A great post, but a crucial point here - fans are going to dogpile on devs or Community staff the first time someone with a Bioware tag pops their head up. It's new, exciting and the chance to get answers to the deepest mysteries of the cosmos (or so how someone's mind will think). The second they see half a dozen Bioware people posting across the forums (outside of botmods locking threads), the rabid attention (of both adoration AND rage) will evaporate.

An ideal setup in my view would be moderators who are community based (and, hence, free). This worked in the past with the BSN and that was even before a decent reporting system that could better track abuse or misconduct, so it should work even better today. The stipulation that no one could moderate a topic they were actively apart of, but rather had to pull another mod in. There would be junior and senior mods as well, with more authority given to those who were veterans and shown themselves to be fair.

The Community Manager wouldn't be a policeman or try to speak to game development, but would guide discussion on the forums. This would range from asking fans about game features, talking about upcoming events, discussing interesting history of previous games or any number of topics. And developers would be the final component, where devs would be recruited (purely volunteer) to show up for scheduled AMA sessions, where fans could throw out questions or devs might join existing theeads to give feedback and where extra moderation would be present to squash any trouble. This way, you don't have your Lone Warrior dev who tries to "save the forums" all by themselves and suffers inevitable burn out, but rather a group of people who can come and go as they please, having fun in a engaging and fun manner.

To me, THAT would be a community that would truly offer what no other place on the Internet does - a feeling that you were interacting with Bioware. Any fan site fan lump people together to speculate about the next DA game's romances or what aliens we would see in ME:A... but no other site would have a team dedicated to promoting discussion about Bioware, something Bioware is PAYING MONEY FOR through conventions, interviews, commercials and PR spots.



But... no one asked me, so I guess that is a useless point.

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Which brings me back to my point - the mistake I believe you (and Allan) made was moderating in the first place. It becomes impossible to distinguish if you were banning someone for being in violation of the rules or banning someone for saying something you didn't like.

Not to say a use of power was in play, but that's the way it will always be perceived. And perception is reality - the only way to avoid issues is to wear your dev hat, say what you can, be consistent with message and then report those who you think violate the rules to a mod (and see if that mod agrees with your assessment).

Otherwise, it can easily stress you out to try to play someone's friend and someone's disciplinarian. And anyone that feels burned by the exchange will come at you, personally, instead of a moderator who is divorced from the situation.



Just my two cents.

Which seems terribly inefficient.

I am sorry as I stated earlier, I was not invovled in the OT forum thing, so I have no knowledge that I can share. 

I didn't moderate, and I nearly never do. The person that drove me off, was not banned by me. I believe since the new forums came online, I have given out 2 warning points and both were in threads I was not actually involved in.

The reason I do not moderate is 1) I do not want to be called out for censoring people 2) I do not moderate enough to have a typical baseline 3) I do not want people to have a perception that I am "superior" to them

Ha, totally understand that. I hate the fact that once a 'post' is a day old people have decided what the top comments are and all other discussion is basically one-liners in small comment chains saying how they agree/disagree.

Even image boards have a more structured discussion flow imo.

You are making a generalization about the type of people you would see. During ME3 I found the MP forums far more welcoming than the general forums. 

So am I to understand it that you would tell devs that they need to be there as part of their job requirements? Because that is probably not going to end well for anyone.

I believe those days are gone, you can look at the case of the nintendo employee that got fired for talking on a podcast for an example of "the dangers" of communication. 

When you look around at the industry, how many teams actually have people talking to people on a regular basis (outside of smaller companies ie <100 people)

You are probably right. Then again... how many employees at Bioware have their personal Twitter accounts monitored minute-by-minute from the stalkers here? Just look at Chris Priestly about how that can backfire when you make a personal post on your not-so-personal Twitter account.

I really don't see why people, as employees at Bioware, would prefer to be stalked online and NOT be open to having fifteen minutes in the spotlight session where they are the star of the Bioware boards for a night. I see just as many pitfalls in my proposed system as I do for the de facto one that exists today.