In my time on ArchMC, I have lurked and wandered around the forums at times. Now that I am becoming more active, I have started to notice a big issue on the forums:

There is a distinct lack of moderation and rule-following on the ArchMC forums.

In the past couple of weeks and months, I have noticed way too many threads and posts that are ragebait, toxic, and lots of times even scams. 

Here are a couple of great examples:

• The most recent, Bloodstar_9's scams and manipulations, which Voxel's post goes over in great detail and extras' post exposes him - I recommend checking those posts out.
      

• The DupeRam123 fraud situation, which Zarif summed up very well here - Go look at this too.    
   

• Countless posts meant to diss and ragebait specific players, including but not exclusive to: almost every unranked beggar, plus thatonesweat, extras, and even me. Even if the original posters of these threads say it was intended as a joke, if the target of the post feels disrespected and unhappy, the fact that it was a ‘joke’ doesn't justify what was said.    

   

A big reason I think there is so much controversy on these forums is because of the lack of rules and rule enforcement. I looked over the biggest forums sections, General Discussion, Off Topic, Giveaways, and Survival for rules. The only mention of rules in these sections are for Giveaways and Off Topic. I couldn't even find rules for the forums as a whole.

I'll give credit where credit is due, the Giveaway Guidelines are pretty straightforward and easy to understand, and they outline everything you should need to know to host a giveaway. However, people don't always follow these guidelines, so there are still quite a few scams that occasionally happen in these forums, the most recent being Bloodstar_9's controversy.

The Off Topic rules are good as well, telling you what you can and can't do… but it's not a very detailed list. Something that stood out to me in these rules was the rule "don't make dumb posts like "who here likes tacos" or anything like that which users could just spam." This doesn't fall into my list of scams, toxicity, and ragebait, but I still see lots of posts that break this rule, such as this post, which the original poster literally reposted, creating spam. 

Here's what I think could help to stop these issues. 

The only general rules I could find in the entire multiverse of ArchMC were the rules posted in the Discord, which many users only glance at one time anyway. The vast majority of forums users aren't on the ArchMC discord, which is why they use the forums to communicate. These rules are clearly only intended for the actual server, and have nothing to do with the forums. 

What's my point? There aren't a lot of general rules for us on the forums to follow, other than our intuition. I would recommend at the very least, putting the rules shown in the discord here, on the ArchMC website, for everyone to access easily. Another step I would take, which is definitely a lot better, would be to post rules specifically for the forums, to the forums. This would make it a lot easier for the average forums user to know what they can and can't post.

Of course, this would all go to hell if it weren't for moderation. Oh boy, moderation. I have noticed a severe lack of moderation during a few of these controversies. Staff never jumped in to help sort out the Bloodstar situation. From what I've seen, staff haven't done anything to punish users that are being overly toxic, ragebaiting, and using slurs on the forums.

The solution to this? Crack down on moderation, and be more strict. If users don't see punishments for their actions, they won't stop breaking rules and ruining other's experiences.

In short, the forums lack in moderation, with too many controversies, and two simple ways to stop it are to establish general forums rules for users to follow, and for staff to be more strict with forums moderation.

Edit: 
Voxel pointed out in a reply that there are ingame rules posted here, although the only way to access them is directly through the link. Voxel also sent a link to the official ArchMC forum rules, but they haven't even been started, which shows that there aren't any general rules for the forums. The only thing there is “qwertyuiop.” No joke.
 

Thank you for reading,

W4TER

If I missed anything in this post, please feel free to correct me, KINDLY. If you feel the need to DM me on Discord, my username is fourxiv. (including the period)

lub u w4ter I agree to ;-;

I agree with everything here except part of the moderation section. Mods are active, but will usually only step in if asked to, like today, when Krnunch banned bloodstar_9 for sending an IP grabber link, or when zarif_ helped with the duperam situation. Overall great post and many of these rude posts could be avoided with ules clearly displayed.

With, faith, hope, and charity,

retrowave_17

Extras, even with clear rules for the server, people continue to break them. Since there is moderation, most people don't break the rules in fear of being punished. The same can be said for the forums, if there is no moderation, rules will be broken because there will be no punishment. My point is that staff should punish players without having to be asked. 

-W4TER

w4ter u see people dont rlly care abt being banned as they wud get unbanned in prob a week or so and then til that time they can just make new acc(ealger). 

Thas y people don't rlly care abt wat they post in forums :D 

Eragon

here is all that in one sentence 

hey AI genorator a bunch of random shit

Run it through an AI detector then. I just ran it through multiple and got 0% with both. 

I used these to check btw:

https://www.zerogpt.com/ 
https://www.grammarly.com/ai-detector 

Do your research next time you accuse someone of using AI. Voxel makes more detailed posts, and you didn't call him out for using AI. Plus, as far as I'm aware, AI won't paste links from outside websites into their text.

-W4TER

w4ter respond to me breh :( w4ter u see people dont rlly care abt being banned as they wud get unbanned in prob a week or so and then til that time they can just make new acc(ealger). 

Thas y people don't rlly care abt wat they post in forums :D 

Eragon

Eragon, there's a fun little thing called an IP ban that takes care of that issue.

-W4TER

I completely agree with all of your points, especially that there is a severe lack of active moderation and the rules are unclear. 

The only person I have seen ban someone on the forums without being prompted is GinTamashii, and even they only ban players for breaking the giveaway guidelines. If there were more staff active on forums these issues would not be so prevalent. 

In terms of rules, the rules shown in the discord can be accessed at https://www.arch.mc/ingame-rules, however there is no way to access them other than the direct link. In terms of forum-specific rules, the staff team planned to make them, but never finished (https://www.arch.mc/forum-rules). 

I think that some things that would help are to limit messages to one every two or three minutes, and to limit posts to one per hour. The forums are meant to be a place of community discussion, not as a way for two players to message each other back and forth. 

In addition, more moderation tools would likely help. Currently, the only way to stop someone from using the forum is to either ban their account (either temporarily or permanently) or to lock their post. There are significant problems with both. First, when you ban a player on forums, I don't think there is a way to IP-ban them. This means that you can just get around bans by creating new accounts, which is very easy because when creating an account, while the email section is required it doesn't make you confirm (I use this all the time to give ranks to alts, but I only ever use the forums with two of them). In terms of locking posts, the original poster can just unlock it themselves. Muting players, where they'd still be able to access their chest and the shop but not the forums, would also help moderation.

Let me know what you think of these suggestions!

-Voxel

I think these suggestions sound great, and reading over your response I thought automod tools might help, similar to those in-game and in Discord. For example, if someone types a slur on the forums, either their message won't be allowed to send, or their message won't be allowed to send and they'll get a temporary mute.

Thanks for your detailed response,

-W4TER

W4TER u see i think they dont Ip bann cause at schl we use the same wifi

so hypothetically if som1 did somehitn wrong to IP bann EVERYONE AT MY SCHLL cant play mc 

I think thas the reason y

Eragon

Eragon, IP bans are still handed out. I know a couple of people whose schools are IP banned. It's an unfortunate punishment for those who didn't do anything, but it still happens. 

-W4TER

As a mod, this is something I agree with. My superiors haven't given a single thought to any of this, and I don't have permissions to punish anyone via forums myself, and I'm a moderator. It just goes to show what they're willing to ignore. I'm pinning this so it gets recognized.

W3ter ur a great and trustworthy person and I agree to everything, even the part where extras disses everything cuz I'm a hater :sad: (which I'm not)

Also w3ter holy and w essay :P

REEL 

thanks navy :) 

agreed 100%

unbanned in 12 days unbanned in 1 if the “bloodstar bail” gets paid also not a scammer

Bloodstar, the fact that you're still trying to deny the allegations of your scams is just audacious, especially with the amount of concrete proof that extras and Voxel showed the community. Please stop trying to clear your name, it's not going to do anything. Accept responsibility for your actions and formally apologize. 

-W4TER