that a bit more in the CTS response below.
TBT moderators have never messaged reportees, which is due to a few different reasons, such as privacy for the users involved, the complexities of certain situations, and the time it takes to handle each report. However, we are open to discussing reports through the private Contact the Staff board, as long as it's information that can be shared.
For those of you who would like to see an automatic response to every report, we're interested in hearing more about the kind of information you would like to see. Are you looking for a simple confirmation that we've reviewed the report or something more? With the forum software's current capabilities, it's certainly a lot easier to have detailed discussions in the CTS board, which leads to our next topic.
Contact the Staff (CTS) is a board for users to talk to the staff privately whether they have a question about a warning, an issue with another user, or even private feedback. Some members mentioned that they never received a response to their threads, and this is something we would like to improve. Since the beginning of 2024, staff have replied to 82% of CTS threads, so while this isn't horrible, it goes to show that we could be doing better. The reason this happens is often due to threads getting buried while the staff's attention is directed elsewhere, like an event.
To help improve our responses in CTS, we'll do the following:
- Create a separate board for collectible date changes from events, which often bury other threads.
- Potentially split private feedback into its own board - we're still considering this.
- Add more prefixes, such as "Under Review" and "Feedback Considered" to help communicate that the thread has been read while we review/consider the situation before posting a response.
- Work on a system to increase the visibility of threads posted to the board for the staff.
- Revisit threads from the last year or two and reply to those that we haven't posted in.
Mini-modding and users "getting infractions for helping newcomers by redirecting them to the correct forum"
While we don't allow mini-modding, it's not a punishable offense unless it's severely abused. The forum's warning system is the easiest way for us to send and track messages about the rules, which is why these show in the same place. However, these "warnings" are all titled as "reminders" and are worth 0 points. One of the reasons we prefer users to report misplaced threads over posting a correction is that it often encourages the user to recreate the thread. When it's reported instead, we're able to move it. While we don't see this as a big deal, I understand some users don't like to receive anything under the guise of a "warning."
We are considering how we can make this even clearer. In place of these reminders, we have started deleting posts with an alert explaining the reason to the user. We plan to use this even more once we iron out some details about how it works on our end.
In the first post of this thread, we included some guidelines about leaving feedback. Since our first topic is about feedback itself, now is a good time to elaborate on these guidelines and their purpose:
- Constructive, not just critical. While criticism is welcome, we would like the feedback we receive to be actionable when possible. You are free to be critical in your feedback, but the most helpful suggestions explain what you would like to see changed or how you would prefer things to be handled.
- Understanding and cooperative, not accusatory. Feedback is better received when it's not framed in an accusatory manner. The staff team consists of experienced people who want to improve TBT wherever possible. At the same time, any team of humans is bound to be imperfect. The community as a whole shares the common goal of making TBT even better, so let's work together to achieve it as best we can.
- Respectful to other community members, including the staff. Disagreeing about feedback or responses to feedback is fine, but it should be done respectfully. Most members want what's best for the community, even if what that means may not look the same to different people. If you believe someone's feedback is disrespectful, please help make us aware by reporting it.
- Specific, with examples if applicable. Since we don't always have the same context as members, it may not always be clear what situation or area of concern is being referred to without an explicit explanation. If you feel the specific issue is something that shouldn't be discussed publicly, private feedback can be left using the Contact the Staff board.
We would also like members to keep the following in mind when presenting feedback and reading our responses to feedback:
- Sometimes there is a mismatch in information between members and staff. The staff often have information and internal discussions that cannot be shared with members, and, on the opposite end, members may be aware of information and context that was either not brought to our attention or was buried.
- Some topics are more nuanced than others and don't have one "right" way to address them. This may be due to information that is not visible or due to other factors that we have to take into consideration. Sometimes, how we address a situation may only seem suboptimal due to factors we are unable to disclose, but we also recognize that our staff team is only human and therefore capable of making mistakes. There will always be cases in which the "right" course of action may be subjective, but we always discuss these matters as a full team to ensure they're handled appropriately and fairly.
Though there isn't much that can be done regarding these facts, which can often lead to frustrations from both the user and staff perspective, we would like to encourage you to give us the benefit of the doubt when possible as we try to do the same.
Thanks for reading our first response! Feel free to post any additional questions or comments.
.
?
, or maybe even an acnh sprite). If a flower is still weird then I'm sure there's a symbol everyone can agree on
