The moderation on OTF needs to improve.

Before making this post, I had a large Google Doc titled “Ways to improve the current state of OTF,” and explained how members could make the forums better and of higher quality. I discussed topics like thread creation, spam, thread hijacking, and things we could all avoid easily to make OTF more enjoyable for everyone. But in the middle of writing, I stopped and thought about how the forums should be better moderated, which I’ll explain here.

On these forums, there are only a few rules. You’re not allowed to debate religion or politics, post sexual images, curse, spam, or attack others. The site does a great job, for the most part, of making sure that political and religious arguments are kept out of OTF, and does fairly well at making sure that the forums are safe by muting members, locking threads, editing posts, and much more. However, I think much more should be done about spammers, thread hijackers, and people who add nothing to the community except to be a pest. 

Spammers. There are so many of them, as we all know, posting meaningless content, counting to 1000, and so many of them create threads that encourage spam, thus adding to the problem. I think that most people would agree that these users should be muted on the spot for one day as a warning, and gradual punishment should be in effect as well. The same should go for obvious thread hijackers, who post topics that are off-topic and unnecessary. These repeat offenders who spam, thread hijack, and have nothing to add to the community seem to never be punished, spamming meaningless threads and posts all around OTF freely. People who bump 14-year-old threads and just say “bump” should be muted as well, no questions asked. Moderators and staff have to stop being lenient with these individuals and remove the heart of the problem completely. This isn’t to say that the community can’t improve, since we certainly can, but the mods need to help us out in becoming a higher-quality forum section by muting spammers with nothing to add, locking or removing threads, and not allowing threads to be bumped with no purpose. Thank you.

You can, but it seems like a waste of time to wait 3-5 days for a response because of a select few spammers.

I didn't read this entirely, but chess.com is a bit short-staffed. I mean, take larger companies for example, alot of them cannot moderate their website 24/7, and some things slip through. So cut them some slack.

They're too heavy handed on arguments and insults, and not heavy handed enough on stupidity that baits arguments and insults. Cc wants it to be this way and it won't change.

Well, that's some of the problem. OTF isn't paid attention to very much. At the same time, it's extremely easy to mute a select few users for spamming.

It seems that way. Though I'm more concerned about the level of spam here, since there aren't too many arguments here surprisingly.

Same with sites like tiktok, its easy for them to just mute the inappropriate accounts. But again, Some areas on tiktok and not payed attention to, you can check for yourself and see that some get overlooked.

I remember back in the day when OTF was still spammy, but still had meaningful threads.

Now we barely have any meaningful threads without it being a “Clubs and Teams” section, and just meaningless brainrot

Yeah but the drama on here gets real.

Some are…

There aren't any arguments because at the slightest start of any minor altercation people get reported and muted.

Completely agree!