Category Archives: Rant

Moderating as therapy

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6

A quick post while on a coffee break; I don’t know if anyone else feels (or is crazy enough to feel) the same way, but I do find moderating quite therapeutic.

On a good day you see good offers waiting to be granted (though some, for various reasons, might not be granted immediately), torrent reports coming in for torrents that need fixing, comment reports and all sorts of reports waiting to be resolved. When the system runs smoothly, the reports that come in are sensible and well-written, and you get a real sense of progress fixing stuff up, improving descriptions, making changes to the Wiki (yeah, it is constantly being changed even if nobody notices T_T) and taking care of adoptions. Yeah, it’s easy to get high on moderating.

Then there are days when users just refuse to make your job easier, insist on asking questions that have been asked countless times (and hence have been answered in the FAQ), or generally just make things difficult, whether intentionally or unintentionally (sample question asked in help form: “how do i put up a display picture?”. It’s a legitimate question, but also one that could easily have been self-resolved if one could be bothered to explore the settings page).

On those days, you erase your memory and start afresh the next day 🙂

Weekends Are Too Short

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7

It’s a never-ending cycle really. Every Monday, you look forward to Friday and every Friday, you hope Monday is far away. But before you know it, it’s Monday again and you need to get up early for work.
There is also another cycle related to work, as mentioned by a friend of mine yesterday. To paraphrase:
“You go to work to make money. You need money to help achieve happiness. You need happiness because you work.”
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Read!

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I know this has probably been addressed over, and over, then beaten to death with a stick, but it’s a point of discussion that comes up constantly amongst staff: users not reading our rules and guidelines.

For users from a site that specializes mainly in subbed anime, one would think they would be used to reading text … maybe we need some pretty pictures to go along with the words.

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Look + Feel

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5

It’s almost one in the morning, so I decided to post something for a change.

As many of you know, we do have a wiki and an FAQ to handle many of the questions that our users have as well as a forum section to deal with more detailed issues. Many people seem to get along just fine and find answers with very little effort.

But for some, there seems to be a deficiency in two key areas. Reading and Understanding.

Reading

As I said before, the wiki is a good resource for finding answers to many common problems. For some strange outlandish reason, certain people find it extremely difficult to read the help sections, or use the search function for that matter. Is it really that difficult to find answers? We get many requests per day to answer questions that are clearly and thoughtfully answered in the FAQ. Handling these requests are fairly annoying, and sometimes I feel the urge to not answer at all just to spite them for not reading the FAQ. But alas, ethics drive me to answer anyway (the tone of my response, however, depends mostly on my status at that moment).

Understanding

One of the major reasons I don’t handle offers as much as I used to is that it was simply too much trouble to chase after users to have them fix their torrents. When asked if they had read the upload guidelines, nearly everyone replies “Yes, I have!” Most of the time, common sense tells me “No, you haven’t” or “Do you understand it?” Understanding things and using logic is how the world works. Sometimes I wonder how these people get along without screwing up.

I wish I could say more but now it’s time for me to go. Bye~~