Barbelith Underground > Policy & Help > Wishlist -- what could be.

I've thought about this one quite a bit in the past. The reason not to let people just change their posts is because once they've contributed to the commons other people build on top of what they have said. If someone responds to something you say then they're investing work and effort. It's not fair on them if you then go and change your original post to make it say something dramatically different, or decide to go and delete what you said because you're not prepared to stand by it. That's why you have to get one moderator to agree (and that's all you have to get) - just to mean there's a bit more of a need to be careful.

There is a feature on Digg, however, which I do rather like and may try and get into the site at some point (particularly now Cal has said he's comfortable doing some more work on the site occasionally), and that's to help you deal with minor typos and errors - basically allowing you five minutes to edit your post after the original posting. That would seem like a sensible feature to be able to give people.

The more general question about moderation actions and whether they should be detailed so you know what's happened is one I'm REALLY unsure about and is probably one that I'd like to build in as an option that the community could choose between with some kind of voting. The reason for this is that it would dramatically change the community and not necessarily for the better. The distributed moderation system is there to make moderation less likely to cause fights by making sure it can't be viewed as a personal attack. Multiple people have to agree for the action to happen. And I'd like people to be able to vote with the conscience rather than because they're afraid of what they'd look like.

Having said that, I'd also maybe like to be more transparent about the kinds of changes that are happening around the board. Perhaps it would be sensible to do a few kinds of alerts around the place to start off with - ie. you proposed this action and it has been confirmed or rejected by the other moderators. Then you'd know whether to propose it again or go to the Policy or whatever. That would probably be useful, and I might try and get that happening.

I'm quite interested in that one, but a more risky possibility could be to put up an archive of moderation actions - with no names attached - made visible to either just moderators or for the whole board. That way people could talk about which kinds of actions they think are appropriate and which are not, and the scale of them and all that kind of thing. I'm a bit concerned that the whole thing would end up being a bit culture destroying and start a few fights, but it could increase the sense of transparency. Perhaps we could also add in a feature that allowed normal users in the community to retroactively roll-back moderation changes if a sufficient number felt it was appropriate.