December 3rd, 2008 by Steve Watts

On the PlayStation.Blog, Sony marketing manager Mark Valledor has addressed some recent concerns about Little Big Planet level moderation. The post goes into several questions from the LBP community, and moderation was certainly the elephant in the room. Valledor says that they're "continually improving" the process. He points out that the stages that were deleted had been flagged by the community using the "Good Grief" tool, and that Sony itself doesn't delete stages unilaterally. Though he says that most stages were deleted due to offensive material, he also notes that the company is "evolving the way moderation happens to ensure that creators are made aware of why their level was blocked."

The post also claims that the servers have been improved in the last few weeks, and that a better Search function is coming. This seems to address most of the major complaints of the LBP community, particularly by making the moderation process more transparent. Despite outlining the deletable offenses, some users have found their stages removed for no discernible reason. Most famous is the Azure Palace controversy, a stage that was deleted and then later restored. If moderation is being handled entirely by user reports, it stands to reason that sometimes people will gang up on a stage that doesn't break the rules. At least by working to tell authors why their content was moderated, the process of restoring unjustly deleted levels should go a bit faster.