Moderation Discussion

[eigen]

Starting off (continuing) the discussion of moderation.

My recollection is we left it at:

1. Low intervention moderation: only intervene when something truly crosses a line, and mostly focus on all the background tasks- member approval, post moving, etc.
2. A moderator discussion forum (made).
3. General moderation team, but include specific people who have sub-forum based responsibilities.

If you were one of the people interested in moderating and I haven't made you a moderator, let me know. At this point, there are three tiers of moderation:

Administrator (me) that has access to the back-end of the site. This includes software upgrades, backups, etc.
Senior Moderators: Have access to everything but the back-end of the site- this includes being able to change pretty much anything about the forums.
Moderators: Have access to basic moderation functions (deleting/editing/moving/splitting topics, approving new members, issuing warnings or suspensions) but can't change the overall forum structure and settings.

Or at least, that's how I think I have them set up.

[eigen]

Apologies if I have missed it elsewhere, but what will be the process for dealing with violators?

Bringing this discussion from Aside in here along with thinking about how we deal with violations/violators.

In my opinion, one of the primary roles of moderators isn't just to deal with moderators, but to help defuse situations. A lot of issues in regular discussion arise from heated discussions getting more and more, well, heated.

The first step in that case is for a moderator to post in the thread, reminding people of the rules and asking them to cool things down.

The next step would be (temporarily) locking the thread.

For cases where a poster isn't responsive to taking a step back and cooling off or where there's a trend (targeted harassment, following a user from thread to thread attacking them), then the proper step would be to move to an official warning, then a suspension, and finally in really extreme situations, a ban.

And in my mind the cases for a ban need to be truly egregious.

Different forums have different policies on moderators deleting or modifying posts: I'm personally against it unless there's case to be made that the post, in itself, is doing harm simply by being there- like a poster's real identity being outed. Otherwise, I think posts with a warning serve as a reminder and shouldn't  be erased.

[Tenured_Feminist]

Eigen, I endorse your tiers.

[namazu]

Me, too. 

I agree that "low intervention moderation" is the best approach here.  Historically, we've mostly been able to sort things out amongst ourselves without intervention from above (at least, intervention that was visible to the casul observer; I don't really know what the CHE mods did or did not do). 

Still, it's good to have guidelines and procedures in place to deal with potentially egregious cases that don't respond to the usual "work it out amongst yourselves" methods and become seriously abusive/disruptive.