Why the "What you can do to help moderate" announcement matters.

Before reading the rest of this, it's probably a good idea to click here.

So I'm assuming everyone had read it, but just in case you haven't, this is a recap. Pottermore posted a new post on the Insider on April 30th. This post was effectively providing slightly clearer guidelines to the community about what to do on Pottermore, and how to act.

Why is this important random anon asks? Because Pottermore does something it hasn't really done before. It's acknowledging problems in the website. While this isn't a surprise to anyone that has spent over two seconds on Pottermore, it's a marked improvement over messages that used to be sent by moderation, known as "yummy canned spam" in the community, to the point where a good majority of us assumed that the staff at Pottermore consisted of robots. Pottermore admitted the following problems (albeit indirectly and without casting blame at itself but meh, you take what you can get): Over-use of the Report button that is unfair and abusive and the use of multiple accounts for ingredient hoarding/cauldron collecting/duel-gifting.

Now while ingredient movement is somewhat of a moot point, they also made clear three things people *can* be banned for, like spamming, directing people to external sites, and talking about having multiple accounts, especially while banned. Of these, I want to half-applaud Pottermore, though the other part goes. No. While I like that Pottermore is acting a teensy bit more open and acknowledging some problems publicly, some of the policies are probably being over enforced, others are under-enforced, and some need to be "fixed" for the time being. Currently I would say that the claim they make that over-use of the report button gets someone booted and the whole thing about multiple accounts... it's quite frankly bull. This is something where I'm of a mixed mind about multiple accounts, especially with how house points are counted, incidents of spying and gifting and all manner of things, I honestly think that Pottermore could do a bit to "id" users a bit more, though to paraphrase Elm Blade 43, the limitations on how many accounts you can have doesn't matter as much as it used to. You can make and ditch accounts quickly, even pull up spares that share a name with your main account if you want to spend the time on it, this isn't like beta where there was only a set amount of users that could be on at any one time, and extra accounts were disliked because they deprived others of their seats. The recommendations is actually what I would like to change, though part of it is due to my own interests (getting people to come to the forum so they can learn how to duel/brew). This is the BIG problem with Pottermore as an online game. The fact that communication is spotty at best and chaotic mumblings that rival a mentally deranged individual at worst. Pottermore is NOT a place for talking, nor is it really a place to reflect on what is written on it, nor is it really a place to really interact with fans. THIS is what I realize is a piss poor thing. You cannot talk on Pottermore. You really can't, and what makes it worse, is  you can't even attempt to move people to a place that explains their answer, nor can you direct them to a place where you can describe it in detail. Even saying "go google it" would be something that would be considered against the rules. The same results from spam that could be borne out of a posting glitch.

Now this *could* be lessened by humans, however, I will still say I doubt they have actual people on the actual ground to judge what is good and bad. Knowing some of what happens between the two, I don't blame moderation for getting some things wrong, the problem being when they get the same thing wrong consistently, and to the point where as far as the poster knows... they may be entirely innocent and still get things taken down proper.