Edit:
This topic has been now made sticky and moved to the tea room forums. It has also been closed since it has already served its purpose, but nonetheless the information in here are very useful and relevant when posting in the forums in general, and the tea room specifically, so please read it first. Thank you.
End of Edit

Dear playroom users,

We would like to address something here that keeps occurring on the English part of our forums in the last few months, and unfortunately has become more of a problem which needs to be resolved.
We would also like to hear constructive opinions from all of you, so feel free to contribute. Please stick to the end of this message, though.
For quite a while now, we have been observing that our forum is leading up to losing its actual purpose, and we think that the reason for this is because some of you are not using the forum the way it is meant to be used.
We are not only pointing at the "true or false" topic" here, and some of the very controversial comments in there. These comments can and will, in fact, be simply treated as abusing of the playroom rules, as has been already stated previously, and shall not be tolerated at all for the violent and provocative content, despite it not being meant seriously.
However, the topic is also a good example of what we are trying to say. Many of you are sending these and other comments as a result of being bored, having no valuable thing to say and not realizing or caring of the other readers. So to start with, in the previously mentioned topic, not a lot of people are willing to go through such messages like "the next person likes to eat human brains" several times a day, they are not considered funny, regardless of them abusing the rules once again. It is also worth mentioning here, that the challenging attitude of some people does not make them look cool, and we in fact can and will take action against you if such thing is repeated. answering with something controversial and obviously put in quote just to challenge the admins and moderators is not accepted, especially After explicitly pointing out that comments like these are not allowed.
But things do not stop here. Forum should serve as a kind of helping platform in the first place. It is not a place of short and spammy messages with vague or no content at all. This is rather what free tables are here for. Take this topic as an example: We are not implying that sense of humor is not appreciated here, but “Tearoom” probably should not be interpreted as free chat with no restrictions. We should mind the other people who use the forum in order to share their views, and who are possibly looking for some helpful information too. Which also brings us to another closely related example. Check out this topic: In the first post the author asks a question about Swamp. Without any mean to sound rude, the answer right after the question sounds as if the person did not care to read the full question and replied something well, just to reply something. The answer to that is actually unnecessarily spammy, and the reply that follows could be totally omitted. If I seek a solution for a game related issue, an answer like “don't know, it's not much of a game”, is definitely the last answer I want to hear at this point. This actually shows you that people do not read at all in some cases and do not check the dates carefully to know if the topic is even still alive, if you observe the tournaments forum, you will find many people signing up to past tournaments since weeks or even months.
Which brings us to our next point, tournaments. It is important to bear in mind that they are social events just like other ones, in spite of being organized virtually on a gaming platform. Therefore we should remain responsible towards the organizers, as well as the organizers shall respect our plans and take the challenge of organizing seriously. It is wrong to host a tournament without mentioning a format, date and time. It is wrong to sign in a tournament and then not to arrive without letting the organizers know in advance. When signing up, think of your real plans and whether you are capable of showing up at the given time or not. And lastly, the tournaments section on the forum is designed for playroom tournaments only, not for any other tournaments. To help you organize tournaments we have posted a helpful topic here, so go ahead and check it out.
These have been our views about the forum lately. We are now wondering if we should ignore such incidents for the freedom of speech, but on the other hand, what’s the fine line between freedom and responsibility? Should such spams and in some cases provocative comments be tolerated? Should old topics continue to be revived for no purpose or no useful answer just because the replier did not care to check the date or read the previous posts? What are exactly the actions we helpers can take? These are the questions we are struggling with, and with this post we aim to hear other people's opinions and suggestions about how the forum should look like and what actions should be taken to make it beneficial again as it once was.
Thank you for reading,
The English helpers.

The one piece of advice from the tournaments message that was missing was to see how tournaments work first and if possible to take a minor part in a tournament first and see what works well and what doesn't.

There are some language issues so I wander if it would be possible for a basic template/form for people to fill in such as date time, game etc if they are not able to write their own articles for new playroom tournaments.

On some of the lets say odd comments there should be a report link where if 2 different people choose to report the comment a message replaces that comment with comment 44 is awaiting helpers approval.

Not sure if it is a constructive opinion, but don't really know if the forum is losing its purpose, since there's a category called tea room... I thought we could talk of everything on there, of course, as long as it doesn't break any rules. I might be wrong, though. Now I rather think of the possibility either to be allowed to see more topics from the Windows client, not just from the web one, or also some option that helps you mark a topic as spam, then perhaps admins/helpers can decide what to do with that post. Also the possibility to close a topic wouldn't be bad, as for tournaments.

Hello,
thanks Marina for creating this topic, this is what I felt for quite a while regarding the forum already. Tea room or not, things such as "run checkup .exeeeeeeeeee" are spam and the rules clearly state, no spam. We aren't talking about limitting the topics you can write about, just responses which are not useful for a forum at all and are for a chat on a free table. Things such as lol, rofl, plus 1, in my opinion on a forum you should provide some more constructive points for a discussion and not one word posts.
The true or false topic has 400 messages, this is in my opinion just too much. Not only is it too much, it's now according to statistics the most popular topic. With such ridiculous responses on there, that should definitely not be the case.
So, in my opinion you should absolutely warn people who constantly do so and have a need to reply to each topic no matter how old it is just to say yes, right, I agree and so on. I know I certainly don't want this to become another Spanish forum. Nothing against the Spanish forum, they probably find this platform the most popular place to discuss and don't have too many technology forums so it works out for them, but when I read in the true or false topic a response that starts with hmmm, I don't know, it's clear you are posting just for the sake of posting and have nothing useful to say.
You can absolutely have interesting discussions in the tea room. Some of the great ones I read included topics such as your favorite accessible game characters. That's the kind of perfectly normal discussion in a forum. Even asking about a game, well, pretty much anything as long as everybody who responds pays attention and carefully reads the first post instead of just replying with something completely irrelevant. You already brought great example with Swamp. If I ask a question about something and how to fix a problem, it doesn't make sense to reply and say that what I am trying to fix sucks.
If a topic is about a Jaws problem, you don't respond with Jaws sucks, don't use it.
So I'm glad you are paying attention to this and trying to solve it, thanks also for adding the topic about hosting a tournament.
Best regards, in the hope of seeing less spam.

I totally agree with Nikola.
Yes Diana, there's tea room, but why to talk on the forum about topics you could talk at a free table?
We have this one too, then go there and talk.
I think helpers should clean up the forum by closing topics about the tournaments which had concluded already or even removing other topics which simply have no sense at all.
Ok, everybody is free to post there, but why to have such a messy forum?
Hope the players will understand the purpose of this forum and will use it better than they did before.
It is for our good because we like playroom and need to have it available whenever we want to enter and play or chat with the people on here.
I've thought yesterday it happened something with my account and because of it I could not enter. I've tried even via web. Then a friend had told me what to do.
It's absolutely unpleasant when we face such situations.

What is the purpose of the playroom and what are its objectives? If one of its objectives is to have a family friendly playroom then bad language and some of the comments should be removed as soon as possible and not left there for days. If you are prepared to let one or two things go then maybe only people who have passwords can see those comments and not the general public as it gives a bad immage of the playroom.

It is not possible to be bored as there are many games here now, perhaps it would help if people knew more of them and they would get more out of the playroom. If you are still bored then perhaps the playroom is the wrong place for you and you should look elsewhere for your entertainment!

Thanks everyone for your opinions.

@YNWA:
The templet can maybe be useful but if someone doesn't know enough English to write such a post, then I think it would rather be more of a help to turn to a friend who can help him/her manage the tournament, since it's not only about the post but they'll need to contact players as well. If you're interested to write it though I can open the topic for you to post it and then close it again.
as for your other suggestion, it is not something we as helpers can do, but even though I honestly do not agree, this feature will rather be abused more than it being useful. Imagine the group of x y and z are bored. So they decide to go mark all posts of q, let’s say as spam. That would be a spam to us, frustrating to q and not so helpful.

@dayan:
When we wrote this post we did not have in mind at all limiting people to a type of post or something, all what we are saying some posts are just spam, the same person who created the post about bots can get coronavirus made another very similar about bots as well. I think such jokes should be made rather in free table, not to spam the forum. And the other important point is the one word answer and reviving old topics which is annoying, there are some people who do not read the forum for a while, then they come and read all at once, of course that’s not a problem, but my question here why when you do that, you have to reply to every single post you read with “lol” “don’t know” “plus one” even though the topic probably served its purpose already, or even if it didn’t their message certainly did not help solving the topic but rather bringing it to the top for no reason.

@Nikola and @cristina:
Yes, that is what we are talking about, of course many of the things happening on the forum do not violate any rule, at least theoretically, but what do you suggest we can do. Should we talk to the people who do that individually? Or just or do something in the topic itself like removing the spammy reply or closing the topic? But on the other hand closing the topic is bad to the original poster if he did not get his reply yet. I don’t feel it’s right to ban them from the forum for such a thing either except if it becomes too much and specially that there are many users who tend to do such things now.

I wonder if is it possible to clean up the history of the forum?
I mean, to remove all those posts which are no longer important because the poster found answers to his question and so on...

You do not really want to do that, it actually might be useful for someone else having the same problem, specially that we have a search feature.

hello there!
I think humour which is funny but not offensive or outright disgusting or stupid should be allowed.
I don't know if this would be possible, but maybe some people could be banned from poasting in topics where they have demonstrated that they can't be mature, for example, the true or false topic, there was one person who spoiled the topic and caused it to be closed, so I think that one person should be banned from poasting in that topic.
These are just my opinions though.

I definitely agree with supremekiller here. There should be humour, but in decent limits. Also there should be a feature that would ban a person from the forum only for a period of time so they can understand what they've done and learn their lesson. A few years ago, I personally done enough bad things to get me banned from everywhere. Allthough that time I was mad and tried to evade my bans as much as I could, now, as I'm 19, I understand why that happened and how imature I was. That's exactly how other people could get banned from using the forum a period of time, learn their lesson, then come back and post decent, peaceful topics.

Well, I have an idea though it will require the developer to code the feature. Instead of banning someone, you should have an option to put their posts under moderation for a certain time period. What this means is that they can post, but before a post is published one of the helpers or administrators can approve or decline the post. That way if somebody is constantly spamming or reviving topics, you can warn them and let them know to not do that, but also pay attention to their posts individually for a while.

It is called putting them on report and that could be a useful helpers tool. I think other websites do that.

Thanks Nikola for the suggestion, this really sounds very convenient to me.
and Supremekiller, we currently do not have such option but Nikola's suggestion looks more convenient to me because it is not necessary that they do the offenses at a particular topic. We do have however, the option to ban the player from posting on forums.

As for tournaments, I would suggest that you have a moderator on the tournaments forum who closes topics when tournaments are over

No, I would suggest letting the OP close their topic, in the tournaments section only.

I think the idea of ​​moderating and rejecting posts is good!
And I think that you need to pay attention to the topic itself, it should reflect the essence of what will be discussed!
topics like problem, help, or history of messages from buffers and any such topic can only make it difficult to find the information you need!
I also think that separate fields should be added for the tournament section.
in which you need to write the time, amount, and additional information.
And if a person who wants to hold a tournament does not fill in the time, simply issue a message that he has not filled in all the fields.
Then people will remember about additional information, and they will have to indicate it.
I apologize for my English, unfortunately it is not idial, and I could convey some thoughts a little differently!

Exactly and that is why I gave a simple template sample to what is required here. Very basic but was the minimum info needed.

this feature, posts moderation maybe be bad, because helpers can have too many work because some peopple will be moderated,.
sorry for my English.

It should not be like that, if helpers do their jobs properly then the number of cases after the start where it could rise should calm down. We have a saying and that is if you give an inch then they will take a mile meaning people have done what they want because they were allowed to get away with it. It is about doing things properly and keeping proper records and remain consistent in the course of action that is taken and have a robust system that works for all. If people don't listen and action has to be taken time and time again then both sides of the system is broken.

We don't know yet how things will work and how the rules will work in practice yet, just look at video refs in football.

Exactly, here I agree with Ynwa. It was too much spam recently because it wasn't prevented from the start. As for moderation, keep in mind that I didn't say every single post should be moderated, that would indeed take too much time. This should only be applied when a helper chooses to do it for a certain member, for example if they notice this member has a habbit of reviving topics without adding anything useful.

I actually agree, but what prevented us to take actions in the past that such things, are not theoretically against the rules as explained before. We were always skeptical whether to take action or not until it became too much.
However, I noticed that even though the people who were usually doing such acts did not comment here, they definitely stopped for now since this post was written, which is actually a positive step. This was one of the aims of the post to discuss, we never said we will ban anyone, we were looking for opinions and whether people agree, and what are the best actions to be taken.
As for the tournament idea, I thought YNWA meant that we add a sample post under the topic created about how to organize tournaments. But on the other hand I do not really agree with putting this as mandatory because as I said, if the aim is to help none English speakers then I would suggest they rather ask help from a friend because it will make communication very hard in organization itself, not only writing the post. However as mentioned in the tournaments post, any post that does not mention these information clearly will be closed.

We have all had to fill in forms on the Internet and even the playroom uses such boxes. Statistics for example where you choose a game or if you want to find a friend's username so you can send them a message in their in-box so some of those fields already exist. My proposal which has slightly changed is to have a tournament table where people can visit there or find info from that room on future tournaments. From there it could be possibl to press space as you do now with Quiz party and fill in those boxes and a simple message as previously demonstrated could be printed out for us to read in the tournaments section.

Game
Individual/team
Number of players/teams
Date
Time
Rules
Hosts

For rules they can choose game options and those would be the rules for the game. Yes basic but least the minimum amountt required for a tournament. I feel sure I would be able to do that in a number of the languages here. I agree there should be more than 1 host and if none of them are unable to fill in this form then how are they going to be able to host a well run tournament?

That's not the problem, the problem is that hosting a tournament requires a lot more than just filling out a form. If you don't speak English, how can you communicate to other players and let them know the required information? You need at least some basic understanding of the language to communicate with players.

Yes, As I said such sample could be added to the post, but not to be a fill out form, at least here in the English part, we do need the organizer to write something so we can have a basic idea about their seriousness. it of course does not depend on the level of English, although that requires at least a basic level as explained before. But how the post is organized, whether the ideas are coherent that probably will tell you something about the organizer commitment, and the whole tournament. Standerdizing this process takes away this part and doesn't leave a place for creativity.

The percentage of players who applied for tournaments was quite small from the forum, most were from free tables or existing players from our friends list. Those who host successful tournaments are more willing to find those extra players. You are talking of vetting players I guess in an unofficial way. The way to go is tournaments could be classed as playroom tournaments and the rest would be tournaments. I know Aminiel is less keen on official tournaments because the complaints if things go wrong would go straight to the helpers as it would be an official tournament. The problem you have is with approved tournaments is more of the liability if things go wrong people may blame you. I can see what you are trying to do is good but you will get the law of unintended consequences either way.

Not really, this is not at all what I had in mind. What I had in mind is exactly Nikola's previous post.
Now about closing the tournaments that do not meet these requirements, it is never to say that they relate to official tournaments or any sort of thing, this idea was taken from the French part as explained in the post, and I find it to be very convenient to try to avoid failing tournaments and spamming the forum with topics like, Hello I organize x tournament join me. Without any information, and it does happen.
I hope you got what we are getting at. Having these kind of pre-written posts just encourages these users to create their tournament, which probably tells you it won't be a success, so it will give less credibility to serious organizers in the long run. You need to trust the organizer, at least with a very small act like a thoughtful post. Plus it encourages non-English speakers to create their own tournament which again won't be a great success if there are big language barriors, how is the organizer is supposed to communicate with the participents?

Perhaps we can all meet half way. I do think the idea of a guide to hosting a smooth tournament really isn't a bad idea at all, just to give people an impression of what is necessary in order to successfully run a tournament. But it would need to be more than just a fill in form, for the reasons that have already been mentioned here. Yes, giving people information like the date and time, tournament format, and the game rules is important, but far more critical are the communication skills, making sure people don't have to wait too long between matches, remindingpeople to actually come on the specified time, thinking about what to do if someone needs to drop out for any reason, or if someone files a complaint. A general tournament hosting guide can help with that.

So a template/form isn't a bad idea, and could be part of that guide, but not all of it. Personally, I am not in favor of having official tournaments and non-official ones. It should remain up to the organizers to make sure their tournament goes well. Where it gets problematic for example, is when players post topics where they announce they want to organize a tournament, and want to run it on the same day as the post. There's nothing wrong with spontaneous tournaments as such, but the forum isn't the best place to do it since the information will be very outdated after a single day. Private messaging people would be a better idea in that case.

I do agree a mixture of both systems will help a lot, Everybody will have different requirements and needs. Some may just need practical advice, others may need just someone to be there for support but what ever their needs it will not be just for adverts but the start of the tournament too.

I can tell you from experience that no two tournaments are the same and you can't predict what the issues will be even though I try to think of them all. In the last tournament I was getting messages from people, while trying to play in the Yahtzee tournament, (as we had to make up the numbers) plus getting scores from other games and writing down which group was player x going to play in the next round all at the same time.

Tournaments are fun but don't think you can just write a few words here, click your fingers and everything will fall into place. Those who are thinking of hosting tournaments have to be prepared to put in the hard work. You only get back what you are prepared to put in. Some of the advice already suggested such as smaller tournaments or choosing a partner who has some tournament hosting experience will prove very helpful to you.

Wee all agree things have to improve but those new hosts who are serious about hosting a tournament will need real help behind the scenes for at least their first tournament. I don't know much tournament experience the helpers have but the more experience they have the better because it is easier to speak from experience when giving advice.

Also I will have to help teach more games so we have a bigger choice of players for future tournaments.

So Ynwa, if you are aware of all these issues, why do you think a template helps? I'm not in any way against it, I just don't see what issues it solves and how it helps anybody. If you want to host a tournament you really should be able to write a basic post about it.