As many of us have recently been reminded, it takes a steady hand and a level mind to run a community properly. That is a lot easier to achieve if we have more than one person in charge, and even moreso if we work in concert to ensure timely, fair, and non-prejudicial moderation is the norm.
With that in mind, here are some guidelines I'd like to propose—as a starting place—for a sort of official procedure for how to conduct moderation.
I. Moderator Conduct1. Before taking action against a problem in the community, moderators should discuss their plans in an appropriate venue (defined later).
2. If the problem being discussed is
trivial in nature, such as removing spam accounts or spam posts, then the "discussion" may consist only of a notice that action is being taken. If the problem is
urgent in nature, such as censoring doxx, then immediate action (and notice) is also justified. These categories are defined more precisely in the next section.
3. For problems that are neither trivial nor urgent, support of at least one other moderator present should be obtained first before taking action.
4. Providing notice of remedies to even trivial problems is a vital part of accountability—if there is a later dispute over the appropriateness of the response, this provides a paper trail; it also allows us to gauge long-term patterns of problems (such as a recurring spammer); and moreover it demonstrates good will on the part of the moderator performing the action. SMF has a built-in moderation log, but it does not always provide context—for example, when a thread is deleted, only its ID is logged, not any content or title.
5. Moderators should be role models to other users: don't flaunt power, don't talk about users behind their backs, and don't act against the interests of the site and community.
II. Trivial, Urgent, and Deliberated Problems1. A problem is
trivial if:
- there is a blatant rules violation, and
- the offender is a newly-registered account, hijacked account, or probable bot, and
- the proposed remedy will not impair any meaningful contribution to the forums in the very probable future
For example, it is "trivial" to lock an account of a long-standing forum member if it suddenly starts posting spam, so long as the owner is notified by email as well. It is also "trivial" to remove thousands of posts from dozens of newly-registered spammer accounts, although the actual effort involved may not be pleasant.
2. There is also a special class of non-trivial problem,
urgent, that still merits immediate resolution without debate: things that are intrinsically time-sensitive. For example:
- If someone is hosting a live event very soon and gets the timezone conversion obviously wrong, it is probably harmless to correct it for them, so long as they are notified.
- If someone has posted (maliciously or accidentally) information that shouldn't be circulated, such as the home address of another user, then that should be redacted immediately and the affected parties notified.
3. Any rules violations not meeting either set of criteria count are
deliberated, i.e., they should be subject to assessment by at least two members of the moderation team, using the moderation venue.
III. Appropriate Venue1. All moderator discussion should take place in some sort of group chat, email thread, or forum set aside for the moderators—probably a channel on
@ZombiePhysicist's NeXT Posterity Discord server (https://discord.gg/pjSNHy82QE). (As of this writing, no such conversation space yet exists.)
2. I am not 100% certain whether or not this venue should be accessible only to the moderators or visible to the general public. Restricting its access removes unsightly discussion of spam and rules violations, and allows moderators to express their views frankly, but comes at the cost of limiting auditability by the public. Perhaps there is some sort of compromise that can be arranged, e.g. an auditor or filing FOIA requests. (Thoughts on this are welcome!)
3. The venue should not be used for any sort of conversation other than reporting and handling problems. Although judgements of character must inevitably form part of the resolution process when deciding how to deal with anticipated misconduct and repeated offenders, keeping the moderator venue free of spontaneous conversation is important to ensuring it remains professional and unprejudiced.
I cannot say for certain that these are comprehensive—maybe I missed something obvious?—but aside from policies around recruitment and dismissal of moderators, this seems to me like a sensible bundle of guidelines. I'd like to avoid any strict "user does X → user receives punishment Y" prescription of remedies since it seems to me like we should always be trying to strive for better (and more context-sensitive) resolutions than that, but please let me know what you think!
(Also it goes without saying that applications to moderate are welcome—as of this writing I don't think we'd turn anyone down!)