2009 CIL?

Submitted by Route66 on

What is the status and thoughts of the CIL for this years games? Last year was the first year I ever participated and it was life changing. I was able to sit alone in my basement and watch a game(without dumb people in my ear) while chatting online with people who "get it". I know CIL went through a rough time with b-ball season and the jinx and all, but I feel like I have to have it this fall. The jinx was only b-ball, right?

Stephen Y

August 21st, 2009 at 2:15 PM ^

CIL is the reason for all evil in the world, and is the SOLE reason for our dismal season last year and the Sri Lankan cricket team terror attack.

Bring back halo scan!

chitownblue2

August 21st, 2009 at 2:44 PM ^

My two cents, as someone that moderated all but two:

Moderating them sucked a huge, fat, dick, no sugarcoat. I didn't get to watch much of the game, but rather spent most of the time approving comment, not to mention wading through "Why aren't I auto-approved?", "WHY ISN'T MY COMMENT SHOWING UP!?!?!?!?!?" and the like. The software that we used made moderating the comments of more than 500 people at a time really difficult - sometimes people didn't get their comment approved because 15 other people said the same thing, sometimes because "NOOOOO!!!" isn't very insightful, and sometimes because we missed it in the flood of comments. A large number of people seemed to chafe at any moderation at all.

So, I think the readership would need to have a good, long think about how much moderation they want (some? none?), and whether they thought the efforts of the moderators brought anything to the table (the polls, the pictures, the music). If they want a moderated CIL, I wonder if a format tweak would be in order.

Route66

August 21st, 2009 at 2:55 PM ^

That is a great point. I would not want to mod that thing! I can't imagine trying to watch the game and enjoying it while filtering peoples comments. Thanks for your efforts though and if it doesn't happen I will be sad. But I will understand 100%.

wile_e8

August 21st, 2009 at 3:13 PM ^

Is there a way to set the software to automatically ignore posts from certain users/IPs? I'm guessing the moderating task would get a lot easier if you could filter out people making frequent worthless posts/mod complaints.

As far as I'm concerned, bring back the moderated CIL, I think you guys did a great job last year. I'm pretty sure the need for a point system on this board has shown us that the noise level on anything popular skyrockets if users are free to post anything they want. The CIL would be an impossible to follow stream of mostly worthless posts if everything was approved.

CPS

August 21st, 2009 at 3:32 PM ^

There is a way to ignore posts from certain users/IPs (I'm not entirely sure if it's based on one or the other). Theoretically, the burden on the moderator is eased in that respect, but I'm not sure how effective it would be in practice. There are still hundreds of distinct users, not all of which repeat worthless comments. In fact, I would venture to guess that the majority of users in the CiLs were like me, where some of the comments got approved and others did not, and that the repeat offenders of worthless posts/mod complaints are more of a minority. So practically speaking, I'm not sure how much of an effect it would have.

I think the larger question remains: if there are CiLs, should it be all comments approved or none. If there are CiLs, I'd prefer they be moderated, like you. But I wouldn't blame the moderators one bit if they didn't want to do it at all. In the end, we all primarily want to watch the game.

chitownblue2

August 21st, 2009 at 5:06 PM ^

Yeah, we could, and did, ban a few people (it's not really a "ban" - their comments, unbeknownst to them, would just stop poppin up in our queue - but at the same time, this isn't our site, it's Brian's, and it's also his job. We took the "banning people" thing pretty seriously and only did it two or three times, as we didn't feel right alienating people from Brian's site (we obviously have no problem alienating people from our own). When someone was banned, they generally had received at least two warnings to cool it. I'm sure the quality of our team last year also impacted the vitriol in some comments, as well.

I don't want to act like it was all negative - a large number of people were genuinely helpful (gsimms, the Varsity Blue guys, etc) and a larger number of people were genuinely appreciative. My complaint, I guess, is that when you get a few hundred people submitting comments at once it's really hard to keep up with the thing. I wonder if the thing could come with a throttle - each person can only submit one comment a minute?

chimmychonga

August 21st, 2009 at 10:59 PM ^

"WHY ISN'T MY COMMENT SHOWING UP!?!?!?!?!?"

I'll admit I was one of these people. I didn't understand why my stuff wasn't showing up. I failed to stick around to find out why. I eventually got the idea but it took a few weeks. Sorry for always clogging up the works.

Bronco648

August 21st, 2009 at 3:26 PM ^

First, thanks chitown for moderating last year. I'm sorry it was so difficult and that you missed a lot of the games you moderated.

But, I did find some of the comments to be very insightful, esp. Brian, GSimmons, Tim, & Magnus to name but a few. If we were to do it again, unmoderated, I think it would still be fun to watch the game and the comments.

formerlyanonymous

August 21st, 2009 at 5:35 PM ^

I'd totally go for a CiL where it's 80% pre-chosen mods with little snippets instead of continually approving anyone with a half way decent joke, but I could see people not being into it if they aren't at least getting heard on occasion.

If we could get Magnus/Gsimms/other coach, a WLA guy with experience in this for color commentary, one play-by-play volunteer, and one random mgoblogger to round out the booth, it could go alright. I'd vote the random mgoblogger to be the default general comment screener, that way they can steer side conversations as needed, much like ESPN run CiLs with their blogger staff.

This is probably more complicated than it sounds, though. It involves too many people taking on responsibility and several organized people.

I think we should just get a uniscorn thread instead.

fatman_do

August 21st, 2009 at 6:56 PM ^

As a viewer of last year's attempts, I favor Marshall law vs. anarchy. I would rather see a notice that only top quality, non "look I am trying to be funny" posts from non-moderators are allowed.

That would serve two purposes. The casual observer doesn't have to read auto approved "buddies" trying to be cute. As well as most people up front would know that, "No, your post of Forcier sucks... is not a quality post".

wooderson

August 21st, 2009 at 9:37 PM ^

I was a big fan of the CIL's, they were fantastic for fans like me that are stuck in hostile, far-away cities. I thought the mods were fantastic too, their efforts were much appreciated. Especially the Beckinsdale pics.

chimmychonga

August 21st, 2009 at 10:54 PM ^

Well hell, all we did last year was share our sexual fantasies with underage women by the names of Miley Cyrus and Selena Gomez. Also talk about how drunk we were and how out of control stuff was getting, all while not giving a shit.

Zero

September 4th, 2009 at 6:42 PM ^

Has a decision been made?

I can only imagine how difficult these are to moderate but goddamn it sure would suck to watch a game without CiL's.

aenima0311

September 4th, 2009 at 6:59 PM ^

I can't imagine they're too hard to moderate. Just get a few trusted users in there to aprove comments and empower a few of the better commenters to help out.

Then again, I could just be making it up as I go along.

A Case of Blue

September 4th, 2009 at 7:23 PM ^

As an out-of-town fan that doesn't have any U-M fans in the house, or a bar to go to, the CILs (and before them, Haloscan) were definitely appreciated. It's nice to suffer and celebrate with other fans.

On the other hand, I can see how it's a pain to moderate them.

My concern is: if there's no CIL, will viewers overload the board with traffic? (See: a few days ago.) CIL seems like an easy way to largely direct the flow of traffic to one place, rather than have 100 threads on game day.