Thread approval (I wish)

[Cedur]

I know the idea of approval barriers in Levels, Episodes and Projects (and maybe graphics?) has been discussed before and been met with some misgivings, but PixelPest's recent announcement incentivized me to bring this up and explain the most important benefit of this.

From the perspective of me, a normal user, I see a never-ending flood of topics that break and ignore the rules, and I see users who give inapropriate replies (backseat moderation, or whatever PixelPest's announcement is addressing). I see newbies making classic joke threads (usually deleted) and I also see newer users making serious threads but still not paying attention to rules (sometimes deletion, sometimes lock when there's already discussion). There are two kinds of responses that I especially don't appreciate despite them not being harmful, namely

• giving serious credit even to obvious joke posters (i.e. hit-and-runners)
• backseat moderating and writing something like "if you don't [...] this will be locked" when in fact the rules clearly state that the topic will be deleted. If you think every topic like that gets locked, you're misled.

I already appreciate the fact that deletion was put in place around mid-2017, yet both these topics and some of the replies keep being a negative undesirable part of my daily forum routine. The people doing the above probably feel the same but are just a bit inexperienced.

In some rare cases there are also people posting content with very bad design, e.g. lack of effort, cut-off, spammy mess, your 101th generic boss rush ... If something clearly gets rated with between 0/10 and 1/10 for gravely awful design (if you could even call it design), I'd like to have it sorted out too. These things are also a problem for well-meaning users ... on one side they don't want to be hurtful but on the other side they still want to express that it was basically an annoyance and a waste of time for them. Again, it's not a big issue and I don't know how much it even happens but I still wanted to mention it. It's also not entirely objective to draw the line, but as a rule of thumb, a bland plain grass level is undesirable yet acceptable, while a bland plain grass level with cutoff everywhere is not.

The benefits of topic approval are not exclusive to the public audience though. If moderators keep any wrongfully posted topic away from the public, they won't have to deal with backseat moderation or the reflection of whether delete or lock when there already is discussion.

Now what needs to be assured is that approval goes quickly enough, otherwise it becomes a nuisance for those who have to wait. If it can be deemed necessary to spread the responsibility on more shoulders, then a new usergroup ("level moderators" or the like) should be created, starting off with about 3 or 4 active people who take care of it together with the higher staff.

[Kley]

Realistically speaking, this wont happen. I understand that it's frustrating when a user, new or not, makes a thread that's low in quality or rule-breaking. That's why we have moderators. Their job is to scout the forums and fix these cases and tell the user when their thread didn't meet posting requirements or if they're breaking a rule. Restricting every post to be subjected to approval would be too much work to ask of the moderator team. It's much easier to tackle these issues when someone reports the post or when a moderator notices. As far as the levels forum goes, sounds like you're more-or-less saying to bring back level judges but with a slightly different approach. The reason why level judges were scrapped to begin with was due to lack of motivation. Level judges are a great idea on paper, but never seems to last long-term unfortunately. It's hard to keep a team of users motivated to review levels for proper placement (or in this case, for it to be approved for everyone to see).

[Enjl]

I think the best way to go about this would be to instead break down all barriers and close the projects forum for WIP episodes, but open it for project development instead, be it for single levels or longer games. Kind of like a workbench where people talk about certain aspects of their episodes or levels before they're ready to get feedback and ideas (uploading wip levels, gifs of levels, posting custom enemy concepts before they're fully fleshed out). The reward for finishing an episode or level would be permission to post it in the respective forums, and content on the workbench would need to be individual talking points, rather than entire episode plot summaries.

I'm not seriously suggesting this though, because the Design Feedback thread hasn't had nearly as much traffic as I expected. It's only seriously worth considering this step if enough interest for active, cooperative development and feedback is visible in the community. I'd personally LOVE to see this happen at some point, because people helping each other in honing their skills is something I like to be a part of, but I understand that a large portion of the community isn't looking to necessarily improve their skills but just show their creations.

I think there could possibly be compromises met if the outline of this workbench forum was made abundantly clear, encouraging suggestions and encouragements over formalities and technicalities unless otherwise requested (even if the latter in certain situations would do a better job at improving the overall product). Getting everyone to follow that would be an impossible task, but it'd be kinda incredible to just have a massive positive feedback loop which encourages people to keep working on their creations and makes them even more excited to share the end product with the community.

Even if this idea wound up being a success, I don't think it would fully eliminate the problem of high ambitions without good experience though. Maybe some sticky topics can help with that, but perhaps offering that, as well as a topic for people to come together and advertise themselves as potential teammates would help people develop contacts within the community and would work into helping each other out with their projects, which might lead to less failure.

Apologies for spitballing for so long. Would be cool to get some further input on this cause I know it's pretty ambitious an idea and perhaps someone else has different views and thinks perhaps it would be good in this community, perhaps it wouldn't. Like I said, I can't say for sure.

[aero]

From the perspective of me, a normal user, I see a never-ending flood of topics that break and ignore the rules, and I see users who give inapropriate replies (backseat moderation, or whatever PixelPest's announcement is addressing).

I've seen things from both the perspective of a normal user and a moderator and I don't really see where this "never-ending flood" is. So like framing wise for the rest of response is just on what I've experienced since I just haven't seen what you've said myself.

In some rare cases there are also people posting content with very bad design, e.g. lack of effort, cut-off, spammy mess, your 101th generic boss rush ... If something clearly gets rated with between 0/10 and 1/10 for gravely awful design (if you could even call it design), I'd like to have it sorted out too. These things are also a problem for well-meaning users ... on one side they don't want to be hurtful but on the other side they still want to express that it was basically an annoyance and a waste of time for them. Again, it's not a big issue and I don't know how much it even happens but I still wanted to mention it. It's also not entirely objective to draw the line, but as a rule of thumb, a bland plain grass level is undesirable yet acceptable, while a bland plain grass level with cutoff everywhere is not.

I don't really agree with this. I'm not in the camp of trying to get everyone to always improve their levels. The way I look at it is that SMBX is a game and people should enjoy using it and sharing what they make, and anything more ambitious is fine but shouldn't be expected. So say someone does post a spammy mess. That's fine, if it's not breaking the rules then nobody that doesn't want to play it has to. If people play it and find it to be an annoyance/waste of time then I'd just say that's on them. For people that are wanting to improve though, then it wouldn't be a waste of time at all to walk them through their own levels and discuss changes to be made. Someone posting troll levels obviously won't listen, someone that just wants to share their stuff may not be interested, but for the people that are trying to improve is where the attention should be at rather than quality control for the other two groups.

The benefits of topic approval are not exclusive to the public audience though. If moderators keep any wrongfully posted topic away from the public, they won't have to deal with backseat moderation or the reflection of whether delete or lock when there already is discussion.

Honestly backseat moderation isn't as big of a deal as it's made out to be. With topic approvals there would be more routine work for the mods than there would be cases of prevented backseat moderation so it doesn't really make sense to implement this.

Now what needs to be assured is that approval goes quickly enough, otherwise it becomes a nuisance for those who have to wait. If it can be deemed necessary to spread the responsibility on more shoulders, then a new usergroup ("level moderators" or the like) should be created, starting off with about 3 or 4 active people who take care of it together with the higher staff.

As Kley said this is just LJs with a slight change. The concept itself is doomed to fail because you have a limited team keeping up with a community and the community is then limited to the pace of the team. For this LJs and the proposed "level moderators" would be a bottle neck, and activity will inevitably slow down. Again the focus shouldn't be on quality control but rather ensuring people are enjoying using SMBX and sharing content. I really like Enjl's spitballing ideas, with some work they could be very good ideas for a proposal. Really the thought process shouldn't be "how do we assemble a team that makes themselves necessary" and should be more like "how do we maximize the good and minimize the bad." Off the top of my head, a good idea would be to reframe the whole level creator vs level reviewers dynamic into something where the lines are blurred. I remember a long while back there were some attempts at taking people's levels and improving on them then sharing them back. Something like that would be cool to see because it's more cooperative than critical, and holds true to just enjoying SMBX and sharing content. Of course this too is just spitballing and isn't a suggestion, but it's the direction of change I'm trying to get at.

[PixelPest]

In some rare cases there are also people posting content with very bad design, e.g. lack of effort, cut-off, spammy mess, your 101th generic boss rush ... If something clearly gets rated with between 0/10 and 1/10 for gravely awful design (if you could even call it design), I'd like to have it sorted out too. These things are also a problem for well-meaning users ... on one side they don't want to be hurtful but on the other side they still want to express that it was basically an annoyance and a waste of time for them. Again, it's not a big issue and I don't know how much it even happens but I still wanted to mention it. It's also not entirely objective to draw the line, but as a rule of thumb, a bland plain grass level is undesirable yet acceptable, while a bland plain grass level with cutoff everywhere is not.

Want to highlight that if topic approval existed it most definitely would not reject topics just because the content wasn't great quality. Some people work hard to improve and are proud of what they've done. Others may also just want to share something that they've made with the community. There's no reason to not allow someone to share something because it's "too uncreative of a boss rush" or "too bland of a level"

[Cedur]

Ok I'm late but I'd like to explain a bit further:

first off, scrap the part about quality control if you like. It's not that important anyway.

Now, "level mods" (moderating the three subforums and sorting out wrongful topics) would not nearly be the same as level judges. There is no judging process involved here, which surely was the most laborious and unthankful part about the position, which indeed takes a lot of time and which you indeed quickly get tired of. The main responsibility of LeMods would just be approving according to the rules. In most cases you don't even have to download anything to check if it follows the rules. It shouldn't be that much work even from my perspective and I assume there are other people besides just me who could be willing to commit to this. I don't think this kind of position is more prone to inactivity than mod positions are in general

[Enjl]

If anything, this job is covered by global moderators. Not that it's that important anyway. Try to spend less time getting upset over it.

[PixelPest]

Ok I'm late but I'd like to explain a bit further:

first off, scrap the part about quality control if you like. It's not that important anyway.

Now, "level mods" (moderating the three subforums and sorting out wrongful topics) would not nearly be the same as level judges. There is no judging process involved here, which surely was the most laborious and unthankful part about the position, which indeed takes a lot of time and which you indeed quickly get tired of. The main responsibility of LeMods would just be approving according to the rules. In most cases you don't even have to download anything to check if it follows the rules. It shouldn't be that much work even from my perspective and I assume there are other people besides just me who could be willing to commit to this. I don't think this kind of position is more prone to inactivity than mod positions are in general

So you're suggesting a whole other mod group just to approve Projects/Episodes/Levels topics? I don't see that as being a useful position to have. Levels topics are supposed to be one per user which makes it difficult for topic approval to do much, Episodes is not super busy, and Projects honestly isn't busy enough for it to need another group to handle it if thread approval was on the table.

Also quality control shouldn't be important at all. People should be able to share what they've created and not be disallowed from posting something because it isn't up to someone else's standards. There may be someone out there who really likes what they've made, or even multiple of those someones