That'd be rather strange, since as Lauront pointed out it's their forum and they're fully in control of it. If they want to clean the place up they absolutely have the power to do so.
Printable View
In this forum are maybe 12-15 consistent posters. And of them are maybe 1-3 very vocal people who dislike zep for the controversial over hogwarts legacy or for quitting. And if she Says something that's in anyway opinionated then yea.. People out if hate for her will say black is white.
- as a side note btw. My old fc through out 3 members who played hogwarts legacy and stalked the others who left over it-
I really hope they do. It's s toxic mess.
I recently voiced my opinion in the recent community dev post.
At the end of the day, I read these forums for ideas and information. But when it's spammed by ppl like totanmrn, stormpeaks etc I just don't want to read anymore.
Very bad look for SE tbh.
I agree, in principle at least - as the emphasis has to be on "properly".
I've said this before, but I was permabanned from the forum of another game for expressing a negative opinion - I commented that the CM of said game needed to learn how to use a spellcheck and how to proof-read his sloppy blogs and news posts (since they were/are always filled with spelling errors, poor grammar, and incorrect dates), and actually learn how to make a professional looking customer-facing product. I also noted that there wasn't really any viable excuse for said CM's work to be so sloppy after six years and a promotion.
My forum account there became inaccessible a few hours later. Truth hurts I guess - but a friend, who still plays that game, still sends me links to the blogs the CM of that game produces and they're just as sloppy and unprofessional as ever, and the Devs of that game don't seem to mind demonstrating, via Twitter, their disdain for anyone who dares say anything negative about them or their game.
That sort of thing is probably why some do take to Reddit - to express opinions that forum moderators may not/won't tolerate.
I do think that there is a large amount of territory that lies between the extremes of what would be considered under moderated or over-moderated and I'm not sure many forum moderators (anywhere) are great at finding that balance.
As I see it, their role is to just make sure discussion is cordial and respectful, and largely stays on track. Their job is not to police opinions and there's elements of the TOS which are less than ideal in that respect, which fall into the kind of scenario you mentioned. Problem is, the exact same issue exists on reddit and to an even worse degree in terms of how capricious and opaque the moderation can be over there, coupled with moderators being responsible for multiple subreddits which are meant to nominally be independent of one another. And that's not even getting into the active userbase attitudes there. It's an independent site so maybe there's less of a reasonable expectation for fair moderation there (although equally it just sours my view on it that much more), but if this site is not well moderated there is ultimately only one party to blame. And I largely refuse to cut them SE slack for avoiding this place (other than to supposedly collate feedback) since it is one of their own making, plus they're fine visiting sites which have even more hostile environments for this. I don't think a forum is even an ideal way of harvesting feedback when tools like surveys exist, but sometimes they may end up asking the wrong questions in those so a forum can help course-correct. If SE is resigned to just not bothering with this site beyond obtaining summaries then so be it, but the decision lies at their feet.
Really, do you think any of that is necessary given the info they likely hold on your account already and can cross-check across accounts through firmer data they hold? If they wanted to do any of it, they could. I don't think they really care all that much.