Fugitivus Discussion Forum

Mod voice: The ability to speak like this. Basically tis an idea that I have seen work to great effect on another forum that I am a denizen of. It very clearly delineates between when you are talking in your capacity as mods or just as fellow denizens. It also draws the eye to mod decisions within a thread (like a split or merge). Of course, with this system, the color of the Mod Voice is restricted to mods only and any breech is met with a warning and an edit.

It also comes in an attractive range of colors. But #BF0000 works best, in my opinion.

Hmmm. I wonder if it would be possible to do up an even more impressive version with its own background colours and make it a custom BBCode tag, like [modvoice], so it's harder for the average citizen to use by mistake. But then you'd need somebody on the mod team who can really hack phpbb, and I don't know if there is such a person, or how much phpbb they'd need to hack to do it.

I've never personally seen a mod voice like that used before, so I can't speak to its effectiveness and I have no opinion either way on whether or not it would be a good idea around here.

I believe I am a denizen of the same fora Kulantan refers to. I think that the ModVoice(TM) works very well, for the reasons stated in the OP. There's a difference between having a debate with a mod-as-a-normal-fora-member and a mod-doing-mod-stuff (warnings, edits etc). I think it's good to be able to separate the two.

This sounds like a really good idea. I'm in the process of trying to see if I'm able to monkey around with the settings to add something like this.

Since I can't reply to the test thread in the Moderators forum, I'll speak up here:

Ooh, shiny.

If you can easily add a highlight colour in addition to the text colour, I suggest you do that, because it'll give you absolute protection against accidental uses; normal BBCode can't do highlights. Of course, since normal BBCode can't do highlights, it'd probably be hard to implement...

(While I'm giving unsolicited advice to the moderators: Having a public mod forum is pretty awesome. I like the sense of transparency it gives. If you guys need private discussions too, and you probably will someday, I hope you make a separate forum for them or use an invisible-to-plebes thread setting if such a creature exists.)

Turns out, it would actually be incredibly easy to implement. Highlighting is one of the examples, in fact. Very good idea.



I'm glad you mentioned this. For some reason I thought the Moderators forum was invisible. I also like the idea of transparency, but I feel relatively confident that there will come a point where something will need to be addressed in a place that is for "mods' eyes only."

ETA: I did the testing in the Mods forum because I thought it was invisible, because I want to hide the ultimate name of the modvoice tag, so that only mods will know it. Just to clarify.

Yeah, I don't think that will work. When you quote a post all the tags in the quotes post are displayed in the "post a reply" box. So (unless you do some extra clever magic) I could just quote a post with the modvoice to find the tag for myself.

Thar be a lot of us

I'm going to reply to the discussion of mod voice in the Moderators forum again here:

The reason why I suggested altering the background colour is because the BBCode offered when composing a post has no highlight option. Therefore, the only way for an average user to mimic modvoice would be to use the modvoice tag itself; it would be impossible to do by accident, because there's no way to change background colour arbitrarily with the BBCode available to us. Under those circumstances, an instaban for faking modvoice would be much more clear-cut, because there would be no quibbling over exactly which shades of maroon qualify as too similar. Users could post in any shade of maroon they liked, and it wouldn't look like modvoice because there would be no altered background.