Moderator selection criteria

Structures and bureaucracy also repeatedly resulted in abuse of power. Sadly the problem is not just lack of structure and just adding more formalism should not be expected to solve it entirely.

The problem is that people are not ideal and any power can be abused, and there is no silver bullet. And formalism has own issues. For example codes of conduct are not magical power stopping abusive people - and abusers can use also CoC as a tool.

Though yes, smart structures can be better than informal soup.

Someone able to delete posts and ban people is definitely position of power. Very minor one but it is something.

I have been participating in another Discourse forum started shortly before this forum and it has encountered some issues surrounding moderation. There was not a formal process to select moderators. But on that forum the moderators do participate much more such as by adding tags to topics. For example right now there is no wiki category. If there is a topic about a wiki, a moderator should be able to go in and add the wiki tag or move the post to the correct category. I would suggest creating a moderator duties description that clearly states what powers a moderator does have. Clearly something like banning a user should not be done by a single moderator. Discourse does have ways of flagging and hiding posts that do not necessarily delete the post. Documenting the processes surrounding moderation and being open in that sense is just as, if not more important than the selection of moderators themselves.

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Yes, I tend to believe that a simpler process might be possible and that anyone fulfilling the requirements should be able to help as moderator.

Let’s think about your proposal, how would you handle if there are different opinions and there is no consensus? Who would be the ultimate decision maker here?

Note that the current proposal is trying to optimize for communities self-accountability.

They are expected to mediate in conflict, enforce the guidelines and the have the decision making power to hide, move or delete messages if needed.

This requires leadership and community trust in my opinion, and building a process to ensure the problems I described above are tackled is complex. Most probably the first version of this criteria won’t be perfect and will require future tweaks.

The main question is about how to resolve conflicts in case some potentially single community members are not happy with moderation style. And I can imagine that in some cases two conflicting opinions collide and a moderator falls out of role and hides messages or potentially edits them to please better.

So question now is: Do you want to allow allow anonymous complaints or do you require that a member more or less publicly has to state this?

I think a way out of this is to have a second level of moderation, which would in these hopefully rare cases moderate the moderator. This could be a reminder to not take position when speaking as a moderator or clearly differentiating in which situation something is stated as moderator and when it is as regular member up to actually revoking status.

In this scenario a member could report to that second level that they believe the moderator is overstepping. That 2nd level moderators (like super-moderators) could then revoke moderator status (at least temporarily) from that member and ask community for suggestions on moderator. Maybe even allowing the community to keep the moderator in question.

Reporting to super-moderators would only expose the identity if the reporter towards the super moderators. So in case of minor issues the potentially already existing conflict between two members is not additionally fueled and allowed to cool down.

These specific 2nd level moderators, by having the power to promote members to moderators and revoke moderator status have then significantly more power. For these you might run elections.

This would then also allow to separate these roles from technical administration of the forum. It might be the same people if elected, but could also differ.

A group of maybe 5 super-moderators could then vote with a majority decision and start the community process of moderator approval.

This would bring the administrative overhead from 5ß-60 polls each year down to these 5 and potentially another one in case a moderator did overstep. Still uncertain whether this actually ever happened since we run the forum.

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If a moderator is being abusive it can be reported with the current proposal:

This second layer of governance is something we have already with the Forum Governance Team, which by the way I remind that we keep looking for feedback on how to improve, ensure true diversity and leadership rotation.

I think then everything is in place already to deal with moderators abusing power.
No overhead for polls needed.

You might think about splitting technical administration and governance. It looks like this is the same role currently.

Well, only one member of the current forums governance team is actually in charge of the technical side of the forum :slight_smile:

Ideally, such guidelines should be tailored to our specific community dynamics, and such a custom document hasn’t been created yet. But some parts of the generic Discourse moderation guide are applicable to our forum as well.

I would like to keep things simpel. I do not think that an “evolution Poll” each year is meaningful.

I think its good enough that 10 members of a community (or 1%) can står such a poll and mabvy we can have a yearly reminder Post.

I do not like the idear of moderators seeing their role.for a limited amount of time. It should clear that a good moderator that has in mind to quit should look out for people to “grow in that role” including “alongside work”.

Theierfor i dislike the idear of having a moderator with an evaluation process like a “board member”. It is not nesseary to request än officiell title - but it is nesseary to have a metod for conflict handling.

The need to stop a moderator with democracy in special situations does not mean that it has to be complecated to became a moderator.

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I just learned that the probably “typical” moderator in the community, a “category moderator”, won’t have special powers to delete or silence other users. Actually the only “special” power as opposed to a TL4 level which can also be reached by power users is to review posts and flags.
This does not really justify all the proposed overhead of polling.

We should focus more on encouraging regular users of the forum which demonstrated communication skills in terms of mediating between conflicts and such to get involved into moderation, instead of thinking about rules to protect from a not existing thread.

This is a reminder, the deadline for comments on this proposal ends on 2022-09-14T22:00:00Z, after that the @forums-governance will review all feedback and take a decision on next steps.

Apart from some frequent visitors I think the most visitors (at least of the Dutch forum) do not check the forum often and for sure not daily. I would make each of the periods that long that they at least include a weekend.

Thanks everyone for your feedback and input in this topic.

As a result, the @forums-governance team came up with five improvements to the initial proposal:

  1. In order to reduce the voting burden, polls to validate proposed moderators will only take place during the initial category creation or during later additions/removals of moderators when the evaluation of mods requirements fulfillment turn not to be obvious.
  2. The time for the initial discussion and voting will take 5 days each, but always having weekend days in the middle to optimize for everyone’s available time.
  3. Once a year, a reminder to communities will be sent to open a conversation to check on their moderator group health: Do you need new mods, does someone want/need to step-out because is no longer fulfilling the requirements?
  4. A feedback mechanism will be established to allow individuals to flag to the @forum-governance any issues with a moderator at any given time. Their fulfillment of the requirements will be evaluated.
  5. New mods can be suggested by the communities at any given time, as long as they fulfill the requirements and accept the role.

Wording has been changed in the original post to reflect these changes.

Again, as a reminder, this is a version 1 that will be tested starting now, and the process will be evolved/updated as its being used and what works and doesn’t work can be analyzed.

Thanks again for helping shape this process!

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bit late … but maybe food for thought at the next turn: what about some minimal set of badges, that show some knowledge and familiarity with the platform? if “moderator” we’re talking about is a task, not a title.

Not sure about tying it to badges (although that has the benefit of objectivity!), and at the moment, asking for experience with this particular platform is tricky because it’s still quite new.

But once that’s no longer the case, I do agree that familiarity with the platform is desirable for moderators. So in the long term, I would personally read

  • Actively contributing in the community conversations at least in the last 6 months.

as looking for participation in community conversations on this platform, even if it doesn’t say so explicitly.

That would also apply for the later health checks, of course: If a moderator has not been active on this platform for quite a while, that would be a clear reason to revoke moderator privileges and look for someone more engaged.

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indeed, the objectivity of badges was what appealed me;
point taken, the platform is now too new to provide insight on commitment;
concretely, I had noticed three ‘Getting Started’ badges:

autobiographer
certified
licensed

and, oops, I have not one of them. but that can be fixed, with limited effort. btw: Tutorials? hadn’t even noticed there’s tutorials for this platform. my bad, or looking for excuses, lacking advertisement.

… 6 months is a long time. can we make it 3?

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Better not. The moderator has to be someone well known to the community.

oops, I’m sorry, I had read it the opposite way … I thought we were looking at months of absence from the platform, and 3 months absence seems to me enough to form proof of loss of interest.

still, for a proof of familiarity and commitment, 6 months is a long term.

IMO, we need some flexibility, somehow, but I’m not making further suggestions, beyond a selected set of badges.

Hello, good night from Mexico.

I don’t understand the role now of a moderator, at least not the one they want to assign here on the new platform.

For me, a moderator role has a simple charge: To have an order in a forum.
Report spam, block comments that may cause problems or upset, etc.

For when there is a discussion between two or more members and that can incite more lack of order, the moderator should intervene asking for the fight to stop. And if the users involved do not intend to stop, the moderator should report it with the next level

The next level will take note and make the necessary charges (temporary suspension, or permanent block).

I don’t know how many levels there are here, but normally there are only 3: moderator, administrator, and finally the legal representatives.

When a moderator abused the power of it, all the posts (messages) had a “flag” to report the user author of that message. Who reported a user, had to add the grounds for him to report.
And if it was a moderator who was reported, among his fellow moderators they tried to solve the problem, before taking the problem to the administrators.

But throughout these years on the old forum, I saw no need for problems beyond the scope of a moderator.
I don’t know if here they intend to add new functions to the moderators.

Sorry, just copy and paste on online trasnlater.