Okay. Real busy today, but my name was invoked in the context of /facepalm, and that brings me to this bit of free advice/scenario breakdown:
- “I got into a heated argument.” No. Professional moderators do not get into heated arguments. You don’t roll up your sleeves and argue, and you definitely don’t get all het up over anything. You can lay out facts, once. You can debunk outright lies before cauterizing the thread. But you don’t get angry. You’re a pro. When you get angry, you walk away.
- “I became part of the community because I liked being treated like a rock star.” What? No. The fanboys do have a tendency to treat red names like rock stars. However, if you let yourself believe the things that people say about you on forums, you ALSO have to believe the ones who say you’re a fat fuck who should die in a fire. You cannot have it both ways. Generally speaking, anyone with this “I love to be loved” mentality on a forum is cruisin’ for a bruisin’ be they dev or player. A forum community’s margin of tolerance isn’t big enough for more than one ego, and that ego parking space is reserved for the producer, lead designer, or CEO, depending. And it IS like a reserved parking space – just because the CEO isn’t using it doesn’t mean you get to park your ’91 Caprice hoopty in the spot.
- “Let’s continue this conversation in PM.” What? Oh, hell no. Taking a conversation private is the worst possible thing you can do, because it’ll be reposted in a dozen forums you don’t control… and very possibly edited to make you look like a schmuck. The schmuck you are if you took the chitchat private in the first place, of course, but still. Your only defense is to have the conversation so publicly that the context is there for anyone who wants to look.
As an employee (more on that in a second), your every word is public. You have no expectation of privacy. If the conversation is too angry/passionate/demented to have in public, you shouldn’t be having it at all.
- “I’m a volunteer.” Two flavors of volunteer, here. One, you are an employee but not a community team member. Your mod duties are therefore volunteer in the sense that the company pays you, but not to mod. Personally, I hate that kind of thing. If it’s a person’s actual job, that person tends to be more thoughtful, accountable, and part of a team that can help with sanity checks. And yes, you need sanity checks. I’ve been modding off and on for more than a decade in both junior and senior capacities, and I regularly ask teammates for feedback. Lone wolves die in the winter, boys and girls. Don’t be the lone wolf.
The other flavor of mod is a real volunteer – someone outside the company,totally unpaid, and totally unaccountable. Eh… /shrug. If something goes wrong with this scenario, the company deserves the drama. You know why? You get what you pay for.
- “Just my opinion.” Here’s the trick to having opinions when your name is red (or whatever color the employees have, okay, stop nitpicking me, I’m old and for old people employee names are always red IN SPIRIT): You can say “just my opinion” in only one situation: when you are talking about something so self-evident that anyone disagreeing with you will be shouted down by the entire forum. “Just my opinion” is not “just your opinion” when you’re a representative of the company (more on that in a second). You use that phrase in the context of building rapport, of identifying yourself as firmly in agreement with the entire community. It’s a phrase that bears a lot more semantic weight when you’re on the dark side of the force.
There’s one exception to that. You can also use “just my opinion” in opposition to your community…when you are speaking on behalf of the product with the full support of the entire dev team. See, here’s the thing. You are not a private citizen. The community does not, on an emotional level, differentiate between your red name and say, the creative director”s red name. So, even if your actual role at the company is mailboy or cube warrior or producer’s bitch, you still have the footprint of the most senior producer.
If you’re thinking, but I just want to talk about games with people who share my interests, I do sympathize. You wouldn’t be a mod for a game unless you really loved games (not for more than a couple weeks, anyway – easier to make money walking the street in platform heels). But life’s not fair. Go pee somewhere else on the internet. You can’t be a private citizen on your own company’s board, ever. And don’t think you can sneak around this rule with a sock puppet, because you WILL be caught and it WILL be ugly.
And that’s all I’ve got to say about that.
