I can understand a desire for more transparency in the reporting/banning system.  You can't really tell if a user has been warned or if a post has been reported.  At the end of the day, the constant trollers get banned and their final post is documented in their profile.  If you feel like more moderation should occur, you should probably report more posts.  

Remember, with great power comes....

special thanks to Kowenicki for letting me repost his costume. :)

I actually think there is too much modding in this site. Frankly, i rarely say what i really think because i think I'd get banned. The things i see people getting banned for are simply little stuff.

I believe the Mods are doing their jobs and I applaud them, but it's a little too strict sometimes especially about a certain console.

We need to redefine the word trolling because opinions have taken a backseat for it.
It's one thing to insult someone, race, religion, but How do you troll a console? and it's a double standard too, because people get to say whatever they want about some consoles, but it's trolling when it comes to another.

As is the case with pretty much every forum, if you've been here for a long time you'll most likely be favored over a user who is newer. The less posts and VGC $ you have, the less serious people will take you.

Listen to this man. He speaks from experience and knows that people tend to take you less seriously when your username ends in OOOOOOOOOOOOOO.

...And then there's Rol, who is the exact opposite of what you just said. :P

Thanks for the input guys!

I just find it a little silly when mods/staff members tell me that I shouldn't be angry about trollers not getting banned if I don't report them myself. I have nothing against the people who tell me this; it's fine, and it's true. What I do think is strange is that it should be my responsibility to "stop" these trollers and report them to the mods. The mods "sign up" to do this stuff, don't they? I don't understand why the responsibility should lie so much in our hands as well. It just seems tedious at times. Again I completely understand if we don't have enough mods and/or they don't have enough time to thoroughly get through everything, but I believe that getting more mods would help the situation. It's just my opinion based on what I know so far.

Then there's the fact that I get tired of reporting different users over and over, and not even knowing if I had any effect. Did the mods approve of my report? Did I help in any way? Was I too harsh?  I can't tell because we get no input. This makes the situation even worse in my mind.

I got so tired of it today that I took the effort to actually write up a rather....long.... report that was completely backwards and sarcastic. I was complimenting the poster on his "vivid words" and making such a beautiful picture out of the whole thing, when really it was an ugly post. I'm sure that whichever mod read that had a good laugh. =D

Speaking of which, are we allowed to share what we write as reports to other users? Or is that against the rules?

A lot of these complaints would be mitigated by improvements to the modding system that have been put on hold while all development effort gets poured into the black hole that is 2.0 - a history of mod jobs for admin to review, the ability to view a particular mod's history of job responses, and the ability to mark a post that has been reported and how it was dealt with.

With that said, VGChartz has always been a user-driven community, and the modding is no exception. Our moderators are the judges, hearing the merits of the case and handing out judgment and penalties, but it is the users who are the lawyers filing the cases (reporting posts). It is not a moderator's job to read every post ever written on this site, but to go through the reports queue and clear it out, while keeping an eye out for violations during normal posting activity (patrolling, as it were).

If you feel a rule violation is taking place without anything being done about it, contact naznatips or myself.

From my perspective, if you keep your critique on topic, and focused on the OP at hand, you SHOULD be okay, but quite often, it spills into personal attacks and comments on the individual, rather than focusing on the argument. This is nothing new or different from a political campaign or a big time fight news conference...were I think the some Mods could play a better role is to review the entire thread, better handing out a judgement.

The suggestion that more mods would be good is fine, and pretty damn true, but your reasoning is off.

You will never have enough mods for reporting to become meaningless and outdated because we are volunteers so we aren't going to browse through every single thread looking for violations, and we aren't asked to do that.

For me to find every single instance of trolling I would have to turn this site into a job without pay, and if you did that you would have no mods whatsoever.

On any given week I probably spend 7 hours doing things for the site between writing reviews, editing the reviews of others, and doing mod stuff (thankfully my least time consuming role), and I think that's about as much as you can expect out of a volunteer. Even if I spent all that time looking for trolling in the forums I wouldn't find it all, so reporting would still be necessary. Not to mention all of the game webpages and pages for sales that aren't usually looked through.

I don't think it's the Mod job to scourge thru posting to monitor for trolls, since this is a community based site, and we need to report violators, and THEN, a mod needs to take action, but it would be nice to always have a mod online...VGC is global, so timezones shouldn't be a problem...