The Official Feedback Thread

[Jeremy]

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

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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.

No response to reports

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.

Lack of response in CTS

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.

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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.

 

[Jeremy]

Hi all. In this post, I'll address the topic of event rules, specifically the recurring feedback we've received regarding inconsistent enforcement of effort rules. This concern started during one of the creative tasks in our recent Valentine's Day event when a participant's submission was rejected and they were asked to resubmit.

Since then, some members have expressed frustration about how this was/wasn't addressed during and after the event and have recently pressured Chris, the task's host, to make a statement. While it's too late to make any changes to the event after its conclusion, I'll do my best to explain rule enforcement in events from a staff member's point of view and address aspects of it that we hope to improve.

Effort Rules

Our creative events typically include a rule that asks for each entry to be made with a "reasonable amount of effort." We added this rule a long time ago after we had to ask some participants to resubmit their entries. The idea is to require some standard of participation so that events aren't used as easy ways to earn prizes, especially because other members spend a lot of time on their entries.

To provide some context for this rule's original intention, consider the following example for an event to "create a creature":

Spoiler: Example

A staff member drew this image, but there have been submissions in the past that were similar in perceived effort, so this rule was designed to help prevent them. Over time, however, our bar for reasonable effort has likely shifted as these kinds of submissions have become rare. This is possibly a result of the overall increase in quality in submissions as well!

During the recent event, some members disagreed about an entry's rejection for not using enough effort. We've reviewed the event, and while the entry used a different medium than we typically see for art submissions, we agree that it displayed sufficient effort to qualify for participation rewards. Going forward, we'll reframe the effort rule so that it more specifically addresses the amount of "detail" included in creative entries instead of the perceived amount of "effort" it takes to create them. We'd also like to clarify that the medium used will not be considered when making this judgment but, if applicable, would be covered by separate rules depending on the task.

Furthermore, while we would like to keep some form of this rule in place to keep things fair, we believe that event participation is, first and foremost, just for fun. Other participants who go above and beyond have the chance to earn extra prizes by winning contests or staff favorite selections. At the same time, other members may not be confident in their artistic abilities, which could cause them to be unsure about participating in creative events altogether. We want to stress that effort does not necessarily correlate with skill, and we design events to be as inclusive as possible so that everyone feels comfortable participating regardless of their perceived skill level.

Another reason we're changing the way this rule is worded is that we acknowledge how implying your entry is "low effort" may come across as insulting. While rules will always need to be enforced in events, we certainly don't intend to hurt anyone's feelings! Another concern that came up about this specific incident was the fact that it was rejected publicly. Sometimes we handle issues with submissions within a reply, while other times they are handled privately. This is usually at the host's discretion. Replying directly in the event thread is often easier, or there is additional context wherein a public response seems necessary. However, we can see that this may be embarrassing. Going forward, we'll consider the types of issues with event submissions that would merit a private message and try to handle similar cases privately.

Consistency in Event Rules

As you've seen when we host events, each task is run by one or two staff members, which is one of the ways we distribute event work to the team. Having staff members take the lead on their part of the event helps everything run smoothly, but it means we are generally less focused on the other parts. However, event rules are ideally enforced as consistently as possible, which was one of the concerns brought up about the effort rule. Judging art is subjective, which is also true regarding the perceived effort used to create it. It can be challenging to maintain a consistent standard while considering different skill levels, mediums, and circumstances. To help address this in the future, we'll aim to have more staff members give feedback before a submission is declined. Of course, this can also be challenging due to schedules and commitments in other areas of the event.

Problems With Some Feedback

Finally, I'd like to talk about the feedback that was given about this issue and our response up until now. In my previous posts, I listed some guidelines about leaving feedback and asked that it be cooperative and constructive, not accusatory. Unfortunately, some members who weren't involved made extremely accusatory, demanding, targeted, and sometimes even insulting posts directed at Chris. This is why LadyDestani made another statement about giving feedback and the site's rules regarding being respectful. The situation that resulted would make any staff member feel uncomfortable, which is why he's not addressing this himself. Making demands is not a helpful way to leave feedback, as shown by this example. That being said, we do appreciate all of the constructive and friendly feedback given about any topic, including this one, and we hope to use it to help improve TBT.

Conclusion

In summary, we plan to:

• Reframe our effort rules
• If applicable, clarify the allowed medium with separate rules
• Reach out to participants privately in certain situations
• Have more team members give feedback before rejecting a submission

We also agree that effort should not be judged too harshly and regret that the enforcement of this rule caused feelings to be hurt. In one of our upcoming responses, we'll touch on more event-related topics, such as repeat winners and competitiveness. Thank you!

 

[Justin]

Hi everyone. Like Jeremy mentioned previously, we plan to cover the main topics he outlined at the start of this thread in summary posts.

However, I want to make an exception to talk about the What Do You Look Like thread. This is because it's a new topic not covered in the previous thread that quickly found a lot of agreement on staff with simple changes that can quickly be made:

• We'll unpin the WDYLL thread. We're okay with the thread existing on the forum for those who wish to share photos, but agree there's no particular reason we need to endorse or encourage members to post photos of themselves by pinning the thread. It can exist just the same as other Brewster's threads.
  • Spoiler: Sidebar about pins; Justin's personal opinion

    Some of you might be wondering why it was pinned to begin with -- honestly, it was over 10 years ago now, so I couldn't really tell you. If I had to guess, it was simply a nice thought of a moderator that our community could be closer by seeing each other. We were living under what you might call 'peak selfie' back then, and now we're not anymore haha. Times change.
    
    The other aspect of this is sometimes in forum culture, once a thread becomes pinned, they sort of become 'grandfathered' in with a feeling that you need to justify to either other staff or the community as a whole why you're choosing to unpin something! So, some threads just kind of end up staying in place without much thought or regard, and this is a good example of that.
• We'll ask that only members aged 18 and above post photos of themselves with a note regarding this in WDYLL. If there's a photo reported or seen by ourselves with clear reason to believe the member is likely under 18, we'll remove it. Right now, this is simply noted in the opening post, but we may be able to make it more prominent later.
• We'll hide the WDYLL thread from guest access soon. This is actually something we'd already been looking into previously for a few select threads on the forum. As things go, it got put on the back burner for other priorities, but we will be working on it again now with your feedback in mind.
• Long term, we'll consider automatically removing ancient photos from WDYLL. Unlike the other points here, this is not something simple or easy to implement. We'll consider it in the future, but it's not an immediate priority or something we can promise.

Thanks for your feedback on this issue!

 

[Mistreil]

About the events, I think it would be cool if we got more of the game ones that @/Mistreil made like the oarfish one where you ate the staff's island reps to grow bigger or the one with Leif where you had to make your way out of the maze. I'm no programmer so I figure those game probably took lots of time to program and stuff, but I enjoyed seeing and playing them even though I wasn't very good at them

Games!

Since these are my domain, I've decided to just talk about these immediately because 1) it only really is relevant to me on the staff team, 2) I'm stuck on a train and trying not to fall asleep and miss my stop, and 3) I'm a nerd.

The tl;dr if you don't want to read this over-detailed post is: feel absolutely free to suggest game ideas/domains/etc.! There are limitations to what I can reasonably make, but having a log of ideas when my brain is empty is always helpful -- especially since I'm never sure what might actually be interesting to people aside from me!

I think this is probably the main thing I should mention: limitations to the games that I make.

There's a few categories here, but the main ones are about the game design itself, and then the implementation.

... The last limiting factor is also just my own time and mental energy -- I do programming for my full-time job, so I usually just... don't want to think on my off-time, even if I really like game development and find it fun. Most of the games I've made so far were actually quick weekend endeavors! Or reskins done in the few hours between work and sleep.

Game Design Limitations
This isn't about art or anything (somewhat), but more about the types of games made, things that can be used in them, and their controls.

The main factor is: every game I make, I try to make sure that it's something most members should be able to play. Namely the rules I try to keep in mind are:

1. It has to be mobile-friendly: This means the controls are either using the keyboard-only, or have click/swipe controls, but not both (unless at separate times).
2. If audio is required, there has to be a text-equivalent: For obvious accessibility reasons. I think I messed this one up once, but quickly adjusted (iirc it was available but the text version was too unclear initially -- or I had a bug and it didn't actually appear right; might've been both). This also means I'm probably never going to make a rhythm game. Sorry to my fellow rhythm gamers.
3. Anything with multiple repetitive clicks/button mashing is a no-go: Single click quick-time events are OK (with a slightly generous timing window), but that's it. I don't want people breaking their hands, keyboard, or phone. Also I'm not giving myself repetitive strain injuries while playtesting. This means no cookie clicker, unless there's a built-in autoclicker from the start.
4. It should be short-ish: Or doable in a single session, even if a bit difficult. This one's a bit looser, but the general idea is I don't want people to have to spend more than like 20 minutes to solve something at fastest. If I hand it to the other staff* and it takes them more than 20 minutes, I usually try to adjust. Usually. So no long epic narratives (unless I split it into multiple small parts!)

* Shout out to ~Kilza~ who I use as a good benchmark for "is this too hard"

The summary is that games I make and any suggestions need to be fairly accessible! Games that are frustrating because of brain usage is OK (although hopefully not too frustrating), but not because of skill, technology, or accessibility issues.

On a side note, I've had a few personal concerns about visual-oriented games (like the mazes), but those seem to have largely gone OK so far? The only thing I need to keep in mind in that regard is probably colour blindness (so no puzzles where colour is the only indicator of difference). But maaaybe there's other things I'm forgetting?
If there are any accessibility issues you've faced with the games, please do let me know! I know some of them were difficult, but hopefully not too impossible.

Implementation Limitations
This one isn't really something anyone else can predict aside from me, but it does factor into what I am able to make reasonably.

The short of it is: I implement almost everything from scratch for the games.

Think of it like making a cake via cake mix and premade icing vs. from scratch with both results looking pretty much the same in the end. Most people being happy with having a cake at all, but there's still reasons to do things from scratch (like ingredients, health, because it's fun, etc.)

There's a few reasons for this:

1. It keeps the file size small: This is sort of the large one - I  could just write games in a game engine (e.g. Godot) and then export it for web! This is much faster, but the resulting files are usually larger than they need to be -- which I don't really like. At most, the games I make have just the images as the main overhead for data usage/loading time (and I try to keep that somewhat reasonable too -- if I do make games that have significantly larger images, I'll probably note what the total size is.)
2. It gives me more control: All the problems that appear are things within my control (for the most part), and things that I can probably fix much faster than trying to figure out why a game engine handles something a certain way. Also more control over the size of files, and the control scheme of the game (and thus mobile-compatibility.)
3. I find the technical part fun: I'm a nerd, nothing else to say here. I find it fun to make things from scratch.

There's a lot of drawbacks to this: namely that it takes way longer for me to make the entire engine from scratch compared to doing it in an existing game engine (e.g. moving a character around and animating it takes like, 2 minutes to do in Godot -- but instead I have to spend like 6 hours making the logic for the map, sprite reading, movement, animating, etc. which may also be more bug-prone.)

(I don't actually know if anyone cares or if the difference would even be notable, but I care and I'm the one making the games. So in exchange, you get fewer games because I'm stubborn about this.)

With that said, there's actually very few limitations in terms of programming ability -- I'm fairly good at figuring out how to implement things (and I'm building on existing projects over time -- like text in the maze games). There's just a higher initial timesink to build the base from scratch.

Game Ideas

I would love a fishing game. 0.00000001% chance of getting a golden ray or something webfishing

Funny you mention that! There are a few ideas I've had floating in my head that I might explore in the future, such as:

• RNG Games: ... like fishing or balloon shooting! Various locations, a simple wait + click quick-time event, and then you get a random fish or something. In terms of event currency, it's probably redemption codes after getting X rolls (and people can share their results or something for funsies.)
• Visual Novel-like Games: ... like dating sims but not romancey except in a maybe comedy sort of way. Just some reading, maybe results based on what you pick. But I'm not actually that confident in my ability to write that much, sooo... big maybe here.
• Point-and-click Puzzle: ... probably an escape room sort of game, since I like those. But this one's a bit more time consuming for me to implement compared to others, including art asset creation.
• General game reskins: ... like what I did with Snake (Oarfish)! Maybe 2048 or minesweeper or something, because... I just like those games.

I'd love to know what sorts of games you'd be interested in! Part of me making these is because I find it fun to do, but also because I like seeing people have fun!
I grew up playing like, neopets and its minigames, so... this is me trying to carry on that spirit in a way, I guess.

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Aaaand that's about it! Thanks for reading! I may edit this in the future if there's more things I forgot to mention.
... this is also why you probably shouldn't ask me about my fields of interest. this was probably way more information than is actually relevant and yet required 0 braincells for me to write.

but also it got me through my train ride. and i almost missed my stop because i was locked in on rambling. oops.

 

[Mairmalade]

Hi, everyone!

Based on the feedback and some of the reports we've received recently, we want to address the What's Bothering You thread sooner, too.

This thread was initially created as a space for members to vent and share their feelings. However, we recognize that the nature of this space can also lead to misunderstandings, discomfort, hurt feelings, and tension.

To help the thread remain a safe and supportive outlet, we've discussed and are introducing additional guidelines alongside our existing ones when posting in it:

• Focus on your own experiences and feelings. Please avoid sharing personal details or issues about others to respect their privacy
• Do not make indirect statements about others. Making vague statements about a past or present relationship/friendship who are members of TBT can be harmful. Even when you don't include any identifying factors, the other person can figure out they're the target of your post, and we often can't verify or take action because we don't have any knowledge of the situation
  • This also applies to posting about another person's situation, whether positive (e.g., concern, worry) or negative, as their situation is not yours to share
• Be mindful of sensitive content. Some topics may be triggering to others (e.g., mental health struggles, traumatic experiences, medical conditions and procedures, politics, or loss). We encourage using spoiler tags for such content to be considerate of everyone using the space.

Code for Spoiler Tags:

[spoiler=Spoiler Title Text Here]Your post content here[/spoiler]

Becomes:

Spoiler: Spoiler Title Text Here

Your post content here

As always, please continue to report rule-breaking posts for staff review.

Additionally, we've decided to close the Pet Peeves thread. As it serves a similar use case to the What's Bothering You thread, we believe it's best to keep such posts where additional guidelines are in place.

Thank you for sharing your feedback!

An edit was made to the wording in the second point for clarity.