I have had a few of my posts deleted in the last 24 hours because they contained some information that the moderators don’t want the community hearing.
I have made sure not to post any of this information in this post in hopes that the moderators allow this post to stay so we can have a civilized discussion on the topic.
I feel that it is wrong and insulting for the moderators to censor the free flow of information. I come to CD to read about and discuss the latest news in the FRC community. This news should be no different then any other.
Bochek
ps. please don’t discuss the information the mods are trying to keep suppressed in this tread. We don’t want this thread deleted too.
The topic in question compromises a core element of how FRC works, an element which in my opinion plays a huge part in making it highly effective. I personally believe that it is in our best interest as a community, and as participants in FRC, to respect the structure provided to us by FIRST.
As a result, I support keeping the topic in question under wraps as much as is possible, in order to maintain the intended operation of the program. I don’t think equating maintaining the intended experience to censorship is quite right.
To discuss the fact that the moderators feel its okay to keep information to themselves. I believe that once something is found out about the game, it should be shared between all of the teams. Everyone should have an even advantage.
I am also a little bit disturbed about an entire thread and 10+ posts in another simply disappearing with no trace. It makes perfect sense that the site originally hosting the information would take it down immediately. But CD is a more or less unaffiliated community space, where we would not expect certain party’s special interests to be protected by censorship. If the censored material were related to some of the more important issues discussed on these boards, it would obviously not be OK to slant the discussion and community’s awareness like this. As it was, the offending material was relatively harmless and frivolous, and I’m not terribly upset. But it still gives me a little bit of a bad feeling.
It’s also my gut feeling that this is not a matter of consensus among the mods. For one, there are so many that there is likely never a perfect consensus to be found. But also, I think many of them would share the sentiment that removing these discussions is not something we want to happen. But of course it only takes a few mods who disagree to go ahead and take it down. I hope that they are not acting on behalf of the relevant parties.
EDIT: In the time between clicking reply and making my first post, several people made their own posts. Several have since posted as well (in particular, thanks GKrotkov for pointing to some relevant forum rules). Having had a chance to read these, I see a very strong case for the censorship as well. It is important to the FRC community to maintain kickoff hype and to abide by FIRST’s policies for information release. Jessica gives some great examples of past precedent that I didn’t make the effort to search out. Finally, I don’t think any mods were acting to cover someone’s butt as I made it seem in my above post. Their intentions are in fact in the community’s interest.
I’m totally fine with the information in question being suppressed. I just get a little shaken up when my posts go missing
I wont speak for all the mods, but it looks like I’m the first one to the thread.
Since the late 90s when Chief started, the mods have been pretty consistent in their actions. Any discussion that concerns leaking the game in any way gets shut down to keep an even playing field. That includes the time an image repository was accidentally public, any (serious) manual cracking discussion, people breaking into SNHU, and even discussion about the time some kid went into the rock climbing place across from HQ to catch a glimpse of the 3rd floor.* Now that I think of it, this kind of thread is pretty common too, if you go digging.
Kickoff is my favorite of the FIRST events because everyone is in the best mood they will be all season. Noone’s crabbing about rules, or who did what to whom, and everyone is well rested and optimistic. HQ has done lots of hard work all year long, we can wait a couple of days.
If you have an issue I recommend you speak to Mike Martus directly, because airing of grievances won’t get you far. It never really does.
*(Ok, that one wasn’t discussed, but it happened and I love telling that story.)
This is not new to CD. Any post that goes against GP, “critical” of volunteers or does not serve the CD community in positive way have disappeared. I don’t know the contents of this specific posts, but at large, moderators seem to be doing a good job in keeping the website follow GP and stick with CD forum rules.
Hey now, as someone who has made a lot of posts critical of volunteers and that have been called “unGP”* I’ve never had a post deleted that I didn’t request deleted. They don’t moderate to remove a side of the story they don’t want heard. They moderate to follow the rules we agreed to when we signed up.
When it comes to leaking the game early (which seems to be what’s being discussed, even though the OP doesn’t say so specifically) and “censoring” the information on CD, I think everyone needs to think things through a bit.
The FIRST community is really an awesome one. From what I’ve seen, most people in the community, if presented with the game early, wouldn’t try to gain an advantage by it. I know I, personally, would be super excited but wouldn’t tell my team - they need to go through the experience the same as everyone else, on a level playing field. However, there are some people (and maybe even some teams) who would take advantage to get started early. And frankly, we would probably never know unless they said something.
So if someone comes across non-public material (or material that is supposed to be non-public) about the game, they need to stop and consider how they want to handle that material. They could look at it, get excited, and bask in the knowledge that they know something everyone else doesn’t for a few days. They could use it to get started working early. They could simply pass it up. Or they could try to share it with as many people as possible.
The OP’s position seems to be that such information should be leaked to as many people as possible so everyone has the same opportunity to cheat. In my opinion, that’s wrong. The odds that someone will take the information and get started increase with the number of people who know such information - keeping it to yourself and not sharing helps ensure that fewer people know about it, and less cheating occurs.
Personally, I support the mods using their power on the forums to help ensure we preserve the format, intent, and purpose of the game and program. What are mods for, if not to actively moderate the discussion and keep us all in check? They aren’t glorified babysitters who are here to only delete spam posts.
The posts in question at this point in time may not have been by the choice of the moderators of this forum. If what was in the posts was credible FIRST may have contacted them telling them to take it down or face legal action. It sounds extreme but I wouldn’t be surprised if this is what happened.
There were certainly Chief Delphi moderators involved. Threads can only be removed by moderators. Additionally, my post in the game hint thread was not deleted by me, but by a moderator. Whether they were acting on their own initiative or at the request of FIRST or Andymark is hard to tell, and probably not worth speculating about.
All this transpired within 10-20 minutes, from initial discovery to cleanup.
Don’t be surprised. All GDC, FIRST Employees that work in the “Game Design Dungeon” and remote Kick Off sites have to sign a NDA and I would assume there are legal ramifications if there is a leak.
I’d still be surprised if FIRST reacted that way. I’d think it more likely they they dealt with it on a professional level and simply removed that person from the process. After all, look what happened when their biggest event was hijacked - the way it was handled didn’t involve lawyers at all. But it’s all speculation. I like to think the best of everyone until proved wrong
