Dealing with Chronic Lurkers

[Thok]

1. Mod Prods. Lots of mod prods.
2. Replacements
3. Start lurker lynching. This becomes a metagame play to try to force chronic lurkers to stop it. Or course, this doesn't work in my experience.
4. Ignore the issue and create your own bandwagons.

[Thok]

Part of the problem with lurking is that a lot of players need to learn to be more aggressive when they are protown. If people are lurking because they don't find anything interesting going on, then the solution is to make something interesting happen, so that people have stuff to talk about. (I put my fourth solution in my initial post for a reason.)

I agree that a post every "blah" days rule is silly. It could be improved by requiring some amount of content in those post (say a certain amount of words, or just not counting "I'm here" or "Hi" posts). Of course, I'd love such a rule, because I have no difficulty at all in pumping out five or six sentences in a post that look interesting, but doesn't really say anything at all. I call it active lurking, and it's a strictly better idea than lurking if you are scum (you can still detect it, but it takes more effort).

As for chronic lurkers-mods need to remember that they do have some ability on who they allow into their games.

[Thok]

I often enjoy living to day 2 and 3 as those days imho have the most interesting discussion, if this means lurking and staying under the radar most of day 1, I'll do it occasionally.

Have you considered replacing into games that are at day 2 or 3?

[Thok]

The first thing we have to do is fortify the metagame of lynch all lurkers. The town

does

benifit in the long run from this strategy. You cannot stop a strategy which is detremental to the game by rewarding the people who practice it. Lynch people who lurk.

While I agree with this sentiment, practical experience shows that in general metagme lynching to achieve a behavioral modification doesn't really work (unless you count driving players away from Mafiascum as working). I mean, while vote IS TeeHee is fun, it didn't seem to change IS's behavior.

(Feel free to prove me wrong; give me some examples of people who were lurkerish who've changed their behavior because of repeated lurker lynches).

[Thok]

One comment I'd like to add (and I seriously thought about adding a new thread for this), is that people need to realize that mafia, just like any other activity, is a nontrivial time commitment. For a single game, it's not unreasonable to expect people to spend a half hour every couple of days (it takes that much time to read the game, think about suspicions, and make a good post). That's about one and a half hours a week.

I see people sign up immediately for five or six games when they first arrive. That's potentially a seven to nine hour a week time commitment, on top of any work/homework/other activities you might have.

There are some people who have immediately jumped into 10 games. There is no reason one should do that unless you know you can handle the pressure/time commitment, and frankly no newbie knows that.

If you find yourself constantly having to say "I'm sorry, I don't have time to post because I need to do other things" perhaps that's a sign you should cut down your games. Getting a replacement is not a sign of weakness, or a reason to be mocked; in fact, I'd appreciate somebody more if they recognized a need to be replaced in some number of games so that they free up time to concentrate on their remaining ones.

[Thok]

Hey! You know what'd be fun? A game where everyone could play, with the whole site divided into a number of "players" based on something like the first letter of their username or their join month. Anyone making their first post in the game thread would be sent one of the roles. Team F for the win!

Team T (aka Team "Stop confusing Twomz and Tamuz and Thok and Thoth!") support this idea.

[Thok]

I'd tried poking him on IM the last time I've saw him online. He promptly went offline.

The correct way of dealing with lurking mods is have backup mods/draft replacement mods.

[Thok]

Any ways for dealing with lurking mods?

On a related comment, I'll say that lurking mods encourage lurking players. Nothing sucks the life out of a game like having to wait a week for night choices, then having to wait another couple days for the mod to actually open the thread.