Thanks, A.J. – that does help quite a bit
I think something really important to keep in mind with this idea is that moderating wikiHow and the forums also involves protecting younger users from less-savory people out there. We’re unfortunately not immune to predators or scammers, and while admins obviously do what we can to stop these kinds of people, I’d be really worried about the ways this could end badly. There will
be someone who attempts to hijack someone else’s account or act predatory towards younger users. If a minor were to get hurt or scammed because of the difficulty moderating this kind of thing, we’re opening ourselves up to a potentially long-lasting legal battle, and an angry parent with a malicious lawyer could drag the lawsuit out for an incredibly long time – which, worst-case scenario, could cost enough to kill wikiHow outright.
There’s also inevitably going to be someone who creates a Minecraft server, which is legitimately impossible for us to moderate. The game costs money, Java and Bedrock editions were incompatible last I checked, and you can’t jump onto a server and review everything in five minutes like you can with the forums. There’s really no way we can avoid people sharing server names, IP addresses, or so forth, and even if we could strictly enforce a “no servers” rule, someone would get around it by sharing it over email or offsite. Then there’s the same risk of someone getting hurt or scammed, and we legitimately
can’t do anything about that. (Even aside from that, imagine the temper tantrums over someone’s house or base getting griefed… Yikes.)
Even on a “lighthearted” note, a forum for Minecraft could risk causing drama and massive blowups that would just irritate the admin team at best. I love looking at people’s Minecraft creations now and again, but I can also easily
see preteens squabbling with each other because “you copied my build!” – it seems silly to adults, but this kind of thing is a Huge Frickin’ Deal™ when you’re 9-13 or so, and can result in some incredibly heated arguments, or even worse. (TW: suicide mention) I was once told to kill myself over some Minecraft drama, and I was 12 and dealing with suicidal thoughts at the time.
I don’t want someone else to experience that sort of thing, especially on a real-time platform where they could still get a glimpse of the message before an admin deletes it (particularly when many kids are experiencing depression or anxiety, and may be using games as an escape).
There’s an underlying issue, too, that we’d probably struggle to engage the current wikiHow-facing community with a separate, internal Minecraft one. Per the Community Topic Areas
, we don’t really have that many people who play the game. I have Minecraft, but I don’t play regularly and am horrendously out of the loop, and I’m sure lots of other community members are the same (or just don’t play at all). There’s no easy way to engage with a userbase where you have little in common, and some users may not feel comfortable doing so – as a 21-year-old guy, I’m uncomfortably aware that being “too friendly” with kids could put a target on my back. That’d lead to some amount of community disengagement from that section at least, and if the internal Minecraft community were to bleed over into the regular section of the forums and start causing trouble, I could even see it putting wikiHowians off the forums entirely.
I can mull some alternative ideas over a bit later (can’t think of anything off the top of my head), but knowing what we’re hoping to achieve gives us a much better jumping-off point; this really helps, and I’ll jump back in later if I have more ideas (I encourage anyone else reading the thread to do this too, because I know I tend to hijack forum threads with entire essays, lol). Thank you!
