Revising the Community Guidelines
The latest and greatest on community changes.
After promising a slew of moderation changes, I’m here to release the first batch of changes to address many of the in-site reporting features and the rules that guide them. Let’s get right into what exactly is changing.
The Guidelines
Backloggd at its core is a logging and reviewing site, with the latter having a heavy role in building the community that exists on the site today. My goal is to foster that community into a place that feels welcoming and safe for anyone to share their passion for games with. But that doesn’t come without work, and that’s what the new community guidelines are built to encourage.
Generally, the rules laid out in the Community Guidelines are the same that we’ve been enforcing for a few years now, but are now laid out in a more defined and explicit way. We’re also moving away from the idea of a “Review Policy” as the behavior and expectations set in these guidelines should be expected across the entire site, not just in reviews. Numbering is also added to allow for direct reference when it comes to content removals (more on that later).
I encourage you to take a couple of minutes to read through the entire set of guidelines to reacquaint yourself what Backloggd is and isn’t for: https://backloggd.com/about/community-guidelines/
Reviews Are About the Game
The biggest policy change involves how we consider reviews on the site, so I want to go over a bit what that means here. Reviews were always about the game, they’re a way to share your experience, feelings, thoughts, and everything else you think about a certain title. So I wanted to clarify exactly what that means for reviews deemed “off-topic”.
A review being removed for being off-topic is only when it has nothing to do with the game or is considered meta. Meta content exclusively refers to discussion around site discourse, referencing other reviews, policy changes, IGDB content, etc.. There are other places for this feedback built into both the site and other social channels, but we shouldn’t be using reviews for this.
A different distinction that is being considered is when a review doesn’t suggest first-hand experience playing a game, but goes into a game’s topics instead. Let’s get into that next.
Rating Visibility
There is a lot to be said outside of just playing a game for what it is, games are another medium for art after all and with that comes a wide variety of discussion. These topics are valuable and I don’t want to hamper their existence. When a review is primarily about these larger topics, it creates a shifted expectation for what is a “review” and starts serving a different purpose away from “how does this game play”.
Get Backloggd’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
So as a way to experiment with this difference, we’ll be using a review’s rating as the primary differentiator for reviews with first-hand experience and those without. What this means is that a moderator can hide a rating for a review if it doesn’t demonstrate experience playing the game itself. Unlike before, the rating is not being removed, it is only being hidden from everyone but yourself when it’s viewed outside your profile.
This is not meant to be a punishment of any kind, but a subtle way for someone who’s browsing reviews to decide whether they’re looking for play experience or open to higher levels of critique. If you believe a rating was hidden in error, the appeal system has also been expanded to support ratings along with review removals.
Better Reporting
All these rules are only worthwhile when we can actually action on the reports that violate them. That’s why I’ve expanded the reporting tool to contain a primary and secondary report reason that link directly back to these new guidelines.
Having more thoroughly defined report reasons will help us prioritize the severity of each one. Before, moderators only had a chronological view of reports as they came in. Now reports will be grouped together with the highest severity reason pushing it to the top. This should help us address the most urgent content sooner.
Removal Transparency
Removing content is something that I hope most reading this don’t ever need to worry about, but I think for that reason it’s just as important that when it does happen, the process is as clear as possible. Now you can expect clearer UI for accessing an appeal, more complete banners / notifications when something is removed, and more consistent removal reason.
Moderators are now required to choose from a list of guideline policies that content is violating in order to remove it. This then renders the same policy back to someone who has had their content removed to give a clearer reason.
There’s always more to do with moderation, for instance I want to expand the new removal reasons to comments and lists, add appeal support to lists, and experiment with more proactive approaches to catch things early. I do think the changes made today will be a big step in strengthening the community going forward.
Quick note on the adult games topic from the last post, this was not forgotten but I wanted to focus on the current moderation systems first. I’ll be working more on this next month, so stay tuned on that.
Thanks and see you next in March’s update!
PS: I’ll soon be migrating entirely to Patreon for these updates so be sure to follow the Backloggd account there! You don’t need a paid membership to follow either. https://www.patreon.com/c/backloggd
