One thing I would also like to see would be the reasoning behind some of the theorycrafting statements. It is good and all to have the weight of each stats, but sometimes knowing why the weights have the values they have might be better. I wouldn't know what to make of the math, or the proof, it is an area I do not want to go into, but knowing why mastery is better than haste for mutilate, using words, is something I would like to know.

On that same topic, it might be nice to have a multiple weight lists, especially at lower level of gear. If we take the current weights which are said to be for ilvl 372 BiS, they might not be of much use for people in 346, 353 and 359 gear. Unless of course the weights don't change, but putting a warning seems to indicate it does.

I do think that the 'help me' thread could prove useful (especially with a new patch with new gear and possibly new changes coming). However it mainly depends on just how relaxed the thread is. Personally, I don't think it should be too relaxed, but that will also mean more work for the mods, so it partly depends on if they are able to/willing to keep up. I would certainly answer questions that I deem appropriate to answer, but I worry about the amount of useless questions/post and repetition that the thread will have. Overall I think it's a step in the right direction, it's the discipline level that will make or break the project I would say. We (or you, I should say) should aim for a thread where the good old 'EJ strictness' is in the back of your mind, but you can still post reasonable questions without worrying about getting an infraction.

As for the Blue Post thread, it's definitely nice to have all the Blue Post in one spot. It could be a possibility to also include links to recent/all Patch Threads, since old ones will eventually be faded out of the 'front page'.

As long as the hand holding questions are restricted to a specific, obvious thread, I really have no issue with it. I generally log on to check updated theorycraft, and occasionally post if I feel I can contribute meaningfully to a thread. I never like when I see people begging for hand holding as a part of these threads, when the information provided is readable and accessible. However, so long as the hand-holdy part of the forum is clearly marked, and the hand-holdiness of the questions therein doesn't leak out onto the rest of the forum as a by-product of the allowance of such questions, then I have no issue at all with it. I can not click a link just as easily as the next person.

Quite the contrary, I felt the question was too lazy for an answer. I saw that one and (being a chore to read) valued my time more over answering it. The person obviously did not research their abilities appropriately, let alone the threads here. In fact, it's a prime example of what I DON'T want to see.

If anything, the SQSA thread already accommodates hand-holding in question here.

I think the Blue Post Thread is nice to have, but I frequent other sites that give me this information more regularly.I also notice more blue post updates happen within the spec threads because they prompt relevant and immediate discussion.

Having the three spec guides/compendiums stickied and use the same naming convention would be useful. This is the meat of the site. Make it prominent and consistent.

Relaxed rules should apply in a single thread only, i.e. SQSA. Let people get their dumb questions out, or learn what would be considered an warning/infraction. There is already such intense moderation that this forum will not ever turn into the official forums, so anyone concerned with that is being ridiculous.

This is why I lurk. I want to contribute and got a couple infractions in my first few posts. Is it worth my time to go so into detail, specifics, and numbers to provide good ideas and feedback? It's a chore to post here more often than not. The moderation is so strict that I do not have enough time to contribute spending 20-30 minutes formulating a post that may very well be banned or redundant information by the time I finish.

Personally I think keeping the Blue Post thread is a good idea, i like having a quick Goto thread for all the relevant information to this class.

As for a 'Relaxed' SQSA thread... Really 99% of the answers are here if you're willing to look for them... and if you're not willing to look for them, then how useful is your question really going to be? I can understand some people wanting to get a quick and specific answer to a dilemma they are having, but would relaxing the rules allow the thread to become nothing more than a dozen questions repeated over and over again? I'm not saying i'm totally against it, it would clearly have some advantages... but where do you draw the line, so to speak, with repeated questions and people just being plain lazy?

I think a 'help' thread would be justifiable if standards were tightened in other threads and if it maintained some -- albeit laxer -- standards in that thread itself. While I agree this maybe be a slippery slope, I also think it would benefit the community.

I can understand that people don't want to encourage a bunch of useless posts asking very obvious questions, but I think there is a grey area between "insightful new thoughts" and "retarded drek." Sometimes there are questions that are perhaps less obvious, or from people who are reading the data but not sure if they are interpreting it correctly, or perhaps they found the information but the post discussing it was so old that they're not sure if the conclusions are still valid.

I agree with the other posters that I think that sometimes valid questions make get overlooked, or not posed in the first place, because people are erring on the side of silence to avoid infractions or thread clutter. People are hesitant to ask and hesitant to answer anything that falls in that grey area.

I know personally there have been some topics that I felt were discussed too briefly or too long ago, or I questioned a conclusion someone reached and the issue dropped but I felt the thread could have benefited from further discussion. I won't pretend these issues crop up frequently -- maybe a handful of times in all the years I've been reading -- but I think it still may be a missed opportunity. I'm not sure if this is the experience of other people.

To be clear, I'm not advocating a thread where people ask what poison to use on which hand or a place for people to be spoonfed information found in the original post of an adjacent thread. I think what I'm asking for is a thread with looser standards where people can discuss and clarify information that might already be known in the rogue world, but maybe isn't clear, or maybe doesn't apply in enough situations to justify it taking up space in the primary threads.

Of course, my angle is that I'm an "average joe" in the WoW world. I'm not out writing spreadsheets or doing my own calculations and modeling, and I'm not doing world-first raiding to provide unique insight into gameplay. I'm just a person who wants to be superior player and tries to keep on top of all the information out there from the people who do contribute those resources to our community. With that in mind, my bias will be towards a bit lower standards than others may have. However, I also think that players such as myself are the intended audience here -- not the people who have nothing to learn, nor the morons who are too lazy to learn how to research on their own.

This most definitely, for example I've gotten an infraction for answering someone's question of whether or not smoke bomb works on Nef's shadowflame barrage. My answer was basically that it I've used it on every boss just to see if it works and haven't found it to work on any. And apparently that was "6. Do not post unless you have something new and worthwhile to say."

Thanks for the good discussion so far. A couple of thoughts and observations on what's been said so far:

1) A number of you have noted that the Blue Post Thread is somewhat unnecessary because the patch notes are already posted on other sites - mmo-champion, etc. And this is true. However, my experience is that the patch notes will be copied over from those sites into this forum whether there's a thread for them or not. The original intention of the Blue Post Thread was not to make sure the patch notes got copied over here; it was to make sure that it only happened once. Previous to its creation, you'd see the same patch note posted in SQSA, and the Combat thread, and the Assassination thread, and the spreadsheet thread(s), and so on - because it was sort of relevant to every thread, it got posted every place. And this was stupid. Hence, the goal of the thread was to create a "right place" for that information to be posted, such that it didn't need to be posted everywhere. And I think its been pretty effective at achieving that goal.

However, now there are really 2 "right places" for that discussion - the Blue Post Thread, and the relevant patch discussion thread. And this seems a bit redundant to me, which is why I asked the question. If the Blue Post thread has evolved beyond its original intention and has become a useful reference for people in its own right - great. But if its primarily still just the designated place to put patch notes to prevent excessive spam of them, I suspect we could just shift that functionality to the patch discussion thread and not be any worse for it.

2) I'd like to make a few clarifications on the intention of the handholding thread proposal. First - and I want to be clear about this - no one is talking about easing moderation standards across the board. While I am certainly open to suggestions about tweaks to the way I (we) moderate these forums, that's really a separate discussion. What's being proposed is that we create a single thread where handholdy stuff is allowed, and moderate all other threads more or less the same way we currently do. The goal would be to keep the overall quality of discussion in more or less the same place, but create a place that's a little more accessible to those posters who may currently be too intimidated to post here. Whether it would be *effective* in that is anyone's guess, but that's sort of the intention of the idea.

Now, if such a thread were to wind up as purely a "hai guyz, how shud iy sokkett mai geer" thread, it'd pretty clearly be a bad idea. However, I think there is a set of questions that we don't currently address very well. For instance: if you've read all the guides, and think you're following them, but your DPS is low, what can you do? Nothing, really. And in that situation, having a second set of eyes to look at your WWS and Armory and whatever and say "hey, you're leaving big gaps between your ruptures and you forgot to enchant your helm" can be useful. Currently there's no place to do that here - and if people are fine with that, so be it. But it does seem like a way we could make some of the knowledge of this community more accessible to the broader community, which may reasonably be considered a good thing.

There is a secondary point here about the fact that information can be hard to find, and thus allowing people to ask someone who might have a better idea where to look isn't necessarily unreasonable either, but I'll refrain from talking about it here as it bleeds into my third topic, but I think it is worth mentioning.

Fundamentally, the point is this. The impression I get from reading discussion on other forums is that the general impression of EJ is that its a reasonable forum for figuring out what the right thing to do is, but isn't necessarily very good at disseminating that information to the masses - for that, people go to the mmo-champion forums or the blizz forums or wherever. And if we wanted to, we could try to branch out a bit and do more of the explanation and dissemination ourselves. Or we can decide that we're fine with letting other people do it. I don't have a strong opinion either way, which is why I'm asking for feedback before making any decisions.

3) Consistency of moderation. A number of you commented that you feel moderation is inconsistent, both across subforums of EJ and sometimes within the same forum (i.e., its sometimes hard to determine whether a given post deserves an infraction or not). And I think that's a fair observation, but there are reasons for it, which I will now attempt to explain.

First, understand that moderation is and will always be a judgement call. We try to be as consistent as possible, but ultimately its going to come down to one person's opinion, and thus it will never be entirely consistent. We do the best we can, but we do make mistakes - and more to the point, we do have different opinions.

Also, understand that a lot of time, moderation requires a good working knowledge of the class in question. A broken profile is a broken profile, and bad grammar is bad grammar, but if the question is whether something is handholding or repetitive, you really need someone who's up to speed on the class to moderate if effectively. Hence, when there are such questions for rogues, I'm usually the one making that decision. But when that decision needs to be made in other forums, it will instead be made by one of the other moderators (who's hopefully more up to speed on that class). And, being different people, we're going to draw the line in different places, which is a big part of the inconsistency across forums.

Another part of that is that - as alluded to earlier - moderators have been known to perform experiments on their forum. They add a new thread (Blue Post Thread, for instance), or change the rules of an existing thread (handholding in SQSA), or the like. Such things are usually unique to a small number of forums and, as such, introduce a bit of an inconsistency across forums. This is usually assumed to not be a major problem as most people who are savvy enough to be active participants in multiple forums are savvy enough to not need much moderation attention in the first place. If you find this assumption flawed, by all means let me know.

In terms of consistency within the forum - i.e., "why was this posted infracted while that other one wasn't" - the aforementioned point about moderation being inherently subjective is a big part of it. I'm never going to be able to give you a hard and fast rule as to where the line is, as much as I might like to, as fundamentally its a matter of opinion. That said: I can give you some idea as to the stuff I look at (which may or may not help you with the other moderators, but at least is a starting spot.

First: realize that not all information is as easily findable as you might expect. I don't mean to disparage the job that ieatpaperbag and the other thread maintainers have done, but fundamentally there's too much information for it all to be clearly posted in guide threads, and once you're out of guide threads you need to be really pretty good at coming up with the right search term to actually find the original discussion. As a simple example: consider weapon speed for Mutilate. We all know that you basically always want to use a slow MH and a fast OH; but if you try to clarify that "basically", its actually pretty hard to come up with a specific guideline. Here's what the asassination guide has to say about the topic:

Again - no specific details about when it makes sense to deviate from the broad rule. So if I'm a novice poster and I have a choice between a 359 fast MH and a 346 slow one... how do I know whether that applies to me or not? Now, there *is* a post out there that specifically answers that question - I know because I wrote it - but try finding it sometime - and in particular, try finding it only via the search tool, without knowing who wrote it. Its not as easy as you might think.

As another example: its widely known that white attacks use a 1 roll system while yellow attacks use a two roll system. And when someone makes a post that doesn't exhibit understanding of this fact, its easy to blow them off with "what an idiot, *everyone* knows that". And maybe most people do. But this particular individual does not, and if you actually try to find a post that explains that, you'll find its actually pretty hard to do.

Hence, when posts like this come along - where the answer might be broadly known, but isn't easily found - I'm inclined to give it a pass. So as a simple rule of thumb for figuring out whether something is stupid or not - try to find the answer, and see if you can. If its in a guide or FAQ, you probably shouldn't reply. If its not, but searching for one or two words that appear within the post in question turns up the answer, you still probably shouldn't. But if you take a look around and can't find the answer with a couple of minutes of obvious searching... answering it starts to sound more reasonable.

Second: I'm generally more tolerant of questions that ask for an explanation than one that asks for an answer. For instance: we've known since early in the expansion that Assassination generally doesn't want to cap expertise. So when people ask "should I cap expertise", that's a pretty stupid question. But the question of *why* we don't cap expertise is a little more reasonable. The answer "because ShadowCraft says so" may be correct, but its not very satisfying and tends to make people no more confident in the answer than they were to start with - after all, I could have screwed up when I was writing the model. So being able to say "well, Agi is a lot better now, so we can't socket it, and a mechanics change plus the addition of mastery makes it not worth reforging for, so..." is a lot more useful answer for some people. And those explanations (outside of Expertise, which got asked enough that it found its way into the FAQ) are generally not easy to find - so point 1, I'm a bit more willing to let them slide.

Third: I will say that I think EJ as a forum tends to over-moderate rule 10. I try to be a bit more lenient about it. If the question is obviously bad and you answer, you'll probably get a warning. But if its a grey area, I may shitheap the whole discussion if it turns out to be stupid, but I generally don't punish people for answering. So if a post strikes you as sort of in a grey area, its probably safe to answer in that you're unlikely to get an infraction from me. And if you do get an infraction for it - from me or from someone else - feel free to shoot me a PM about it explaining why you felt the question was reasonable. I won't make any guarantees, but as long as you're polite in your inquiry I'll at least hear you out.

(As an aside: that really goes for most infractions within the rogue forums. If you get an infraction here and you really think it was unjust, feel free to contact me regardless of who originally issued it. As long as you're polite, I'll try to give you a reasonable response. It may not be the response you were looking for, but I try not to punish people just for asking. Note, however, that I'm not repeating the "politeness" point just for fun - I don't like getting cussed out any more than you do. I should, however, clarify that this isn't an invitation for everyone to send me every infraction they've ever gotten and ask me to review it. Particularly if its expired or was just a warning in the first place, I don't really care anymore and neither should you.)

Fourth, I've tried lately to be a bit more accepting of new ideas, even when they look stupid, as stupid is relative and I'm no more immune to being wrong than anyone else. For instance, the recent DPS-Gouge debate; my instinct was that it was stupid, but it doesn't really hurt anything to discuss it - if its really as stupid as it seems, we should be able to demonstrate that. And over the years I've been wrong enough times (for instance, HAT struck me as a stupid spec when it first came out, and we all saw where *that* went) that I try not to shut down discussions just because they don't match my intuition. I shut them down if the idea has already been demonstrated to not work, or if we've already discussed the issue multiple times before, but not just because I don't think that they'll work. The goal of these forums is discussion, and there can be as much value in the discussion of ideas that don't work as in the discussion of ideas that do.

Finally, I will say that sometimes I do miss things. Sometimes posts that probably should have gotten infractions don't, because I didn't notice them or didn't have time to deal with them when I first noticed them and then forgot about them, or whatever. So if you find a post that you think probably deserves an infraction, feel free to report it just to remind me to look at it. I may disagree on whether it deserves an infraction, but it doesn't hurt to bring it to my attention. To use the example that Tinwhisker raised, it may be true that people looked at this post and felt it was too stupid to answer; but its also true that not a single one of them reported it, so the fact that I missed it the first time through means it never got any attention.

Post deleted, because of Adriana's eloquent statement above, answering my points spot-on, which appears to have been posted while I was composing mine (thus didn't see it in time).

To be clear: I don't find your questions fundamentally unreasonable; my biggest problem with that post is that I have a hard time understanding what's being asked. To me, it reads sort of like a reasonable post that's been run through Google Translate a couple of times before being posted. I'm not entirely sure *why* it reads that way - as your more recent posts indicate, you're fully capable of posting more clearly - but it does strike me somewhat hard to figure out what you're actually asking there. If I were going to moderate it at all (and, at this point, I'm inclined not to - you've been shamed enough ) it'd probably a warning for grammar before anything else.

That said, in terms of the larger point: we do focus on max-level content here. The problem with theorycrafting leveling gear/specs/rotations is that any optimizations you can make are dwarfed by what you gain by just leveling a bit more. There's little reason to read up on ideal level 50 play when you can use that time to just make level 51 instead. Hence, discussions at those levels tend not to be very interesting, or very important, and as such we at a forum level have decided that we don't want to discuss that here. I won't say that such posts will always receive an infraction - it depends to some extent on the independent quality of the post - but such discussions usually do get shut down pretty quickly.

In terms of max level content, we primarily focus on raiding. Discussion of 5man content - both regular and heroic - isn't forbidden, but for similar reasons its considered less important. Much as low-level content can be outleveled, 5 man content can be outgeared; moreover, its broadly similar to raid content (and easier), such that if you do the right thing for raiding you'll find that its often "good enough" to beat 5 mans as well.

In short: there aren't many competitive 5 man raiders. The competitive players move on to 10s and 25s, and the casual players don't care as much about detailed theorycraft, so there tends to be less need to have detailed theorycraft. Hence, while its not strictly against the rules to discuss these topics, but its not intended to be a primary focus of the forums either.

At this point I feel obligated to address the topic of BIS lists, as I just *know* someone is going to bring them up. Briefly stated: I think its fine to create a global BIS list so everyone knows where they're heading. But "BIS with conditions" lists strike me as inherently less useful, as everyone's conditions are different. Consider a "BIS pre-heroic" list. It sounds great in theory, but realistically, how many of you completely farm out normal modes before starting heroics? Hence, "BIS with conditions" discussions more often wind up being "customize a gear set for me" discussions, which we generally discourage. We'll happily create tools (such as ShadowCraft) for you to figure these things out for yourself, but its generally not worth having a large global discussion about optimal gear for your specific conditions unless you have reason to believe that many other people are in the same boat. And in general, the only gear level that's reliably that stable is full BIS, so....