1. Ban AppealsAs you know, players often make threads about their bans and sanctions in the help boards. Even with the rules added in-game, there will be always users who will post threads asking why they were banned. My suggestion is to make a sticky with information on how to appeal bans. The sticky thread must contain information on how to contact a moderator and generally it should tell players to gather as much details as they can about the event, and also important things to include in their messages (nickname, date, reason and explanation from their point of view on what happened and why they feel that their punishment is unfair). Also, a note saying if they are still unsatisfied with the result, they can further appeal it to the Admins. I believe this will reduce to some point the threads about bans in the help boards. If it doesn't help, it doesn't hurt either.
2. Sanctions/Warnings sectionMy second suggestion is whenever an account is banned in-game and this account logs in the forums, a little message saying "Your account has been banned. Click
here for more information." should appear. The link will lead them to a section in their forum profile with sanctions and warnings. The section will contain information about the type of the sanction, the reason, the duration and when does it end. The only problem I can see for the staff is the amount of time they will have to waste sending sanctions and typing the reasons, the duration and the end date of the ban. Though, even with the many rulebreakers we have it shouldn't take much time, so it's worth a shot. I know Raz is quite busy and he's currently working on the site, but it would be amazing to implement such addon in the forum.
3. "Report to moderator" functionAs many of you may know, there is a little function (which every user can use) called "Report to moderator". It can be seen in every single post made in threads. I have a few questions to the staff regarding this feature, so here they are:
- Should we use this function to alert moderators for "solved" threads (or for threads they have missed to lock) in the Help Boards?
- Should we use this function to alert moderators for a user who is double-posting?
- By "wrongly posted message", do you mean posts accidentally posted in threads?
To move to my next question, see this image first:
So, what will happen if a user edits the "[Edited by moderator]"? And why don't you instead moderate such posts by removing the content, make the post uneditable (if possible) and type
[Moderated by mod, reason: Cussing]?
Also, do you remove double-posts (the second post)? If not, it would be great to moderate them with red text.
Thank you for your time, I really appreciate it!