#0 - July 9, 2010, 10:33 a.m.
Has anyone noticed that commonly with the European forums that whenever things get out of hand or major changes occur that the majority of control exerted by the CMs is a severe lockdown of communication, ergo with the locking of threads that even encroach upon the topic in question. Now I can understand if the instructions given to them were to confine the discussion to a single thread, which undoubtedly sounds intelligent in short term discussion. However as the lead community manager of a large forum elsewhere, this is already looking like a logistics nightmare.
Now, as has been stated by CMs prior, it is their job to act as the bridge of the community on the forums to the company as a whole, relaying feedback, especially in Europe's case as we've seen much more developer activity on the NA forums than here. By acting as the bridge, it seems prudent to want to keep all relevant information close at hand in the single thread, rather than chase down multiple topics to gather the wanted feedback which I assume Blizzard is after.
This is where our problems begin. By confining all discussion to a single topic, especially with the current Fully Threaded forum build, one might begin to understand as time goes on with no end in sight of the topic that actually compiling all the relevant feedback will become more difficult for the employees in question. Consistently with this issue, anyone who wishes to add anything new to the discussion would have a hard time doing so, as their opinion may of been echoed several pages back and again, several pages before that person also did since the common user would rarely seek to read such a lengthy thread on the off assumption that it is two hundred+ (and counting) pages of the same replies to the same replies.
Now due to this lockdown of information or the discussion here in, a lot of players on the forums are becoming agitated, besides the obvious reason for their complaints and threads, in fact I've seen many thread unrelated to the topic at hand being locked as someone else manages to drag the RealID topic into the thread and get it locked, prompting more outrage and more de-constructive posts. In human history, by denying enough people their rights you induce the mob into a frenzy, revolutions have formed over such things if you care to look at the history of several countries.
Comparatively, the North American forums seem to lack these issues, as discussion seems to be allowed fully upon the topic both inside their official thread and out and having read much of it you can also find more of their discussion is constructive compared to our sad state of affairs in Europe, why? Well for starters 9 out of 10 thread each page aren't locked and doomed to oblivion - and they still manage to get a few thousand replies to their main topic.
Consistency in the company? Perhaps you may wish to look into it, EU CMs, this isn't a dig at you but at the policies you may be following and it may be a time for you to raise the concept to your supervisors as an effort from someone who understands the issues of policing a very large set of forums, by denying and attempting to control the masses you are doing more damage in the long run that will eventually out weigh the short term gains.
