Administration/Moderation Changes & New Admin Team Nominations
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@Groaner said in Administration/Moderation Changes & New Admin Team Nominations:
are we getting a CoC now?
With @Tsaukpaetra on the admin shortlist? Seems likely
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@Groaner said in Administration/Moderation Changes & New Admin Team Nominations:
I read the other thread and that was an interesting ride.
So are we getting a CoC now?
I prefer a blacklist to a whitelist in this kind of things. With well defined rules.
And I greatly prefer more freedom than restrictions.
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@apapadimoulis said in Administration/Moderation Changes & New Admin Team Nominations:
@Gąska said in Administration/Moderation Changes & New Admin Team Nominations:
One thing, though. We're all grown-ups, so let's be honest - the major split in worldviews is between the left and the right. @boomzilla is rather far to the right. To stop people who disagree with @boomzilla from whining all the time, there needs to be at least one strongly left-leaning admin to balance him.
Agreed. Diversity of opinion is important, as I mentioned. I would also like a pro-Windows and pro-Linux person, etc. I don't think we'll find anyone who actually likes JavaScript though.
I've recently starting working with Angular and typescript is kind of growing on me.
Rather like a fungus. Time will tell if it's a poisonous mushroom or athlete's foot or some new miracle pharmaceutical.
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@bobjanova said in Administration/Moderation Changes & New Admin Team Nominations:
@Polygeekery Politics may not be involved in the actual decision but if you get moderated by a group that is entirely political opponents, it can certainly look that way - particularly if other posts don't get moderated and they are on the other side of the argument.
It's about perception.
Do you perceive posts as having been moderated unfairly?
We've traditionally had a very light touch moderation style for things that aren't actually spam. Boomzilla as the moderator hasn't been hiding bad faith Lefty posts even though he's on the right.
If moderation was actually affecting one side's ability to speak, then a balanced staff would prevent that from happening. But if we're going back to the status quo ante...
Did you have a problem with how the previous Boomzilla-led moderation regime played out?
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@GuyWhoKilledBear My post was in general terms, not about this site in particular. I only really visit the tech WTF parts of the site so I have no opinion about how moderation's done on here.
I've seen problems on other sites where there is a perception of unfair moderation where the composition of the mod team comes into question and conspiracy theories about bias start to circulate in the community, and it's not a good place to be.
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I'll fill in some history:
The moderation team has traditionally promoted from within. As mentioned, @apapadimoulis doesn't like doing that sort of job. There was never really much to do before Discourse. Discourse changed a lot of things. First, post volume shot up. As poorly performing as it was, it still beat Community Server and its tag clouds and inability of its WYSIWYG editor to function on modern browsers.
We also got the Jeff team installed as admins / mods, which made sense in some ways but they were not a good match for the community. @PJH had been a moderator (and maybe an admin?) since before the software change. Several others who had been moderators left and then it was pretty much just @PJH actively moderating the forum.
A few months after Discourse, he asked me to help fill in while he was on holiday. At first, I was just "Trust Level 4" in Discourse, which gave some moderating powers. Shortly thereafter he bumped me up to full moderator, and we started promoting other people (@abarker, @Yamikuronue, @aliceif, @loopback0, eventually @Weng) to TL4 or moderator (TL4 doesn't have any special powers in NodeBB other than access to the legacy Discourse category that was created for it, similar to the Lounge.
Pretty much all of those people stopped coming to the forums so they were removed from moderation. I recently promoted @Zecc as moderator. He seemed like the kind of person who would be responsible and who is respected by the community.
Most of my admin / moderation activity these days is reviewing first time posters for spam. It's not a lot, but there are a handful each week. We get the occasional flag. Most of them are @Mason-Wheeler upset about something @Polygeekery said in the garage. We probably average less than one flag per week requesting a Jeffing.
We haven't (knocks on wood) had a major server cootie attack for a bit, but that's one of the admin things that I do. I'll look at the logs and most recently it's been something like a DDoS coming from various IPs in China. Sometimes from other weird places like the Seychelles. So I add them to the nginx blacklist (I do have access to the server) and usually life goes on.
I also "own" the github repository where our TDWTF customizations are stored. We seem mostly pretty happy with code customizations and extensions at this point so that's mostly about accepting PRs for custom emojis.
For the most part this place self regulates.
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@bobjanova said in Administration/Moderation Changes & New Admin Team Nominations:
@GuyWhoKilledBear My post was in general terms, not about this site in particular. I only really visit the tech WTF parts of the site so I have no opinion about how moderation's done on here.
I've seen problems on other sites where there is a perception of unfair moderation where the composition of the mod team comes into question and conspiracy theories about bias start to circulate in the community, and it's not a good place to be.
I have been accused of that occasionally, and maybe have done so, though I try very much to avoid it. I am kind of synonymous with avoiding doing much of anything, which I think is coincidentally the right thing to do most of the time.
For instance, sometimes someone posts something questionable in the news thread. Often, it doesn't generate a big discussion and everyone moves on. No controversy and no hard feelings from the person who posted it! But, that backfires sometimes, too. And then some individuals believe they see a pattern in that and become hyper aware of potential fires and go to lengths to make sure the fires start.
I think you'll have to look far and wide to find a forum moderator more tolerant of criticism than me.
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Oh, and on the separation of roles between admin and mod that Alex mentioned. The way things have worked out, people who became moderators and then admins (which were pretty much just me and @PJH) continued to do moderation as admins.
As you might imagine, I won't lose any sleep if those duties are removed from my plate.
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@bobjanova said in Administration/Moderation Changes & New Admin Team Nominations:
My post was in general terms, not about this site in particular.
Fine. On a site with a more active moderation policy, I can see (and have seen) how those issues arise.
If the moderators take a @boomzilla style approach, I'd be fine with any of the forums liberals/Leftists moderating.
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@Gąska said in Administration/Moderation Changes & New Admin Team Nominations:
there needs to be at least one strongly left-leaning admin to balance him. Fellow forum members, please keep that in mind when voting.
In looking for balance, though, keep in mind that on both the left and the right, there are people who want to engage with the people who disagree, and there are people who want to silence the people who disagree. One such group makes good moderators; the other group makes bad moderators. Too far in one direction leads to the Garage (which I don't think is a bad thing, as long as it stays in the Garage); too far in the other leads to a forum in which people are afraid to say anything for fear of committing wrongthink.
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@PleegWat said in Administration/Moderation Changes & New Admin Team Nominations:
@Jaloopa said in Administration/Moderation Changes & New Admin Team Nominations:
Feature request: some sort of announcement when mods and admins are appointed or demoted. In the past people tended to just suddenly be mods, and I assumed that was still happening and we had a lot more staff than we actually did
Agreed. Probably a topic in meta, with a current list maintained in the first post?
The information is available by looking at the membership of the mods and admins groups, but that's not something I tend to look at very often. It also doesn't necessarily reflect the current reality; there are people who are still technically mods but who haven't actually been active in eons. Still, I think it's a good place for the info if it's kept up to date and coupled with announcements. I don't think a pinned post is a good place; I almost always unpin them after I have read them two or three or ten times.
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@boomzilla said in Administration/Moderation Changes & New Admin Team Nominations:
go to lengths to make sure the fires start.
Hey, there's only one official arsonist on this forum!
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@GuyWhoKilledBear
But is it? Or are people with opposing views just not feeling welcome or do we simply not hear their voice? In the past some people thought those voices were not always equally heard or that the slow and liberate moderation benefited abusive behaviour or comments.
I think it's only a fair request of @apapadimoulis to have an admin/mod team that isn't overly leaning to one or the other side.
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@GuyWhoKilledBear said in Administration/Moderation Changes & New Admin Team Nominations:
Did you have a problem with how the previous Boomzilla-led moderation regime played out?
Personally - I did. Obvious flamebait wasn't jeffed to garage nearly often enough or fast enough. To the point where (to some - I disagree personally but still) it looked like selective moderation, which people even angrier and made them post even more flamebait, not all of which was dealt with.
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@HardwareGeek said in Administration/Moderation Changes & New Admin Team Nominations:
@Gąska said in Administration/Moderation Changes & New Admin Team Nominations:
there needs to be at least one strongly left-leaning admin to balance him. Fellow forum members, please keep that in mind when voting.
In looking for balance, though, keep in mind that on both the left and the right, there are people who want to engage with the people who disagree, and there are people who want to silence the people who disagree. One such group makes good moderators; the other group makes bad moderators. Too far in one direction leads to the Garage (which I don't think is a bad thing, as long as it stays in the Garage); too far in the other leads to a forum in which people are afraid to say anything for fear of committing wrongthink.
Agreed. But admin choice, like it or not, is always going to be a little political too - in the sense that it doesn't just have to work well, it also has to look good on paper.
I uphold my vote for @sloosecannon, as he seems the most reasonable of all people who applied (to me - don't take it personally). And I use my third vote to support @Atazhaia.
And whoever said the composer taking most of the page after the update is retarded - I fully agree.
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@Luhmann said in Administration/Moderation Changes & New Admin Team Nominations:
admin/mod
An admin should have powers to patch, upgrade, secure or otherwise maintain the hardware and software. They should not have any mod powers. They can be as flamingly left, right, up, down or sideways as they want... but they should ping mods with any content concerns they may have.
A mod should have powers to delete, hide or otherwise modify posted content to conform to the rules (of course after discussion with other mods). To minimize conflicts of interest, they should not have any admin powers; rather, they should ping admins with any infra concerns they may have.
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@Gąska said in Administration/Moderation Changes & New Admin Team Nominations:
Obvious flamebait wasn't jeffed to garage nearly often enough or fast enough.
I partially agree. There have been occasions when stuff probably should have been moved sooner. But mods have real jobs that pay the bills, and some even have lives outside the computer, shocking as that may seem to us cave dwellers. So they may not always be instantly available. (This brings to mind a point that hasn't been raised, yet. In addition to philosophical diversity, geographic diversity would be a good thing to look for in the mod team — perhaps not so important for the admins — to increase the probability of someone being available in the rare cases that a quick response is needed.) Also, from what I understand, NodeBB makes jeffing a painful experience for the mod, and it certainly confuses the heck out of the last-read post pointers, so I'm happy to see it handled with .
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@lolwhat said in Administration/Moderation Changes & New Admin Team Nominations:
@Luhmann said in Administration/Moderation Changes & New Admin Team Nominations:
admin/mod
An admin should have powers to patch, upgrade, secure or otherwise maintain the hardware and software. They should not have any mod powers. They can be as flamingly left, right, up, down or sideways as they want... but they should ping mods with any content concerns they may have.
A mod should have powers to delete, hide or otherwise modify posted content to conform to the rules (of course after discussion with other mods). To minimize conflicts of interest, they should not have any admin powers; rather, they should ping admins with any infra concerns they may have.
Personally I'm not a fan of such split. One of the things admins have to do is set the rules of the forum - and that inherently makes them part of the moderation effort, as it shapes how the moderation effort of all mods looks like. And a chain of command is useful if mods ever start infighting (and I'm not a fan of super-moderators - it gets too bureaucratic that way).
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@HardwareGeek said in Administration/Moderation Changes & New Admin Team Nominations:
@Gąska said in Administration/Moderation Changes & New Admin Team Nominations:
Obvious flamebait wasn't jeffed to garage nearly often enough or fast enough.
I partially agree. There have been occasions when stuff probably should have been moved sooner. But mods have real jobs that pay the bills, and some even have lives outside the computer, shocking as that may seem to us cave dwellers. So they may not always be instantly available.
I understand that. But there's not being instantly available, and there's actively participating in the flamewar and ignoring the initial few flags and only when things go really really bad doing something about it.
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@Gąska said in Administration/Moderation Changes & New Admin Team Nominations:
One of the things admins have to do is set the rules of the forum
Why? What rules involving content does an admin need to concern himself with?
a chain of command is useful if mods ever start infighting
Alex / \ Mods Admins
Done. Or, the mods and the admins each appoint a lead for their respective parts of the org.
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@boomzilla said in Administration/Moderation Changes & New Admin Team Nominations:
@apapadimoulis said in Administration/Moderation Changes & New Admin Team Nominations:
@Gąska said in Administration/Moderation Changes & New Admin Team Nominations:
One thing, though. We're all grown-ups, so let's be honest - the major split in worldviews is between the left and the right. @boomzilla is rather far to the right. To stop people who disagree with @boomzilla from whining all the time, there needs to be at least one strongly left-leaning admin to balance him.
Agreed. Diversity of opinion is important, as I mentioned. I would also like a pro-Windows and pro-Linux person, etc. I don't think we'll find anyone who actually likes JavaScript though.
I've recently starting working with Angular and typescript is kind of growing on me.
Rather like a fungus. Time will tell if it's a poisonous mushroom or athlete's foot or some new miracle pharmaceutical.
I'm definitely keeping my distance from javascript, but I do work with C, PHP, and Oracle.
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@lolwhat said in Administration/Moderation Changes & New Admin Team Nominations:
@Gąska said in Administration/Moderation Changes & New Admin Team Nominations:
One of the things admins have to do is set the rules of the forum
Why? What rules involving content does an admin need to concern himself with?
All of them. If only because admin authority is less diluted than mod authority, so they're more likely to make consistent statement.
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@Gąska Good point. I have no beef with the way the forum has been moderated in the past, but when the moderator is an active and opinionated participant in the discussion that needs to be moderated, it isn't a good look, even if he/she moderates even-handedly. Perhaps what we need are mods, at least some of them, who don't dislike the Garage, but aren't regular participants there.
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@lolwhat said in Administration/Moderation Changes & New Admin Team Nominations:
@Gąska said in Administration/Moderation Changes & New Admin Team Nominations:
One of the things admins have to do is set the rules of the forum
Why? What rules involving content does an admin need to concern himself with?
a chain of command is useful if mods ever start infighting
Alex / \ Mods Admins
Done.
Except that’s not the structure Alex has envisioned. It’s pretty clear from Alex’s post that he does see the “admin” role as a moderator role and not merely IT Support for the forums.
Personally, I don’t care either way, as long as there’s a clear and consistent set of community standards with clear, advance communication of changes to them. Which it sounds like is the plan, so thanks @apapadimoulis for your efforts on behalf of us reprobates and for allowing us to play with your
ballserver resources.
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@Gąska said in Administration/Moderation Changes & New Admin Team Nominations:
Personally I'm not a fan of such split. One of the things admins have to do is set the rules of the forum - and that inherently makes them part of the moderation effort, as it shapes how the moderation effort of all mods looks like. And a chain of command is useful if mods ever start infighting (and I'm not a fan of super-moderators - it gets too bureaucratic that way).
Agreed - I don't see why there needs to be an artificial split between the two, where one can only do one or the other. If somebody wants to be involved with admin duties only, but not do moderation, that's fine (and, obviously, vice-versa).
Besides, as @boomzilla pointer out, those might overlap a bit anyway, e.g., with editing block-lists and so on.
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@Gąska said in Administration/Moderation Changes & New Admin Team Nominations:
Personally I'm not a fan of such split.
It depends on the people filling the roles.
Some people make good admins but sucky moderators. They should be just admins (and vice versa). Some people make good admins technically but also possess the skills to be good moderators, and they should be able to perform both roles.
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@PleegWat said in Administration/Moderation Changes & New Admin Team Nominations:
PHP, and Oracle
Eww. I think that disqualifies you from any position of authority. It certainly demonstrates a lack of good judgement.
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@HardwareGeek said in Administration/Moderation Changes & New Admin Team Nominations:
@PleegWat said in Administration/Moderation Changes & New Admin Team Nominations:
@Jaloopa said in Administration/Moderation Changes & New Admin Team Nominations:
Feature request: some sort of announcement when mods and admins are appointed or demoted. In the past people tended to just suddenly be mods, and I assumed that was still happening and we had a lot more staff than we actually did
Agreed. Probably a topic in meta, with a current list maintained in the first post?
The information is available by looking at the membership of the mods and admins groups, but that's not something I tend to look at very often. It also doesn't necessarily reflect the current reality; there are people who are still technically mods but who haven't actually been active in eons. Still, I think it's a good place for the info if it's kept up to date and coupled with announcements. I don't think a pinned post is a good place; I almost always unpin them after I have read them two or three or ten times.
I couldn't find the groups yesterday, but we could definitely link to that too.
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@loopback0 also, by having mods under the admins and not directly under the absentee owner, we can have rotate mods much more quickly if needed, and that lets us risk having more mods.
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@Gąska said in Administration/Moderation Changes & New Admin Team Nominations:
@loopback0 also, by having mods under the admins and not directly under the absentee owner, we can have rotate mods much more quickly if needed, and that lets us risk having more mods.
Yeah, and Alex's post seems to suggest he wants the admin team and not him to be the ones to decide on the moderation team (if they decide one is required).
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I appreciate and second my own admin nomination.
I have some ideas about how to use (hopefully not abuse) these powers, in a transparent fashion. These ideas are more about creating structure and policies than about enforcement. I'll leave that to moderators.
I'm a liberal, but I'll try to be impartial. I believe in getting community buy-in to major ideas, transparency, and accountability. If you don't understand or agree with my actions, then please, open a dialogue with me, and we'll work it out, along with the community, or privately if it's a sensitive issue.
Edit: also, I LIKE JAVASCRIPT
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@bobjanova said in Administration/Moderation Changes & New Admin Team Nominations:
@Polygeekery Politics may not be involved in the actual decision but if you get moderated by a group that is entirely political opponents, it can certainly look that way - particularly if other posts don't get moderated and they are on the other side of the argument.
It's about perception.
Also, when a lot of 'offensive material' rules are subjective, it's important to have a range of views on what is offensive. Is it offensive to think it's wrong to be gay, or to treat different castes/ethnic groups/etc differently, or the sexes, or trans issues, or whatever? Different political tribes have different opinions about that (and the offence vs free speech divide in general), and you want a broad spectrum to make fair decisions.
We've never moderated anything like that, at all, given it is posted in the proper categories. When we have it has been just to move it to the proper category.
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@Gąska said in Administration/Moderation Changes & New Admin Team Nominations:
@GuyWhoKilledBear said in Administration/Moderation Changes & New Admin Team Nominations:
Did you have a problem with how the previous Boomzilla-led moderation regime played out?
Personally - I did. Obvious flamebait wasn't jeffed to garage nearly often enough or fast enough. To the point where (to some - I disagree personally but still) it looked like selective moderation, which people even angrier and made them post even more flamebait, not all of which was dealt with.
Ok.
What I'm worried about is a heavier handed moderation policy where users are banned or posts are deleted for expressing opinions that were previously allowed. That would be a major change to the character of the site.
A quicker trigger finger on mods jeffing borderline garage posts into the garage isn't something I'm worried about. That's not going to change the character of the site. If people think that not enough posts are getting jeffed, I'm not opposed to a more liberal policy.
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@Gąska said in Administration/Moderation Changes & New Admin Team Nominations:
there needs to be at least one strongly left-leaning admin to balance him
There was... :P
@Jaloopa said in Administration/Moderation Changes & New Admin Team Nominations:
I'd almost forgotten xaade and lolwhat were members
dude.... I have asked like a couple of tech questions in recent years.
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I change my vote from @Atazhaia to @error. Don't take it personally, it's just that @error is a few percentage points more suited for that position in my opinion (I decided to only vote for people who expressed the desire to take the role; @error only did that just now).
I think that's my final admin dream team. @boomzilla, @sloosecannon and @error.
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@bobjanova said in Administration/Moderation Changes & New Admin Team Nominations:
Politics may not be involved in the actual decision but if you get moderated by a group that is entirely political opponents, it can certainly look that way - particularly if other posts don't get moderated and they are on the other side of the argument.
This is a big point.
I've never seen political reasons for a ban, but I've seen political reasons for omission of a ban. (by never, I mean rarely, obviously)
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@loopback0 said in Administration/Moderation Changes & New Admin Team Nominations:
It depends on the people filling the roles.
It also depends on the forum software. I think supported such a split. I don't know if does. Also, a malicious admin could potentially directly edit the database to give himself/herself that power, so it seems reasonable to me that the organizational structure reflect the fact that admins all have, theoretically at least, mod power if not authority.
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@Gąska said in Administration/Moderation Changes & New Admin Team Nominations:
I change my vote from @Atazhaia to @error. Don't take it personally, it's just that @error is a few percentage points more suited for that position in my opinion.
@Atazhaia Is on my shortlist of potential moderators.
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@HardwareGeek said in Administration/Moderation Changes & New Admin Team Nominations:
(This brings to mind a point that hasn't been raised, yet. In addition to philosophical diversity, geographic diversity would be a good thing to look for in the mod team
Yeah it's a good idea to have full time zone coverage if you're running a global site.
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Some technical details. The only mod group that really means anything is this one:
https://what.thedailywtf.com/groups/global-moderators
That's directly linked to the "global moderator" list in the admin panel.
We can, however, appoint moderators to specific categories. We've done that in the past for Mafia games and @cartman82 is the moderator for the fruit sorting category.
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@boomzilla said in Administration/Moderation Changes & New Admin Team Nominations:
We can, however, appoint moderators to specific categories. We've done that in the past for Mafia games and @cartman82 is the moderator for the fruit sorting category.
One of my ideas involves creating separate categories for each of the more strongly opinionated groups, and let them rule those categories themselves with an iron fist or silk glove, as they see appropriate.
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I wish this week wasn't super crazy (for reasons previously outlined in the Lounge) so that I could devote more time and attention to the issue, but after reading through everything, I had some thoughts:
To borrow buzzwords that have been floating around the news, was this whole predicament a case of a few bad apples, or a systemic problem? In the case of the former, once the bad apples are dealt with, would the problem not be solved and things could go back to normal with no changes in policy?
That we are looking at building new policies suggests to me that there is at least some thinking that it's a systemic problem. I'm not sure whether I agree or disagree with that assertion, but if we are going in that direction, we should be very careful about identifying what the systemic problem is, and coming up with a solution for it.
At the same time, I can understand the typical practice in our industry of:
- Solving the immediate problem
- Putting in measures to make sure it never happens again
But I'm not sure I quite understand what sort of changes are being proposed, apart from looking for a new moderation team.
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@Groaner said in Administration/Moderation Changes & New Admin Team Nominations:
few bad apples, or a systemic problem
There were two apples. There's not much distinction.
Oh, you mean the community? I think it's been mostly anarchy up until now, and we're looking at ways to fix that.
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@boomzilla said in Administration/Moderation Changes & New Admin Team Nominations:
the fruit sorting category
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@HardwareGeek said in Administration/Moderation Changes & New Admin Team Nominations:
@loopback0 said in Administration/Moderation Changes & New Admin Team Nominations:
It depends on the people filling the roles.
It also depends on the forum software. I think supported such a split. I don't know if does. Also, a malicious admin could potentially directly edit the database to give himself/herself that power, so it seems reasonable to me that the organizational structure reflect the fact that admins all have, theoretically at least, mod power if not authority.
Malice aside, whether the forum supports the split or not, the person's role(s) and responsibilities should be clearly defined. Just because the forum gives you moderator buttons, doesn't mean you should be clicking them.
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@boomzilla said in Administration/Moderation Changes & New Admin Team Nominations:
and maybe an admin?
No - I was just bog-standard mod on CS.
When Discourse started, it was me and @dhromed as active admins/mods, but he ended up leaving later on, because he had a life outside of Discourse. Then it was just me. Then I got you involved.
And that 40% minimum for the compose window is annoying...
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@Jaloopa said in Administration/Moderation Changes & New Admin Team Nominations:
I've considered nominating myself but what puts me off is that I've been much less angry since muting the garage and wouldn't want to have to delve back in there to arbitrate disputes. I think similar thinking might be behind the fact that all the lady wing mods we've had in the past have ended up quitting the forum.
If that's your main concern, I wouldn't worry too much about it. Based on my experience before my 2 year hiatus, moderation is mostly based on flagged items. There's simply too much going on for the staff to try and find things. And when a flag does come in, you look a few posts back in the reply chain to get some context, and then you deal with it. Quick in-and-out.
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Another one of my ideas is to have a moderator activity category. Any user (that's not a spambot) who gets hit with a banhammer also gets a thread, explaining what happened and why, and people can give feedback. People can also open appeal threads.
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@Groaner said in Administration/Moderation Changes & New Admin Team Nominations:
That we are looking at building new policies
My understanding is it's clarification of "policies" that were assumed.
Not really building new policies, but codifying expectations.
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@error one of the good ideas for discourse was that a flag created a PM between the flagger and the moderators so you could discuss whatever it was in there.
And when was able to log back in last night pretty much all of them were claiming to be unread. It's possible I missed something that someone actually sent to me because I just marked them all as read.
Hearing that other people were seeing similar behavior I assume it was due to the forum being upgraded, not the ban.