what exactly is your criticism? that not everyone is able to post gifs and whatnot from the start? people made some great points against it so theres that.
everyone has the same opportunity to fulfill the requirements needed for tl3. after all, posting on the forums itself is a privilege and not a right. 
doesnt matter whether you pay a sub or not. you pay a sub to have access to the game and not to the forum.
No. As I wrote earlier:
This will stop the users yo-yoing between tier 2 and 3 -permissions because of their legitimate opinions getting flagged.
Also we do strictly not need the four tiers we have today, three are sufficient enough:
Tier 0 - zero activity users
Tier 1 - New active users, and temporal for users under punishment
Tier 2 - Established users with all permissions
right, and i told you that a flag alone does not compromise your forum account.
you saying that the mods are allowing this is a baseless claim. 99% of the time when you get a silence, its justified, whether you personally agree with it or not, this has nothing to do with being a “snowflake” or “creating a special bubble”. rules are rules after all.
the easiest solution is just not being a douchebag.
I am not speaking about silences, I am speaking about silent censors due to flagging.
not someone, serveral people have to flag it, not just one person. one person thinking its offensive doesnt initiate a flag.
only mods remove comments when they deem it as rule breaking. flagging does not do that, neither is it automated.
i agree that it sucks that you do not know what got flagged and you have to go through your posts to see which one is missing or got hidden. i wouldnt call it problematic though.
if you get a penalty you technically should also get an email stating the quote what you ve been reported for.
take it with a grain of salt though. i didnt get such an email for instance and a friend who got also silenced roughly the same time did. some do some dont apparently, however you can ask support to either send it again or tell you via a ticket directly.
you can submit a ticket and have someone look into it. the message is not automated. somone has issued the silence. when you get a penalty you have a link at the bottom where you can appeal it. so thats your way of contacting.
no. only because a post might have been removed by a mod, as long as you do not get an official silence etc, it does not count towards your tl3 gain.
there is no such thing as a strike without consequences.
the only thing that is automated is the message that your post got hidden. the rest is all issued by humans.
as it should be. naming and shaming is against the policy.
three scenarios:
you post something offensive, people dont like it, flag it, a mod reviews it, deems it against the rules and issues a penalty.
now you re mad that someone didnt like your point of view, you start argueing or witch hunting said person. not good.
someone or a couple of people just disagreed with you because you held an unpopular opinion, they flag it, a mod sees it, unflags it.
now you re mad again because someone abused the flag system, you start arguments or get back at them, causing a scene. not good either.
you post something someone didnt like, people flag, it gets hidden, mod reviews it, deems it as inoffensive and restores your message.
if someone abuses the report function, you can actually submit a ticket and have it looked into because thats against the rules to abuse it and in return they can get punished themselves.
revealing who reported stuff doesnt contribute to anything positive. anonymity is there for a reason as everything else would just bring toxicity and drama. sure, it might get abused but thats rather rare and you can still have mods look into it.
bottom line is, i dont get your problem. everything can be resolved, even strikes arent forever and decay or can be removed from your history by mods if overturned and as long as you are able to behave, you are able to get your tl3 and hopefully keep it too.
i agree that it should be more transparent as to why and what you were flagged for. everything else, however, is on the secret tinfoil hat level.
its almost as if you want it to be automated, be wrong and a conspiracy so badly that you fail to acknowledge the facts.
If one is to assume that there is always a moderator check the flags, it would only take one single flag for the post to enter the moderator review system. And also if the flagger is the moderator themselves, no other individuals are needed. This is from a theoretical point of view, I am not accusing any specific moderators for anything.
They better remove comments only when they are rule-breaking.
That is right, and I got email for the only time I have been silenced. However, that episode was handled correctly by the moderator. Not that I agree that action was needed, but they executed the moderator action after the book, so I have no grudges for that. And this was like 6 months ago.
The recent actions towards my posts have not resulted in any silence or any emails, as I have described earlier. No information or any way to appeal.
And since no apparent punishing action was taken towards me, I did not bothered to contact support as they are understaffed, and I did not want to wait seven days on an answer telling that they can not give any answers.
That is not how it works according to The Ultimate Forum Guide (Codes, Trust Levels, FAQ) and my experiences. As one of the TL3 requirements says:
- Don’t have more than 5 Spam/Offensive Flags
This is flags, not official actions. I have not been silenced 5 times.
I got my silence when I was TL1, and since then have I had a couple posts being flagged as “offensive” and removed/spoiled, but no official reactions. Then I got TL3 in December which lasted a week - due to yet another “offensive” flag and removal with no further action on me. Either that flag exceeded the 5 flag limit, or the moderator manually removed me from the tier as punishment without ever telling me.
I think you misunderstand, I would never name and shame anyone (but myself). Yes, that have happened in January. Someone made a topic for naming and shaming, and named someone else. Then multiple repliers named TS, and I made a post naming my poster character. Funny enough the poor moderator must have overlooked who I was naming as I got a 48 hour silence - which was revoked after 5 minutes by the same moderator. 
No, I am not asking for transparency on flaggers, and I would definitely not go after someone if I knew they were flagging my posts as I respect that people disagree with me, and if people where to abuse the system to hide my posts it would surely be an issue for the moderators, and not something for me to investigate personally.
You know what’s broken about the “trust levels”? Every alt is treated as a “new user”.
It’s not a bleeding new user, Blizzard, it’s a-me! All it makes me do is jump through some artificial hoops to make sure my alts can make posts in my guild thread. Sure, I can add some replies I didn’t really want to make, and browse boring threads in General for 10 minutes - but is this really the kind of activity you wanted, Blizz?
Not at all, we understand that you are insisting that you are a model of probity…and therefore everyone else is going to behave in exactly the same manner… and if that turns out to be a fantasy (which it is), then you want an army of mods, to police the Hellscape you have unleashed, resulting in half the threads being conspiracy theories about the Mods decisions.
Whereas the much easier options are:
why would you ever assume that? this makes little sense to me. if everything only one person ever flagged has to be reviewed by a mod, the whole system would get clogged because its way too much and doesnt necessarily mean theres a lot of merit behind it. however, if more people flag it, its worth looking into it. and why would a moderator be a flagger himself? moderators dont flag comments. if a moderator thinks something breaks the rules they outright remove it, no need to flag something.
so if you havent gotten any actions although posts have flagged you are good to go, the moderator didnt deem it offensive then.
maybe i should have elaborated on my “etc” there, sorry.
sometimes you get a message saying that it got flagged, a mod looked into it and as a consequence removed it.
whether it exceeded the five flag limit or not i do not know. tbh if you really want to know you could ask a mod what happened although they tend to not give information on trust levels.
what you could do, however, if you really want to know, is to let them send you your entire account and game data. you can look into it once every blue moon. there is everything listed, when and where you got what penalty and remarks and when you gained/lost trustlevels. but be warned, it can be a lot.
i did that once, was an interesting read.
i guess i have. i misunderstood i guess cause you said that those who censored you wouldnt reveal themselves i mean, of course they wouldnt, why would they.
anyhoo, my apologies.
thats how i once lost my tl3 because a mod misread a word i wrote and bonked me with a silence. stuff happens, its noones fault.
anyways, its 8 am, time for me to go to bed.
Although I have experienced getting shadow-moderated as described, it have only been within given topics which my posts have been fronting unpopular opinions, these kind of actions does not surprise me. People are sensitive and do not want to have certain opinions in their vicinity, and I can understand that. So no, I do not want to make any fuss and push conspiracy theories which undermines the moderation of this board.
Rather, what I want, is to remove/change the Trust Level system so it becomes more fair for everyone regarding accesses to board features - which is exactly what this thread is about.
Freedom of speech, is not freedom from consequences.
To be fair in these forums only thing that goes by is if you just suck off blizzard as much as you can and if you dare to even criticize them in any way the fan boys come out and cancel you in a heartbeat.
The forum is littered with threads criticising Blizzard…so that’s demonstrably untrue.
Thanks for demonstrating the level of intellect, that Skade wants to give gif access rights to.
Insert image here
You are making bold assumptions about my opinions, in which none are illegal, discriminating nor hate speech. Also I have never assumed that free speech is protected on this private board.
Not really you said you had been moderated and it was because you ‘fronted unpopular opinions’… much like defending the Edgelord ‘banter’ of oral sex about anyone daring to not criticise Blizzard, with a Star Trek facepalm gif… I think I have a pretty shrewd concept of what you would like to see this Forum descend into, if you cannot control it.
I have noticed more and more companies switching comments off on their promotional material on YouTube, recently. Conservatives are a very long way from being defenders of ‘Free Speech’, if they can’t control a media debate, they will do their utmost, to make sure no-one else has access to it either.
Yea and that sure is nothing to do with lot of companies cutting corners with their product nowadays for fast and easy buck making people really angry in result.
If peeps are Edgelord posting on every product a company ever released, because what they actually have an issue with, is inclusivity…especially, if they spend the rest of their time championing/voting for, the system of cutting product corners, to make a fast and easy buck…ie. Capitalism…they need to grow up.
There are plenty of comments demanding WoW go F2P, so clearly staff welfare and cost cutting, is not actually a genuine concern.
Fact is if Blizz were supplying a conveyor belt of Stormrage and Menethil story retreads many of the ‘angry’ people would suddenly become entirely unconcerned with staff welfare, production corner cutting, or fast bucks…we know this from the Anime/Manga industry.
Opinions are not what get people into trouble generally speaking but it is one of the regular excuses we see given. Speaking out against Blizzard is not what gives someone a time out. The most common rule break is swearing, if you have to star out or miss letters to make a word appear you are breaking the rules. If your opinion involves threatening others then that’s also a big no no. Trolling is another common recurring theme.
We are free to express ourselves in any way that falls within the rules set by Blizzard. It isn’t really that hard to stick to them.
I just don’t understand why do we need stuff like extreme time gating nowadays sure we have always had that but in the past it rarely prevented you from playing you character fully. Stuff like crusaders colosseum in icecrown was also time gated but that was only for fluff and mounts.
Also i really don’t get why we have to wait for so long before we can fly in the new expansions since WoD. I get the initial experience and exploring but after 4-6 months i have explored every nook and cranny of the open world that i just want to fly so i can do the WQ’s/dailies faster so i can focus on other stuff more.
Well i for one would actually like paying the monthly fee rather than wow becoming a game like STO with multiple different lootboxes on top of in game store.
And my problem with the modern wow story is that it actually feels like a conveyor belt written nonsense with loth of flash and epic looking stuff with really thin foundation. I preferred older style stories where i was not Goku going farther beyond.