Mods

I agree. This game could be made or broken by louts if they are allowed to get away with deliberately ignoring the rules.

Rules are absolutely useless (a farce in fact) if they are not enforced.

I agree, this kind of stuff shouldn't happen and we could use some mods to take care of it please give us fair minded and just mods

Definitely we need mods who're on regularly and are active throughout the day (even for the European contingent)

Can we also perhaps add to the rules section regarding no swearing and include no abusive speech - given that we had someone log in and call everyone faggots today I think it'd be wise to clamp down on that sort of language before it can take a hold (so no racist, ableist or sexist language).

What happened to the filter that was in place? There used to be one, and I'm fairly certain that words like "faggot" were supposed to be added.

Would be nice to restrict public chat channels to English both to allow the proposed moderators to moderate effectively without having to learn all the languages, and to prevent this sort of spam:

The filter seems to change "cocked" to "penised", making talk about weapons considerably more sexual.

Also, it removes capitalisation.

Words like "encumbrance" and "cumulative" also get filtered.

I think in general, moderation and a culture of players not being rude or crass would be more effective than any automatic filter, and would avoid the multitude of false positives people have been seeing. This has been quite effective in games like Drakor and Illyriad. A filter can make the chat text PG instead of PG-13, but it can't actually make the game any more child-friendly (or for that matter people-friendly) since the trolls will quickly learn to work around the filter.

A couple of moderation-related suggestions:

1. Give moderators the option to mute or ban players by browser fingerprint, IP address, or something else that can't be circumvented by just making more accounts.
2. Prevent muted players from triggering a welcome message on log-in. Otherwise, spammers can repeatedly log out and back in after they've been muted.
3. Add a policy on character names to prevent offensive ones from being used.
   1. This policy should be shown at registration.
   2. A filter should be applied to inform users if their chosen name doesn't meet the criteria.
   3. Moderators should be able to enforce this policy by temporarily renaming a player and possibly allowing the player to pick a more appropriate name.
   4. Additionally, it might be good to give players an one-time option to rename their character. It can be quite difficult to pick an appropriate name without first playing the game and seeing what the gameplay and chat are like, especially since there are games similar to this one but with different chat cultures. So if someone picks a name that does meet the policy, but later realises that it's more crude than might fit our chat environment, they'd be able to pick a more fitting name for themselves. Besides this, it would allow players with unobjectionable names to pick a different name for other reasons: if there's someone with a very similar name in their clan and they're getting confused, if they made a typo, if they didn't realise this is a fantasy game and picked a sci-fi name, etc. As long as the option is one-time use only, it can't result in people frequently renaming their characters and the ensuing confusion.

Moderators should be able to remove offensive chat messages. The filter certainly helps keep some of the rubbish out of chat, but it's not perfect, especially after it was adjusted to let normal words through. Offensive chat messages lingering is especially problematic when chat is quiet, when a message can sometimes stay on everyone's screen for hours.

I do not think the powers that be are monitoring this thread any longer as they have it flagged as Completed

Fully agree with everything here :) Furthermore, as someone who is on the receiving end of harassment from a player(I've ignored them), and also of which still think it's funny and okay to mention me(maybe they stopped, I don't know), I feel as if there's been no punishment so the person realizes they are indeed breaking a rule(do believe they were muted once?), but they have since continually harassed(and yes it IS harassment when you still speak about them in any manner, in my eyes anyhow)...It is obvious from a screenshot above that this player simply does not care :( To me if someone continually harasses and/or makes trouble, why 1. Aren't they muted every time and 2. Maybe even banned...I am concerned that maybe there isn't a set number of times someone is allowed to break a rule before they are muted or a set number of how many mutes they receive before harsher punishment is given, or even that harsher punishment is given in the first place- There needs to be consistency and everyone on the same page...I have also noticed that others have broken rules and not a single thing done except an oh let's not do that, etc.(which is fine), but when they simply ignore that and continue to break whatever rule and not get punished, I feel that's a problem and it will only get worse if not taken care of right away- I really do appreciate all mods who volunteer their time into making sure things are taken care of, but I feel maybe things aren't quite defined within how to take action with things