I really feel missthreated and would like to report a moderator, someone could please explain me the proper procedure?
Short story I wasted one day debugging something I could not sort out. I searched the forum and couldn’t find a solution, or a solution up to date.
It was about serialization, there is not a specific forum about that so I posted in general, and anyway in general people ask about different topics as you can see.
I received probably valuable answers over night, this showed in my alert. Probably some of this would have helped me. But was overnight due to my timezone and I was sleeping.
The last alert was about a moderator just deleting my post together with all the answers that I could actually not read at all (motivation off topic, like there is a specific topic people talk about in general).
So I invested time posting and people invested time answering to my question, proably solving it/ helping me. All wasted.
I believe deleting a post is an abuse. In 30 years of experience on forums I never saw this happening, except when there was a verbal abuse or important misconduct.
The correct behavious in this case is closing the thread stopping people from repliyng or moving the thread to the correct forum. Maybe informing the author?
Actually I can’t even see who did what or who was the moderator deleting the thread with the answers, maybe one of the answers was out of the lines? Don’t know.
To prevent this from happening again I would like to report the moderator, does anyone know the proper procedure to do that?
Thank you for the first link, didn’t know this Meta-Forum even existed.
The second link is not related since it has to do with self promotion, in my case it was just a “general question”.
I assumed over the many years spent on this forum that pusers post in general when there is not a specific subsection of the forum dedicated to the topic
By the way, question is, how do I report the moderator behaviour? I’m writing with some Unity internal rep to try to sort this out.
Where did you post the thread? A lot of posts here get deleted for being in the wrong section. Usually support questions get asked in General Discussion which is clearly listed as not a support forum.
Serialization questions should naturally go in Scripting.
Normally generic support question are asked here in General, even if it is stated differently it is the way users approach the general forum.
The main point is that deleting a post with related answers, is considered an abuse and I would like to report it. Moderation can rely only closing a thread or moving a thread, except in special cases like verbal abuse/spam.
I have been a moderator myself and I’m sure that deleting a post and related infos for a slight OT is not the correct behaviour.
Yeah at some point we stopped asking people not to post in general about support subjects. Too many people don’t read the instruction, etiquette and the rules.
With that said, all moderator decisions are final. You can reopen your question in an actual support forum, like Scripting or Editor.
And you have a wrong definition of “abuse”. But if you insist on this false definition, all serious offenses should be reported to either other moderators or community managers. Which you would know if you bothered reading the Code of Conduct: https://discussions.unity.com/t/940149
@Lurking-Ninja thank you for the answer, even if a bit edgy.
For the first point, yes agree that’s how the general forum is used, it is a fact, and if my post should have been closed (not deleted!) then what about the other 100s post next to mine?
all moderator decisions are final → doesn’t mean that moderators can abuse their position.
About the definition of “abuse”, you can state your own interpretation but as a user and as a customer (that pays), the moment I feel missthreated there is an abuse. Point.
Thank you for informing I can repost, but like most of us here I have work to do, it is a pity the time I invested in posting was wasted and also the time other users invested in answering.
Next time try being less direct, maybe more polite please.
Dude, you don’t read or follow the rules, you got your thread deleted. Then you come here and accuse moderators of abuse. What can be more direct than that?
Even if they deleted your thread without you breaking the rules would be borderline questionable using the word ‘abuse’, especially for a one-time thing. But you know, where I’m coming from we respect the community to at least try to follow the basic rules and when I intentionally or non-intentionally break them I won’t accuse anyone but myself with anything, but I sure don’t run around accusing community volunteer moderators with abuse just because they deleted my rule-breaking thread.
The point is that deleting a post is an extreme misure that should have not been applied in this scenario. Thus an abuse.
The only tool an admin can use is closing a thread or moving a thread after explaining the user why this is happening.
Deleting a thread can occurr only in in edge cases, see spam / verbal abuse etc…
Every single post in General is slightly OT like mine was, but it doesn’t matter what is stated on the guidelines, this is how the General forum is interpreted by the whole community over the last 10 years, otherwise go and delete every single post on it (just take a sec and see what is posted, 100% are support questions).
It is on topic. Plenty of threads on this forum get deleted on a daily basis. Usually low effort threads or threads in the wrong sub forums. Sure it sucks yours was deleted, but it’s not abuse. It’s the norm in this particular forum.
So you are stating that deleting a support post in a forum where people only post support question is the right behaviour for a moderator.
Then you are stating that deleting only my post in the middle of 1000 support questions is the right approach.
And … you state that deleting is the right approach from a moderator, while he could have corrected things just closing the post or moving it, since at the end of the day a user is just asking for help.
In my experience on forums deleting a post is an extreme mesure and easily a moderation abuse. But I see you think otherwise.
I guess we just disagree, thank you from your opinion.
Won’t be judging in this case but it is a tad ironic that threads are strictly deleted/closed regularly… yet there’s no apparent effort to prevent the flood of bot-spam threads that actually reduce the usability of this subforum q_q
Guess mods and forum-devs are entirely different worlds?
Agree … that’s part of the reason why I thought posting was worthed the time … someone should look into the way moderation is performed all around the forum.
Serialization is a programming concept so barring it being a thread about problems with the editor it belongs in the Scripting section.
It’s happening here because the community is enormous. Most forums never come close to these forums. We are talking hundreds of thousands of active users and if even a tiny percentage of them felt that they could get away with posting wherever and making it the job of the moderators to choose for them we’d have a colossal mess.
Hi @Ryiah , actually I kind of disagree… the volume of threads is rather low. As you can see in the “General” section, there are maybe 3 threads started today.
The rest of the forums has very low volumes of “traffic”.
That’s also why historically people ended up writing in the General section. A lot of posts in other subsections of the forum gets unnoticed.
I sort of assumed we all agreed that posts unrelated to other subsections would end up under General, I know it is sort of a missuse of it, since it is stated that it is not for support.
But since things have been this way for years, I also ended up writing there, I thought that serialization didn’t have a propeer subsection (it is sort of off topic for “Scripting” since it is very specific).
To correct this, one should delete all posts under general and things would get straight in some months, but that’s not the way things are right now.
Anyway, In my past experience in pretty large forums, it has always considered rud and extreme a straight deletion of a thread. Also considered I had reply from people actually trying to help me, knowledge and time that got lost. (also checking your link the user felt quite misstreated… that’s what matters)
I see as you mention that there is only one pro bono moderator, but this is not really my problem, Unity is a pretty large company and this forum should have enough manpower to be run properly. we could discuss about this but would be OT.
Funnily enough, this is the only part of your entire thread here which isn’t against the Code of Conduct and not off-topic in the general discussion topic.
