Minecraft Name: Falconaire Suggestion: To remove forum ratings from the Ban Appeal/Complaint section of the forums. Reason: Forum Ratings on Complaints, Ban Appeals, and their comments have become increasingly prevalent over the past few months. Usually these Ratings have no benefit towards the investigation besides trolling/negativity. If the playerbase doesn't agree with something, they'll rate the Ban Appeal/Complaint "Creative", and if they do "Agree", "Winner", etc. However, there's really no point to this except, as stated before, trolling and negativity. IMO, it takes away from what this section is really for; reporting rule breakers and trying to be unbanned. Forum Ratings do not help this purpose at all, and instead can seriously offend players. Any Other Information: I've seen similar Suggestions made before, but most revolve around removing a certain rating. Xenforo allows you to "whitelist" forum ratings so you can't rate posts in certain sections of the forums. I believe this should be implemented to prevent the increased trolling and negativity that can be found in the Ban Appeal/Complaints section. Link To This Plugin: http://xenforo.com/community/resources/post-ratings-taking-likes-to-the-next-level.410/, scroll down to "Admin Interface". Possible Alternative: Dork made a good point in the shoutbox; ratings of agreement/support are usually fine. The majority of trolling is in "Creative" ratings. Instead of removing ratings from the section altogether, you could simply disable "Creative" ratings specifically. Just an alternative that could be considered.
I think it's a good idea. Since players are not allowed to comment on bans/complaints they are not directly involved in they, instead, rate in the manner Falconaire described above. Even though I'm sure it doesn't affect the outcome of the ban appeal/complaint, it can definitely be harmful to a certain extent for the users involved. Ratings, in this forum, are of no use whatsoever. I think that getting rid of them will do more beneficial than keeping them, for all of the ECC community. *Edit: I'll demonstrate what Falconaire is talking about with the post above mine.
-1 Ratings are there for a purpose, let's say someone that claims he doesn't hack and multiple complaints have been dismissed and then suddenly a complaint happens where that person gets banned. I would want to rate it winner just because that person managed to catch him. Or maybe if someone had written out a perfect complaint/appeal, doesn't it deserve to be rated by others. For me I believe it does, reason to be that the person spent a lot of time and effort into it, just as if it's a staff application. While they may be used for trolling, the majority of the community do not use them to troll others. If you're one of those guys who hate a few trolls then simply ignore them. It isn't that hard.
7amoodw, I understand your point, but I only agree with it to a certain extent. I usually don't have a problem with players agreeing with Complaints or Ban Appeals through ratings, but often times the ratings are very opinionated and not true. For example, many Complaints get dozens of ratings, only to find out that the Complaint was invalid and then dismissed. But yes, I agree that ratings of support usually aren't bad, though I don't think there's a point to them. I don't have a problem if specific ratings like "Winner" and "Agree" stayed in the Ban Appeals/Complaints section. However, your point on trolling is invalid. Ignoring a player on the forums does not ignore their ratings. So if you ignore a player that gives you a Creative rating, the rating is still there, and you can still see it. In addition, the actual trolling wouldn't disappear even if they were ignored. The community is still openly attacking the player's words in a place this kind of negativity/trolling is 100% unneeded. Now, I also put a compromise in the suggestion in my previous edit, I think you may find it preferable to the original suggestion, I've quoted it below.
I think if we're to change the ratings there, we should only keep agree if any at all. If the thread doesn't involve you then agreeing shows your support. That's really more than anyone needs to know anyways because it is something the staff has to make an decision on... Why make it harder for them because there is a unanimous community opinion? Let the staff do what they do without needing to be biased based on what we rate the posts. Sent from my NX008HD8G using Tapatalk
You see gernen, he makes false pointless baseless complaints against people (me) to get ratings and troll the staff. And apparently brags about it in the forums. BRILLIANT
See I give this a +1 and a -1 for a couple of reasons. When someone complains about something, such as a hacker, and people agree they aren't allowed to post that or they get warned, using some of those ratings are the way they can show that they agree (an example of this was a complaint on lolelf for hacking that like many people agreed with). I do agree though that some aren't needed and also can be used to troll or annoy others, and at sometimes they aren't needed.
