topic Re: Moderators, please read! :) in SmorgasBoard

Moderators, please read! :)

Anonymous — Fri, 03 Oct 2014 21:36:46 GMT

Please, let me first start off by saying that I do like all of the Mods here. I believe that you are all professional and non-discriminatory towards others and thread topics alike! I value all of your opinions and welcome your veteran feedback when you offer it!

This post is simply a small gripe and I will keep this as professional as possible. I have been a member of these boards for many years and have contributed to more threads than I can calculate on paper. So, as of recent (within the last year) it has been more apparent that The MyFico forums are becoming more and more "moderated". What do I mean by this? Well, to start, in my humble opinion I believe we are having entirely too many threads moved to other forums and/or locked. Yes, this particular forum is about credit cards and it should stay that way! But, we have a lot of members of this community who have left these forums because of how strict it is becoming! We have had some amazing times on here and sometimes change is inevitable, however I don't believe that this forum is changing for the better.

Do we really need 20 threads about Nasa FCU? Well, Yes! We do! Why? Because each thread brings new life and new ideas to this forum along with new information. No need to send these posts to smorgasboard because when you do this it frustrates us and sends good new ideas away. The whole purpose of a forum is to feed off of others and educate one another and when you shut down our threads it shuts us down! Now, I can see yourself saying "Moving the thread is not shutting it down" but the credit card forum is probably one of the most popular credit forums on the web! So by saying you're sending it to smorgasboard to "Get more exposure" you're really not because smorgasboard isn’t nearly as popular hence it doesn’t have the traffic that this forum does.

We have lost a lot of common veteran posters to this forum in the last year due to certain moderator practices which have made the credit card portion of MyFico less appealing as it once was. I know this because I talk to a lot of them on other forums now and through email exchange.

When you see 15 threads about one card, what does this tell you? It says WOW! Something is hot! Something is new! What is it!? So, you'll search and read and that’s fun! So, please mods, stop moving our posts, stop "shutting down" our posts. If we need to find something in the credit forums, we can simply go to the search bar and search for it, no need to move it!

I know all will agree that we like you guys and gals! We also respect you so I hope you will respect this coming from a veteran here, please tone it down J

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Re: Moderators, please read! :)

Anonymous — Fri, 03 Oct 2014 21:41:26 GMT

Don't know if this forum is different, but having been a moderator on other boards we could see your IP Address and your other accounts. I only say this because you obviously wanted to be anonymous.

Re: Moderators, please read! :)

Anonymous — Fri, 03 Oct 2014 21:43:01 GMT

@Anonymous wrote:
Don't know if this forum is different, but having been a moderator on other boards we could see your IP Address and your other accounts. I only say this because you obviously wanted to be anonymous.

+1 to that.

Re: Moderators, please read! :)

HeilFico — Fri, 03 Oct 2014 21:47:37 GMT

Moving topics to where they belong is part of "forum life". This is how things are done in all forums not just here. I for one hate seeing 20 threads for the same thing....its really unnecessary.

Re: Moderators, please read! :)

red259 — Fri, 03 Oct 2014 21:59:26 GMT

@Anonymous wrote:
Please, let me first start off by saying that I do like all of the Mods here. I believe that you are all professional and non-discriminatory towards others and thread topics alike! I value all of your opinions and welcome your veteran feedback when you offer it!

This post is simply a small gripe and I will keep this as professional as possible. I have been a member of these boards for many years and have contributed to more threads than I can calculate on paper. So, as of recent (within the last year) it has been more apparent that The MyFico forums are becoming more and more "moderated". What do I mean by this? Well, to start, in my humble opinion I believe we are having entirely too many threads moved to other forums and/or locked. Yes, this particular forum is about credit cards and it should stay that way! But, we have a lot of members of this community who have left these forums because of how strict it is becoming! We have had some amazing times on here and sometimes change is inevitable, however I don't believe that this forum is changing for the better.

Do we really need 20 threads about Nasa FCU? Well, Yes! We do! Why? Because each thread brings new life and new ideas to this forum along with new information. No need to send these posts to smorgasboard because when you do this it frustrates us and sends good new ideas away. The whole purpose of a forum is to feed off of others and educate one another and when you shut down our threads it shuts us down! Now, I can see yourself saying "Moving the thread is not shutting it down" but the credit card forum is probably one of the most popular credit forums on the web! So by saying you're sending it to smorgasboard to "Get more exposure" you're really not because smorgasboard isn’t nearly as popular hence it doesn’t have the traffic that this forum does.

We have lost a lot of common veteran posters to this forum in the last year due to certain moderator practices which have made the credit card portion of MyFico less appealing as it once was. I know this because I talk to a lot of them on other forums now and through email exchange.

When you see 15 threads about one card, what does this tell you? It says WOW! Something is hot! Something is new! What is it!? So, you'll search and read and that’s fun! So, please mods, stop moving our posts, stop "shutting down" our posts. If we need to find something in the credit forums, we can simply go to the search bar and search for it, no need to move it!

I know all will agree that we like you guys and gals! We also respect you so I hope you will respect this coming from a veteran here, please tone it down J

This message and any attachments may contain confidential or privileged
information and are intended only for the use of the intended recipients
of this message. If you are not the intended recipient of this message,
please notify the sender by return email, and delete this and all copies
of this message and any attachments from your system. Any unauthorized
disclosure, use, distribution, or reproduction of this message or any attachments is prohibited and may be unlawful.

Honestly I don't think the mods are out of control. I think its a little excessive that credit card approvals need to go into their own thread. Seriously I can't recall having ever gone to read that thread. Having a question about a business credit card moved to the business forum where there are a lot fewer views and much less feedback and also a bit much. The overly restrictive rules on referrals seems like they could be reworked as well. That being said I don't think the mods decide any of this stuff and its all policies from myfico. I have been on other boards that get really nasty where people bite your head off for asking a question and seek to intimidate anyone they can. Thankfully the people here tend to be helpful and supportive for the most part. The trolls are kept at bay in large part due to the actions of the mods and I am thankful issues like politics are not discussed here. I haven't noticed a huge number of threads being locked here. And to be quite candid I don't want to see 20 different threads about NASA. Its obnoxious when I load up the front page and its dominated by a product I am not interested in. There is no need to constantly start new threads about a card when you can just add to the current thread. This also makes it easier for the people who are interested in the card to find all the information in one place instead of going from thread to thread etc.

Re: Moderators, please read! :)

coldnmn — Fri, 03 Oct 2014 22:00:06 GMT

@HeilFico wrote:
Movin topics to where they belong is part of "forum life". This is how things are done in all forums not just here. I for one hate seeing 20 threads for the same thing....its really unnecessary.

+1 and having the approvals in a separate place makes It easier than when it was included in credit cards.

Re: Moderators, please read! :)

Anonymous — Fri, 03 Oct 2014 22:08:37 GMT

@coldnmn wrote:
@HeilFico wrote:
Movin topics to where they belong is part of "forum life". This is how things are done in all forums not just here. I for one hate seeing 20 threads for the same thing....its really unnecessary.
+1 and having the approvals in a separate place makes It easier than when it was included in credit cards.

Yes, the moving of approvals really improved the readability for me. (And I don't miss anything as I never felt the need to read people I don't know congratulating other people I don't know on getting a credit card!)

Re: Moderators, please read! :)

red259 — Fri, 03 Oct 2014 22:13:38 GMT

@Anonymous wrote:
@coldnmn wrote:
@HeilFico wrote:
Movin topics to where they belong is part of "forum life". This is how things are done in all forums not just here. I for one hate seeing 20 threads for the same thing....its really unnecessary.
+1 and having the approvals in a separate place makes It easier than when it was included in credit cards.
Yes, the moving of approvals really improved the readability for me. (And I don't miss anything as I never felt the need to read people I don't know congratulating other people I don't know on getting a credit card!)

True.... I think the value of credit card approval posts is that if you are early on in the process and you want to get a sense of your chances of getting approved for a card it is helpful to see what happened with the apps of others who may be similarly situated. If you have a thicker profile or are not apping then the information does not have much value.

Re: Moderators, please read! :)

jsucool76 — Sat, 04 Oct 2014 00:16:03 GMT

Having the credit card approval threads in their own board also stops the "I GOT APPROVED" threads from pushing the actual questions to page 2 and beyond. the 900 "congrats" posts always kept the approval threads at the top. I think people are far more likely to get a quick answer to their questions now without the need for 1 or 2 "bumps" in their thread.

Re: Moderators, please read! :)

Anonymous — Sat, 04 Oct 2014 00:18:12 GMT

@jsucool76 wrote:
Having the credit card approval threads in their own board also stops the "I GOT APPROVED" threads from pushing the actual questions to page 2 and beyond. the 900 "congrats" posts always kept the approval threads at the top. I think people are far more likely to get a quick answer to their questions now without the need for 1 or 2 "bumps" in their thread.

And as a potential benefit, it might cool down the "I must app" fervor, fueled by "Jack got card X, and my scores look pretty similar to his so I will app too [even if the card makes little sense and apart from the score my profile is nothing like his]" Potential, because those so addicted probably go to the approval forum anyway!

Re: Moderators, please read! :)

dollar_bill — Sat, 04 Oct 2014 00:47:12 GMT

@Anonymous wrote:
Don't know if this forum is different, but having been a moderator on other boards we could see your IP Address and your other accounts. I only say this because you obviously wanted to be anonymous.

Hopefully he addressed the IP issues so a mod doesn't know about other accounts. Hillarious if he thought a new handle would make him invisible.

Re: Moderators, please read! :)

SunriseEarth — Sat, 04 Oct 2014 00:50:42 GMT

Since this thread has nothing to do with CCs, I'd move this to Smorgasboard, if I were a Mod.

Re: Moderators, please read! :)

eddie84 — Sat, 04 Oct 2014 01:13:15 GMT

Mods are doing excellent job here imho. Moving, consolidating threads, etc are the norms for most online forum/community. As a matter of fact, I've been to other forums where they're more strict. lol This is nothing.

Oh and yes, move to SmorgasBoard please... don't make me press that report button.

Re: Moderators, please read! :)

bigblue7722 — Sat, 04 Oct 2014 01:23:03 GMT

I think that the mods should change the credit card approval forum from having posts that say congrats to a Data input spreadsheet.

I would like to see things like:

1. Income

2. credit scores accross all three boards or which everone they know

3. inq past 12 months

4. New accounts past 12 months

5. Credit utlization

6. have a section for comments

I would allow the user to be anonymous if they want.

Then i would take that data input it into a spread sheet, im sure a computer program can do all of the work, so then people can see the averages. Now that would be a heck of a lot more helpful than a bunch of people saying congrats.

Re: Moderators, please read! :)

ezdoesit — Sat, 04 Oct 2014 01:25:37 GMT

It is funny that for everything he wrote that nobody agreed with anything he said. That nobody thought he made any valid points. Sounds like some people I work with and then telling the boss that everything he does is great.

He never insulted the Mods. I would think they would want constructive critism for them to learn from as long as it is respectful. I don't know how long this forum has been around but I am sure that it has grown from how it originally started based on feedback from forum members.

Maybe he did hide his IP address but I don't understand why he would I would think if he felt this way he should have the courage to just say his piece and deal with the consequences if there really would be any.

Re: Moderators, please read! :)

Revelate — Sat, 04 Oct 2014 01:43:07 GMT

Two outstanding general comments, well threeish:

1) Leaving this thread here, people can peruse it in all it's glory.

2) I don't care about finding out who specifically is ranting, life is too short, and we've never banned anyone for critiquing practices on the forum, why would we start now? The current moderator group is pretty level headed frankly and not prone to lopping people's heads off.

3) Hiding behind some "anonymous" account is dubious at best, and certainly is no way to get respect for the opinion being posted.

That all said, I will give my opinion on what was posted, first as a general forum member, and secondly as a volunteer moderator.

Speaking as a generic user, it is awkward to find information on this forum. The search interface leaves much to be desired, the post volume is high, and things get knocked off the first and sometimes second pages quickly. Lithium isn't graceful in it's handling admittedly, but I'd challenge anyone who's ever been a part of another forum community to find one that handles things differently: information must be sorted into a heirachical fashion (even if it's only one level here) or it simply gets lost in the weeds. I would suggest it's an easy problem to see when Google is better at turning up search results on this forum than the Lithium native one is.

Scrolling through a bunch of congrats/approval/social messages, makes it hard to navigate. I find it difficult to do so and I have plenty of experience on these forums based on my post count and minutes online.

As a moderator: here's a simple request - offer solutions. Saying that we should simply abdicate everything and let posts sit where they get posted, isn't a solution. Give us something better.

For example, it might make sense to split Credit Cards out further, and put anything relating to a CC application into it's own category or toss it all into what's currently labelled CC Approvals, and create a more "social" board with a simple relabling of the board name, and relax the restrictions on what gets posted there rather than having the seperate GAS board which admittedly doesn't work all that well in my opinion. That would leave CC as a more information-oriented forum, and the CC Applications board as the social one since likely 80% of the non-RYC community revolves around people's successes and failures tied to credit card applications.

Another one might be to take the BK board, which doesn't get a ton of traffic, and consider consolidating it with Rebuilding. Or taking the Garden Thread, and sticking it somewhere, maybe in a board with the underserved FICO Fitness Challenge and some other bit here or there to keep eyeballs on it. Or maybe take both of those, stick them in the theorized CC Applications social board, sticky them, and just let them be in the free for all as well.

Business credit used to be more relevant, now I don't know. Maybe that deserves to get folded back into CC's as the bulk of the questions are on business credit cards with hardly anything on other business credit types, especially as the line is being blurred for sole proprietorships and no lender seems to care: I'm getting business card pre-approval messages from banks that never send me offers as a personal consumer and my silly referee income is maybe 10K a year when I'm not quite half-assing it.

Those are potentially constructive ideas: complaining without offering something on how we can make it better is likely to get ignored.

NASA FCU: that whole thing proved cluster was only half a word. Yup, I get people were excited, and maybe there was a better way to handle it, but having the 20+ threads all on the first page to the exclusion of everything else... no. We didn't have time to use the scalpel (especially with people getting legitimately offended over some of the language used, guess which was higher on the moderator priority list to take care of?), and so the broadsword was wielded... and if you note, we haven't been merging more recent ones. It was a knee-jerk reaction to a problem as we saw it, and while it wasn't a perfect solution, by and large it has worked out pretty well: absolutely can't please everyone, welcome to my world as a moderator, choices and tradeoffs have to be made for the theoretical "good of the community."

As for people leaving the forums: yup it happens. If you hadn't guessed, if I weren't a moderator, I'd probably be gone too but it's not because of the moderation practices: people tend to get their information, sometimes stick because of the community (or further interest, I became a CC information junkie for a while), but everyone moves on eventually. This is true of users, CL's, moderators, and Admins; I'm continually surprised at how sticky this forum has been for an admittedly niche shared interest forum. I think it rather suspect that anyone who cares enough about this community to stick around for a while, would simply leave without sending a PM to me or one of the other moderators they know well like Lexie rather than simply taking their ball and going home so to speak. I have a very difficult time understanding that, perhaps it's just my being stupid, but how have we been chasing people away? If we're sucking, tell us, seriously.

Along that point, I fully expect people to transition through the myFICO community, and sometimes move on to different credit forums: they serve a similar function but with a markedly different outlook and what's permissable is different as well... which leads them to cater to a different crowd. No harm no foul there, and I have nothing but respect for CB/FT/et. al even as a moderator - the more people see credit scoring information, the better in my opinion. Is the information here (or there for that matter) 100% correct? Of course not, but I'm not one to throw out the good chasing the perfect, and I think overall this is an excellent community for the function it serves.

Anyway the moderators are just volunteers and we did not write the TOS (hi FICO Legal!), we just enforce them. Things like referrals, that's just spam schilling, so we're preventing individuals from attempting to make a buck or two, seriously who wants that on a forum?

To reiterate in closing, throwing stones without offering even remotely plausible solutions tends to just be griping: welcome to the Internet. If you care enough to actually post the message, then I would suggest you should care enough to offer realistic ideas to improve the forums. I know I can speak for both the moderators and the current Admin staff on this one: we absolutely welcome ideas on how to improve the forums; you as an individual user might not get a vote (and sometimes I don't as a moderator either, hi spam filter funsies) but it will be discussed, and on the whole, personally I think that's a pretty fair way to run a forum.

Re: Moderators, please read! :)

Anonymous — Sat, 04 Oct 2014 01:39:20 GMT

Oh, I hate constructive suggestions, but if you insist: How about copying some other boards and create issuer sub-forums. So, General, Amex, Citi, Chase, Barclays, BoA, Cap One and Others (or some such, General for issues concerning ccs as a whole, Others for other issuers not specifically covered) Then at least those interested in a specific question (lets say the email of the Cap One EO!) can start in more focussed forum.

FlyerTalk recently added a Citi subforum (after an extended time discussing if the traffic justified it, but that's them), and the mods could do the same here, deciding if for example PenFed deserves its own forum etc.

Stops cross-pollination, but so does too many posts and an underpowered search feature.

Re: Moderators, please read! :)

Revelate — Sat, 04 Oct 2014 01:41:43 GMT

@Anonymous wrote:
Oh, I hate constructive suggestions, but if you insist: How about copying some other boards and create issuer sub-forums. So, General, Amex, Citi, Chase, Barclays, BoA, Cap One and Others (or some such, General for issues concerning ccs as a whole, Others for other issuers not specifically covered) Then at least those interested in a specific question (lets say the email of the Cap One EO!) can start in more focussed forum.

FlyerTalk recently added a Citi subforum (after an extended time discussing if the traffic justified it, but that's them), and the mods could do the same here, deciding if for example PenFed deserves its own forum etc.

Stops cross-pollination, but so does too many posts and an underpowered search feature.

We've talked about this previously, I championed it maybe a year ago for the major lenders, but a lot of our posts happen to cross a lot of boundaries (Amex, Discover, Chase all in one thread for example).

How is it handled there?

Re: Moderators, please read! :)

Middleswarth — Sat, 04 Oct 2014 01:45:31 GMT

Another forum I visit has the CC section split into 4 - Visa & MC, Amex, Discover, and Store Cards. I would suggest splitting it like this and maybe even have subcategories under each (maybe CU cards, major bank cards, and local bank cards under the Visa & MC forum for example).

Re: Moderators, please read! :)

Revelate — Sat, 04 Oct 2014 01:51:18 GMT

@Middleswarth wrote:
Another forum I visit has the CC section split into 4 - Visa & MC, Amex, Discover, and Store Cards. I would suggest splitting it like this and maybe even have subcategories under each (maybe CU cards, major bank cards, and local bank cards under the Visa & MC forum for example).

I don't personally think that breaking it up by transaction network works: some cards have historically had multiple transaction networks, and some lenders switch transaction networks too. Further any national bank often has multiple products on different transaction networks, and the common tie is the lender in question. Store Cards and CU's might be two good categories if we did it by lender though rather than a "everything else" forum, that's a good idea thank you.