Moderators wanted

Thomas JackermeierThomas Jackermeier Member, Administrator
edited April 2014 in Blog
The new forum could be launched at any time now but we need MODERATORS to help us to keep to the discussions clean and organized.

In several simracing communicties out there, there are multiple threads about Fanatec products but the threads are super long and information is very hard to find.
There are always two type of threads:
1. Anything related how to modify and tune your products
2. People looking for technical help on some specific problem

My idea is to make searate forum categories for all main products or product categories. So for each product there will be modding discussions and support discussions.

In order to keep a good overview we should avoid that the same issues are discussed in different threads. Therefore each discussion should represent one major issue and in the opening post you should find any helpful information how to solve this issue:
  • Description of the symptoms
  • Photos and videos
  • How to repair or solve
  • Link to drivers/firmware/manual
  • What spare parts are needed
  • And any other info which is needed

In the discussion below the opening post, people can comment if something needs to be changed or if the information was useful.

If your wheel is covered by warranty then you just have to contact our support but when warranty is over then the community can help each other here. We will also do our best to support that because we want our customers to buy our new products because they are better and not because their old wheel cannot be fixed anymore. 

So if you like to help us and have experience with communities or moderation, please leave a comment and let me know.


Comments

  • While I would have a desire to try to be helpful to others I in no way want to become a forum Cop and deal with all the negativity that may arise. However if there is anything else I can do Community Ambassador? Not just here but other forums I would be happy to spread a good word for Fanatec and it's products and leave the moderating to someone with a thicker skin than mine.
  • While I would have a desire to try to be helpful to others I in no way want to become a forum Cop and deal with all the negativity that may arise. However if there is anything else I can do Community Ambassador? Not just here but other forums I would be happy to spread a good word for Fanatec and it's products and leave the moderating to someone with a thicker skin than mine.



    I think many of us are tired of the negativity as well. Although I don't know for sure I would bet Thomas/Fanatec is too. I would wager that this forum will be policed quite well.
  • Well said, Chris.  It does become rather wearing, but as ever, the bad news always carries more weight than the good news.  Couldn't be happier with my choices of kit, and like Andrew, willing to help any way I can.
  • Well said, Chris.  It does become rather wearing, but as ever, the bad news always carries more weight than the good news.  Couldn't be happier with my choices of kit, and like Andrew, willing to help any way I can.



    Thanks Kevin. Too many people just don't understand how long some decisions and R&D take. I have no clue how moderating works. I would try to help but the keyword here is "try". :)
  • I have run a few guild and clan websites in my time so I've done a bit of moderating, and I would not mind giving a helping hand if I can. But, what kind of commitment in terms of time spent are you expecting from your moderators?
  • Hey Thomas!

    I dont have any experience with moderating a forum, but I always really wanna help the community, you and your company as much as I can. You know me as a Betatester of the CSW and CSS and also as one of the German translators for this homepage. So you know, SimRacing is my passion and to be part of your team is a pleasure for me. I'm sure I can learn to keep the new forums clean like your insturctions to help all Fanatec customers to find useful information very quickly.
    If you are still interested in a corporation with me, feel free to contact me. I'm sure you still have my contact details :)

    Best regards,
    Maurice
  • as long as someone moderates the moderators it will be ok

    this forum/community will only succeed if people use it and a good way to drive people away is to limit their "speech". You have to be prepared to cop a hit on the chin and not bar people for that. As long as people know there are some lines you cannot cross ie racism and sexism just to name a couple and to limit personal attacks this forum/community may work 


  • Chris  BrosharChris Broshar Member
    edited April 2014
    as long as someone moderates the moderators it will be ok

    <di

    Not sure what I did here sorry.
  • Chris  BrosharChris Broshar Member
    edited April 2014
    as long as someone moderates the moderators it will be ok

    this forum/community will only succeed if people use it and a good way to drive people away is to limit their "speech". You have to be prepared to cop a hit on the chin and not bar people for that. As long as people know there are some lines you cannot cross ie racism and sexism just to name a couple and to limit personal attacks this forum/community may work 




    I totally agree. There is a forum for a very popular racing title that does just what you're talking about. One moderator in-particular is the worst. The mods need to be people that won't engage in arguments but will stop them. I'm a firm believer of rules. A few straight forward rules would help. But I also think each situation should be looked at individually. Unless of course we are talking racism, sexism etc.. This forum is desperately needed. We need all those in support of Fanatec to ignore those that aren't. That's usually the starting point of arguments. Ie all the posts on Fanatec going out of business. This WILL work but everyone needs to be patient. As there will be a few issues at the beginning.
  • Hi Thomas, wenn es so etwas wie einen Deutschen Bereich geben sollte, dann übernehme ich den mit einem Kollegen meines Forums gerne.
  • as long as someone moderates the moderators it will be ok

    this forum/community will only succeed if people use it and a good way to drive people away is to limit their "speech". You have to be prepared to cop a hit on the chin and not bar people for that. As long as people know there are some lines you cannot cross ie racism and sexism just to name a couple and to limit personal attacks this forum/community may work 




    I totally agree. There is a forum for a very popular racing title that does just what you're talking about. One moderator in-particular is the worst. The mods need to be people that won't engage in arguments but will stop them. I'm a firm believer of rules. A few straight forward rules would help. But I also think each situation should be looked at individually. Unless of course we are talking racism, sexism etc.. This forum is desperately needed. We need all those in support of Fanatec to ignore those that aren't. That's usually the starting point of arguments. Ie all the posts on Fanatec going out of business. This WILL work but everyone needs to be patient. As there will be a few issues at the beginning.
    Yes, I've noticed this too RE some mods out there.   The simracing world seems to have great difficulty finding a balance for some reason.  
  • Would offer to assist Thomas but I'm on the XB1 and not currently using Fanatec. If that situation ever changes I'd be glad to help out.
  • Thomas JackermeierThomas Jackermeier Member, Administrator
    I am not expecting a lot of negativity or bad behaviour. On 911wheel.de we had very little. And the forum has to be a place where people should be able to critisize our products or service as long as it is constrctive and we can learn to improve something.

    I believe that the community will be more succesful if the interests of the members are more important than the interests of the company. If we would censor everything, people would just move to somewhere else.

    So the moderators we are looking for should not act as sheriffs and more like guides who make sure that information is in the right format and place so that it is easy to find and understand for everybody.

    We want to let people feel comfortable here.

    I see Fanatec as part of the community and not above it. The products we make are full of features we learned from you and at the end of the day we want to produce products the community really wants and continously improve ourselves.


  • Thomas I agree. I'm all for free speech. And constructive criticism is how products and services are improved. Speaking only for myself, the negative comments that bothered me were the ones that basically said "Fanatec sucks, or Fanatec's going out of business". These help in no way. They do no one any good and just take up space. And as is with most things, it's the few that ruin the experience for the rest of us. These are the people I want policed. Someone who has a valid complaint or concern shouldn't be ignored or silenced. They should be helped. And as you stated in your OP, by us the members as well as Fanatec.
  • Thomas I agree. I'm all for free speech. And constructive criticism is how products and services are improved. Speaking only for myself, the negative comments that bothered me were the ones that basically said "Fanatec sucks, or Fanatec's going out of business". These help in no way. They do no one any good and just take up space. And as is with most things, it's the few that ruin the experience for the rest of us. These are the people I want policed. Someone who has a valid complaint or concern shouldn't be ignored or silenced. They should be helped. And as you stated in your OP, by us the members as well as Fanatec.
    Some of us did have a Valid concern that Fanatec was going out of business because of the long silence. In the end I did buy a CSR wheel. It is unfair to silence people with such concerns too. Especially if we have fanatec gear.
  • While I appreciate the discussion of business practices of emerging consumer electronic device companies, I'm gonna pass on piping in with my $0.02 for now...  Anyway, I have discussed Fanatec's business and customer relations here, on Thomas' Blog, and elsewhere, and I'm pretty easy to find so seek them out if you wish.
    I thought I'd just drop a line here to say I'd be happy to set aside 30 minutes or so a day to help administrate and/or moderate the forthcoming forum and blog here at fanatec.com. I'm a present or past staff and/or moderator at a few different hardware/sim/racing sites.  Just look up username "posimosh" anywhere and to see my interactions with users and knowledge of software and hardware issues.  Most recently I have become a fan of interacting on the iR forums as well as at GTPlanet, and the official FM forum (where I'm an ex-contributor).  These days I mainly help folks with obscure hardware issues at isr.tv. In the past I have moderated at TORA, and a couple of more obscure league sites (some of which I helped setup using phpBB, proBoard, MyBB, and others (including some pretty terrible proprietary forum software installations). 
    I also work with CMS software (at my day job)... So I know my way around moderation tools (which are similar to CMS tools), and would like to think I keep a cool head in most situations. Furthermore, I am a fairly busy person and know when to admit that I don't have time to help administer a community and am not opposed to giving up the privilege of having "moderator" next to my name if the situation warrants it.  Anyway, if you have further questions, I'm happy to share my usernames and such so you can check out my interaction with others online.
    At the risk of going on and on about myself... I shall cut this short right about here.  However, I do have a couple of links I'd like to share privately that represent some troubleshooting issues I have walked people through and some other instances of my web handy work (including pics and even a video or two.) I have quite a few fanatec devices at this point, some of which I have altered to improve the feel or functionality of a hardware device.Some of the posts are very old, while the posts at iR are less than three months old (for the most part) because I just started racing there in November of last yea.. Ok Ok enough about me... on to further discussion of the perimeters of community interaction and rules for the community in the soon to be "live" official fanatec forum....
    PS. I'm not looking for free stuff or discounts.... Just want to support a product that I enjoy using and a company that treats customers right (you know that fanatec does if you have ever tried to legitimately RMA a logitec product... I have.... and they are terrible.)
  • It looks like Fanatec will step up their game in the near future. Exciting for the consumer and it would be certainly interesting to help out on the forums. Providing feedback, helping out and so on. I would be happy to be on board. I am able to write in English and German. I am also happy to create helpful tutorials, videos and so on. Having  quite a bit of Fanatec hardware and consoles/pc for my racing sims, I could test and try to solve problems too. Also, creating manuals.
  • ^^^ indeed... Looking forward to new products and the (frankly) better, less disjointed, user interaction.
  • Come on...give us some news so that we can all have a good chat about it! I really hope PS4 support is added soon because Driveclub (our first chance to test our wheels on PS4) doesn't currently have fanatec drivers. Check the tweet from Rushy33 to me today to confirm this, he's the design director for driveclub and he says it's up to fanatec to support the PS4 first. Not looking to promising so far!
  • Come on...give us some news so that we can all have a good chat about it! I really hope PS4 support is added soon because Driveclub (our first chance to test our wheels on PS4) doesn't currently have fanatec drivers. Check the tweet from Rushy33 to me today to confirm this, he's the design director for driveclub and he says it's up to fanatec to support the PS4 first. Not looking to promising so far!
    Any time theres news of new hardware coming people start complaining if its not released fast enough telling Fanatec how bad they are etc. Also from what ive heard the support for PS3 wheels on the PS4 is up to the games developer. From what I know the fanatec wheels use the logitech G27 / G25 drivers to work on the PS3 so I dont think it is any different on the PS4.
  • I understand what you mean Steve...although as I said above it was the driveclub design director that told me that it's up to fanatec. I'm sure the G25/G27 driver will make the wheel work... I just want to make sure the full features of our fanatec wheels are being utilised on PS4. I have no complaints about fanatec and look forward to some new announcements :)
  • Come on...give us some news so that we can all have a good chat about it! I really hope PS4 support is added soon because Driveclub (our first chance to test our wheels on PS4) doesn't currently have fanatec drivers. Check the tweet from Rushy33 to me today to confirm this, he's the design director for driveclub and he says it's up to fanatec to support the PS4 first. Not looking to promising so far!
    Any time theres news of new hardware coming people start complaining if its not released fast enough telling Fanatec how bad they are etc. Also from what ive heard the support for PS3 wheels on the PS4 is up to the games developer. From what I know the fanatec wheels use the logitech G27 / G25 drivers to work on the PS3 so I dont think it is any different on the PS4.


    I totally agree Steve!!!
  • So far I have not so much experience with moderating a forum but I'd be glad to do my best in case that you are still in need for moderators (German, French and English, if needed). I too think a well moderated forum is exactly was Fanatec needs and I am glad that this will be the case soon.
  • Maybe the forum does not need Moderators, as such.

    A bold statement, yes, but what I've found through administering a forum of my own, is the best way to direct topics and to influence conversation is for the hardcore of general members (there is always one) to do the job of the moderators without the potential for ill feeling of a moderator jumping in and doing whatever.  Far far better to guide conversation and debate than to smother it.

    The problem with internet forums are that there is no inflection of speech, what you type is just cold hard words, it being very hard to articulate sentiment at times in the written word that is so much easier and natural in speech.  The other problem is that people do seem to get unnecessarily upset or are willing to threaten or get abusive at the slightest thing if they deem it not to their point of view, which is where I think interjection from general membership is far far better than a moderator just deleting or editing.   Being a cohesive, polite and respectful community can have far better results than having  titled members who may become targets in their own right.  Those titles underneath user names in forums do tend to act as magnets for abuse at times.

    If the general feel of the community is right, the conversations are respectful, then that influences everything.  As has been said, criticism should not be stifled, but it does need to be constructive with balanced input and points.  From that can be born many good and productive things.  I am concerned that a community that starts off on the defensive is maybe starting on the wrong foot, and the wrong ratio of members to moderators is part of that.  Yes, there will be nay sayers and people wanting to get things off their chest at what they feel is wrong, but managing those people and hopefully turning them around should be the goal, and I think that is better done through the carrot rather than the stick.  
  • Maybe the forum does not need Moderators, as such.

    A bold statement, yes, but what I've found through administering a forum of my own, is the best way to direct topics and to influence conversation is for the hardcore of general members (there is always one) to do the job of the moderators without the potential for ill feeling of a moderator jumping in and doing whatever.  Far far better to guide conversation and debate than to smother it.

    The problem with internet forums are that there is no inflection of speech, what you type is just cold hard words, it being very hard to articulate sentiment at times in the written word that is so much easier and natural in speech.  The other problem is that people do seem to get unnecessarily upset or are willing to threaten or get abusive at the slightest thing if they deem it not to their point of view, which is where I think interjection from general membership is far far better than a moderator just deleting or editing.   Being a cohesive, polite and respectful community can have far better results than having  titled members who may become targets in their own right.  Those titles underneath user names in forums do tend to act as magnets for abuse at times.

    If the general feel of the community is right, the conversations are respectful, then that influences everything.  As has been said, criticism should not be stifled, but it does need to be constructive with balanced input and points.  From that can be born many good and productive things.  I am concerned that a community that starts off on the defensive is maybe starting on the wrong foot, and the wrong ratio of members to moderators is part of that.  Yes, there will be nay sayers and people wanting to get things off their chest at what they feel is wrong, but managing those people and hopefully turning them around should be the goal, and I think that is better done through the carrot rather than the stick.  



    I like a lot of what you have said here. I especially agree with it being impossible to tell someone's tone by the written word and internet muscles that people get. People tend to get more argumentative behind a keyboard than they ever would in person.

    As far as no moderators, I disagree. And the reason being that this forum is linked to a company and business. Therefore it must be moderated to keep them in a good light. Having said that, if anyone is concerned with over moderating or rouge moderators doing whatever they wish, I don't think Thomas will allow that because it's not his vision of this forum or blog. Need proof? Go back and read posts at the old blog. He didn't have any moderators there. He allowed the community to speak freely. I think that's his vision here also. But with several threads he just wants it to stay on topic. So maybe there needs to be a "off topic" section. That way when we are in the CSS SQ thread discussing issues, someone doesn't pipe in with " when are you going to do X". I think that's our solution.
  • I would be happy to help. I have experience setting up and running a hardware support forum for flight simulation peripherals that has been supported by the manufacturer. I have used a few different CMS packages, most recently Wordpress and have experience operating phpBB, vBulletin, SMF and Invisionboard forum software.
  • I could help also when wished. But i don't have any experience in Moderating, however i know how it works ;)
  • Hi Thomas, you can count me in, I would be happy to help.
  • Come on...give us some news so that we can all have a good chat about it! I really hope PS4 support is added soon because Driveclub (our first chance to test our wheels on PS4) doesn't currently have fanatec drivers. Check the tweet from Rushy33 to me today to confirm this, he's the design director for driveclub and he says it's up to fanatec to support the PS4 first. Not looking to promising so far!
    Any time theres news of new hardware coming people start complaining if its not released fast enough telling Fanatec how bad they are etc. Also from what ive heard the support for PS3 wheels on the PS4 is up to the games developer. From what I know the fanatec wheels use the logitech G27 / G25 drivers to work on the PS3 so I dont think it is any different on the PS4.


    Yeah man, it'll work as any other usb hid device would. I mean I suppose fanatec could choose to pay for official ps4 licensing, but that opens a whole can of worms in terms of compatibility, exclusivity, and would cost extra money at the time of purchase that is unnecessary. I haven't seen the license agreement for the ps4 but I have for the ps3 (circa 2007), and xbox360 (circa 2011-2012) and I'm guessing that the agreement that third party controller manufacturers have to agree and adhere to are even more egregious than they were back when I read them years ago. Por exjampilo, ever wonder why you can't use your pedals as stand-alone on the ps3? It's because logitec agreed that the wheel and pedal devices would be combination devices and not separate components. Luckily, the standard (it's a standard not a method) that logitec upgraded to work with usb for ffb and wheel and pedal kits (from gameport) is open source so companies like fanatec and others can emulate for compatibility's sake.
    Sony leaves this loophole open... Actually, you know what? This has all been said before.
    Tell you what, if your fanatec kit doesn't work with ps4, I'll buy it.
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