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so we'd go from PA banana peels to CRabapples?
spambots and trolls getting very limited access would be hilarious though
Oversight.
If the H&A equivalent is going to allow an anonymous mode for posting potentially sensitive questions, that eliminates one potential use.
In the past, I believe some folks have used alt for forum games to mask identities.
I'm sure there are a few other fringe cases or use scenarios that aren't jumping to mind, I'm by no means claiming this is an exhaustive list, but as feedback, I don't think there's value in allowing someone to obfuscate one person into several that benefits the community.
Doubly so if we're going to be embracing voting on things a lot more.
One person, one vote.
Edit: Well, and Bizarro Stormy obviously, but I'm not concerned with him voting.
Bizarro Stormy is obviously going to be an exception. Perhaps now is the time to try and use my power to learn the secret though...
I disagree. Mod actions aren’t just about changing a single users behavior. They are also a signal to the broader community about what types of actions are not tolerated.
If I see a post that gets dinged, which I feel like I agree with and/or don’t think deserved the punishment my options are not great. I could PM a mod to complain, post something similar myself to get dinged and then appeal, or just accept that the rules are something I don’t agree with. None of which seem efficient or meaningful.
We are allowing everyone to participate in defining the rules now, why do we need to limit the continuation of that discussion just to people directly involved?
I don't think there should be like, an inherent weight applied to multiple people appealing a decision or anything like that, as there will assuredly be decisions that are both narrowly and broadly unpopular and a part of being a moderator is occasionally having to make unpopular decisions in accordance with the rules and values of the community. I don't particularly want to see letter writing campaigns of appeals, at least partially because that feels like it could end up being a fair bit of extra work for the mods, and I think if there is an appeal where it's determined that more information/voices from the community are required, that's something that the mods could choose to seek out.
But there are a variety of different reasons that the most affected person might not want to or choose not to appeal a decision, and that shouldn't just be a complete non-starter if it truly was an unfair situation or something of that nature.
Has anyone seen Summer Dale recently?
It just really feels like the push to let everyone appeal everything is going to result in a culture of further normalizing yelling at mods, which is already an issue. And unlike the current problems of spurious reports, which can be pretty easily ignored, I assume that appeals have to be addressed in a semi-formal manner, which means when people are clogging up the tubes with frivolous appeals, it's creating real work for the mods.
If the solution is just "Well, all the mods will be elected, so nobody will have problems with them and we'll never have to worry about people spamming frivolous appeals," I think that's a bit... optimistic.
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How does this work for ban appeals? Do we allow alts for the strict use of lodging an appeal, or do we allow proxies?
Does a non-appealed decision establish precedent? If I see someone cop an infraction for a behviour I think was up to but not across the line, something I would do - and when I do, if I lodge an appeal, does the argument 'we did this before and it's in line with previous punishment' mean my appeal will be turned down simply because the original person chose not to go through that process, and I was barred from appealing because I wasn't the subject?
EDIT: I'm not disputing your position, I just want to work through the implications.
Probably wouldn't be hard to maybe have a board with bans, where people could make a post to appeal on someone's behalf. Said posts will not be public for obvious reasons. I'd agree that the number of people appealing on behalf of someone should have no bearing on whether the appeal is successful. If someone legitimately fucked up and deserved the ban, it shouldn't matter how many posters come to their defense. Just like if the ban wasn't warranted, it should get overturned turned regardless of how many people stepped up for that poster.
I'm on the fence if it should be anonymous or not. Leaning towards the idea that personally identifiable information is scrubbed before the appeals board sees it, but the admin can still look up who made the appeal. We want a system in place where people won't have to fear mod retaliation for calling out a bad moderation decision, at the same time we don't want this to then be a system where people can be abusive shits to the mods either. The admin being able to see things should discourage people from misusing the system because they have anonymity and if the event that someone does abuse the system, the admin can pull up the name and the individual can be dealt with.
I'd lean towards threads on such a board probably getting scrubbed after they reach a certain age. Sure it could be a handy resource for people go through to see what could get them infracted with certain gray areas, but I'm also not wild about a board of shame either.
{Bluesky Account }{Writing and Story Blog}
For bans, I think there are many ways an appeal process can be made available that allows the person banned to make the appeal themselves. I don't know what it will be, but one can definitely be put into place.
I would think that if a person gets infracted, and you think it was unfair, there are a few options. One, you could DM the person infracted and say that you think it was unfair and that they should appeal. And if they say "Nah, it was fair," that's the end of it. If they say, "It was unfair, but I don't trust the system," you can try to convince them to change their minds. But at the end of the day, if the person most affected does not want to be a part of the appeal process, I don't think it's someone else's place to override that desire and drag them into it.
I also think that if you disagree with an infraction or something, there's no bar to DMing the mod in question and opening a civil dialog about their decision. The difference being that while an appeal will have a policy in place to require certain actions be taken in response, a DM won't. A good mod will probably respond to a good-faith attempt to start a dialog. But if one person insists on harassing a mod every time they do anything, the mod has the freedom to ignore it. (And if someone feels a mod isn't suited for the job, they can always attempt the process to have a mod removed.)
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It's hard enough to recruit and keep good mods, and harder still with moderators serving limited terms, and I think we should keep that in mind as we're designing our policies.
Legos are cool, MOCs are cool, check me out on Rebrickable!
I feel that this kind of conversation is both necessary and healthy for a community, especially one that purports to be self-determined.
I think such a discussion would fall under KD01-F, the one that allows for changing the rules and bylaws? Like that’s what would make sense to me, if someone see a rule that’s being used poorly, let’s get a revised version or a removal vote in front of the community?
Unless that’s not the intent of that particular KD
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Maybe I don't always agree it was points or ban worthy, maybe sometimes I think that person could probably do with a firmer slap on the wrist, but in general it is something of a level set/baseline of acceptable interaction, at least by giving real world examples of what is not.
That said, I don't know if it would have helped if each of those posts or threads had been an open conversation amongst users to express their displeasure about the action.
Which, to that end, what if someone does think that it was justified? If we're going to have threads or conversations regarding someone who has at least possibly crossed a line/broken a rule/failed to uphold the values of the forum, what then?
To be clear, I am obviously not suggesting that it would be acceptable to join such a conversation with 'YAY! FINALLY! FUCK THAT GUY IN PARTICULAR!', but if people are permitted to advocate that they believe that Forar shouldn't have been given points for posting in a questionable manner, would it not be fair for someone to also join the thread to say 'actually, based on a pattern of posts that were ever closer to breaking CoRe rules, I'm not surprised that he got points for that, and I think that moderator was right to apply them at that time, in that manner'.
If it's going to be a conversation, not everyone will necessarily dissent against the points or banning in question.
And with time comes familiarity, and I fully expect 'both sides' of this particular equation would not hold to a nuanced and balanced legalistic neutrality of language for long unless said discussions were set to a level where a hint of fucking around led to an instant and drastic level of finding out.
Yeah, if only the person who is banned can appeal, then that makes it pretty hard for someone who was banned unjustly to let the rest of the community hear their side of the story.
If the mod collective agrees that the banning was warranted, and a majority of the active community or something in that ballpark disagrees, we have bigger problems.
I understand the concerns about mod protections, but I think there’s some space in the middle. The appeals process should not be an actual discussion between mods and users and there should not be an expectation that every user gets a personal response, nor that the mods need to convince anyone that their ruling is correct.
But I think it goes a long way to have a place where anyone can voice a dissent, and a second mod can come in to review and post a final decision. The decision need not be a detailed investigative report, it can just be a reference to the specific rule/guidance that was broken, although ideally they will reference any users concerns that seem valid (again not intending to start a conversation, just to acknowledge that it was considered).
This for sure increases overhead for mod decisions, but doesn’t seem to be exhaustively so. If we are only generating like one mod action a day it would basically require a second mod to review (at most) 1 additional thread a day and make a determination.
Right now we basically have no explanation of mod actions without PMs. I think this is a better middle ground for some clarity on what it is we are trying to achieve.
And just to re-iterate one last time, this isn’t intended to be modding by committee. The original mod has no required additional actions, and the review mod need only make one addition post providing some clarity on what went wrong, what was considered, and the final decision.
There's a lot of inertia in a banning. I think most people who were serving as mods would air on the side of agreeing with whatever the other mod did. I probably would (maybe don't make me a mod).
Accountability requires transparency.
I didn't interpret this as a problem with the rule, needing revision.
We've built into the rules a bit of latitude and nuance, by design. I think that's a good thing, but it does mean that sometimes someone is going to think a line is here and another person will think the line is there.
It's worthwhile to talk about these things but:
1) discussing / litigating the the decision in the thread is against the rules, and people have professed an aversion to having the thread point of discussion become the decision, rather than the actual topic of the thread.
2) there are (suggested) constraints on who can make an appeal, and this discussion doesn't really make up an appeal itself
3) talking about subjective interpretations of an existing rule no-one disagrees with isn't really the same to me as going through a rule change process, which seems like using a sledgehammer for a staple.
So where does this discussion go? None of these answers feels right to me.
probably if i had my ideal system, appealing moderator decisions would work similar to reporting where it creates a private thread only mods and the user creating the request for review can see. instead of a one-on-one PM, this would allow for broad visibility and accountability on both sides of the issue
discussion of the rules in general i think should be public and would belong in the feedback and petitions subforum
How are users supposed to hold mods accountable for bad behavior when public discussions of it are forbidden?
Under this proposal how would it work if 7 people are affected by a decision? Is that 7 different private threads none of them can see? Or one thread where all 7 of them make a collective case?
Just specifically on this part, I don't know that using the term applicable here is needed. Standard practice has been to not quote a full article, however outside of that is pretty nebulous. Quote too little, people get accused of being selective, too much text people get accused of copying most of the article.
I think just extending the previous part of the sentence, "Please use your best judgment" works for how much text should be brought across from an article. Perhaps with a request that if it is a significant amount of text to put it in a spoiler.
At the end of the day deciding what text is applicable, or revelant is still relying on the quoter's judgement.
This also counts to a degree with the length of the article. Sometimes (especially in a world with the annoying live blogs news services have now) a link doesn't actually take you to specific update the whole bit is just 3 brief paragraphs. You're quoting the entire text, but it's just a handful of lines.
Post the link, quote a particularly noteworthy or otherwise valuable quote, and leave it at that. If folks refuse to read and then say you didn't support an argument then those are people that belong in your ignore box because you aren't going to convince them if you just post more of the article at them.
IMO mods are accountable to the rest of the mods and the board. If we think all of those are going to collude to defend a bad ruling, then mobilizing a thread to Get Angry about it isn't going to do much anyway.
obviously something like R rated movies, video games like Street Fighter or Doom is NOT what I'm talking about.
I don't think we want to penalize even silly appeals, and so there needs to be some kind of reins on the system to prevent abuse by bad actors.
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If somebody just starts appealing every mod action that can lead to them getting banned for harassing the mods and other users, and worst case scenario when they're false reporting stuff you're only going to need another mod or two to look at it and say nothing untoward happened, you broke the rules and deserved the infraction.
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I think not allowing people to publicly express dissatisfaction with a moderation decision or an insistence that it should happen behind closed doors is a bad policy.
There's a hard defining line between "reasonable disagreement" and "acrimony derailing a thread," sure, but one of the consistent complaints about Geebs' tenure as admin was that discussions between mod staff occurred in a black box that the average user had no insight or input on until a decision was made behind closed doors.
I think there has to be a reasonable expectation that people are allowed to publicly express disagreement or dissatisfaction with mod decisions within the context of the new rules and CoC, otherwise we're just going back to a system that didn't work and caused a lot of problems on both the user and administrative levels.
Weaponizing the appeal system seems like it's at minimum against our values, probably implicitly against the CoC as well.
I think all Mod actions should be taken with the presumption of appeal in mind, personally.
you might be surprised what percentage of reports are essentially people trying to weaponize the report system
it's a high percentage