If you wouldnt mind, please post here a short list of any links to Really Good Forum Guidelines. I will also be scanning past threads to see if I can find links.
Same to @katscratch and anyone else who knows Good Forum Guidelines
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I can probably help with the judgement Calls I am asked to make, then you can judge and come up with a good way to handle it, then we can present guidelines to the community and people above a certain trust level can vote on them?
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I have been a moderator, of a psych based forum, still in existence, so no names…
What frustrated me was that I had to “invent” policy. I had to try and figure the answers out from inadequate help or data. I had to daily for a while send lists of spammers to the real moderators, who could do something. I had very limited powers.
I did it for about six months, then just quit. No compensation, no plaque. No letter of thank you. Any of those would have been okay, I loved what the site was about. What caused me to quit wasn’t a lack of $, it was the lack of support entirely. I couldn’t get more powers to fix the problems. I didn’t know what they wanted the site to move towards so I couldn’t answer questions about software upgrades that weren’t happening, etc.
The no compensation wasn’t the issue. The lack of clear guidelines and policy and backup was.
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Oh good to know. Yea inventing policy is the thing I hate the most about the job and wouldn’t want it to be put on volunteer mods
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This is a big reason I havent put hand up to mod. Also because sleep deprived people make bad decisions.
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I used to send them questions, User X wants to know if Y is going to be like this or that?
They were moving to a partially paid forum and that was a continual issue. What would still be free? Not?
It was nuts.
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One thing you could do is ask folks here what they want/need the most and how would they like it protected?
My favorite, long lost site was 43things.com. The tried all sorts of monetary incentives/payment ideas, because ultimately the site was owned by Amazon…
None of them worked. What I would have paid for and gladly after I became a member of the community was a really private forum or a way to differentiate between what was shown publicly and not. Their last thing was that EVERYTHING you posted, unless you specifically edited it out, was posted with a “post on FB” or some such button. And, that not only the writer, but ANYONE could do that.
I had poured my heart out and had friends, real friends I made there. (Still talk to about 20 of them, occasionally or often.) I felt violated. Many of us did. And quit because of it.
But I had found a community of people I liked. I found a format that worked for me. I was willing to pay for privacy and protection of that privacy, when I needed it.
One of the attractions here was the private journals…
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I mean, private journals have never been advertised. They are not indexed by google, and only users above a certain trust level can see them, but I would never guarantee any level of privacy. I feel the same way about facebook and twitter. Don’t assume anything posted on the internet is “private”
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I get that. But OMD doesn’t put a button at the bottom of every post saying, “Post this to FB” either and they did. Like I said, that wasn’t really the issue either. It was that anyone…anyone… could take your words and post them on FB or my space or whatever it was and they provided the button to do so.
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Oh yea, not defending the sad death of 43things which I also stopped using when things got away from the OG format. But there is a link to every individual post here, just so people know. Click the link icon at the bottom of a post.
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First off, I am sorry to hear about the pain that numerous people experienced because of brute’s inappropriate actions.
I am not against increased moderating, but I wonder if it will really provide the security that people are looking for.
In my limited understanding, a lot of what happened with brute happened off-forum. Most of us didn’t know what was going on when it was happening, I don’t think a moderator could have prevented any of the harm that resulted. Am I wrong about that? A moderator could keep him from lurking onsite after the fact but damage has still already been done.
There also seems to be concern that there are a lot of people lurking here. Again, I don’t know that increased moderation addresses that. A lurker is not violating any of the rules that I know of. The only thought I have is to limit journal access to those who have posted elsewhere on the forum so we have at least some idea who a person is but that could have its own unintended consequences.
Even with increased moderation, I think it will still be on each of us to flag posts we feel are inappropriate along with a note about why particularly if there is backstory.
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Journal access has been raised to a higher trust level a month ago, as a result of this action. I do not advertise what that level is, but it is not just about # of posts made or minutes spent on forum. There are multiple parameters. Just creating an account does not give you journal level permissions anymore. I can also up or change these trust levels at any time. But never assume the journals are any more safe than anywhere else on the internet. They just have more barriers to viewing
Shadowbanning is usually quite effective in these communities, over outright bans, because people don’t know that no one can see their posts and they don’t know what they can’t see. If you don’t have the trust levels to see certain posts, you just don’t know they exist. If bad actors just get banned, they can create new accounts. If they don’t know they are shadowbanned, they may not know and do so
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Thank you and I hope you didn’t just give away info about your security systems you didn’t want to give away.
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haha no. I set the parameters and can change them if I want. There’s always gonna be ways around it for super smart people but there reason the parameters exist to makes thing safer.
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Oh it wont prevent outcomes, but some of the points raised here were about afterwards. People dont think to hit the “report to mod” button at all. The people with varying levels of mod powers, dont know what decision to make - theyre deciding from scratch every time. Also, this is far from the first issue on this forum, and we are long overdue some stronger Community Rules
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people are also afraid to flag, thinking it is Bad. But sometimes you flag just so the mods see it, doesn’t necessarily mean it is bad. But it creates a record and allows mod tools to kick in. So we need to get better at communicating how and when to ask for those mod calls
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Just testing things
Edit: hmm yes good information will make notes
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Ur not
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Social anxiety high enough I wondered if i was shadow banned
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