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Moderation requests & discussion thereof

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18:15 / 31.03.07

A question about this.

How are moderation requests treated, generally? Are they more like posts, public, or more like PMs, private? Are they something in between?

18:24 / 31.03.07

Not sure what you're asking.

Requests are private in the sense that they are only shared between those iniating a request and the mods who agree/disagree/pass on it. There is no dialogue as such because the software doesn't allow for it, that's why we have this thread - for those cases that need to be talked about.

18:25 / 31.03.07

Oh yeah, and sometimes mods will pm each other about a given request

20:09 / 31.03.07

Ah, ok. Because in the instance I cited, it seemed to me as though something somebody listed as a reason in a moderation request was brought up in-thread to rebuke him a bit, and it startled me. I wasn't sure if maybe it was something that happened all the time and was ok, but I just hadn't noticed it before.

I guess I have been assuming that what I put in the request box would be seen only by mods on that forum, but then I realized I didn't actually know what the policy was on that, or if there even is one. I kind of tune out some of the mod discussions when they seem like mods-only type of stuff and thought I might've missed something.

Less searchable M0rd4nt

22:32 / 31.03.07

Bit of a grey area, that. In a sense there's an arguement for the same non-disclosure policy that most right-thinking people apply to the content of PMs, but I wouldn't necessarily look at mod requests in the same way. If someone puts in a request and their reason is witty and funny, for instance, I would cheerfully quote it in an appropriate public thread.

Having said that I'm not entirely sure what uncle retrospecive's post added to the debate, really.

ONLY NICE THINGS

22:39 / 31.03.07

Short version - that was probably a dodgy use of the moderator privilege, such as it is, of seeing the reasons people give in moderation requests. I wouldn't do it myself. I believe the last time it was done was during the Paranoidwriter episode, but I think he brought up that he had made it clear in his request that he was in fact making a demand that he expected to be approved without question rather than a request - that is, the content was broached by the maker of the request.

Ah, yes - there we go. He actually reproduces the text of his own mod request.

So, yes. Not a great decision by Uncle Retrospective there, I think, and I'm not sure what he was aiming to achive by it, but what are you going to do?

19:35 / 03.04.07

Ask that people don't in future, until they have contacted the person who wrote it? Unless perhaps it's being quoted for funny or positive notable reasons.

10:32 / 04.04.07

I generally favour making the work mods do as transparent as possible, and in an ideal Lith would still like to see a rolling record of all mod requests.

Personally, I don’t think we should encourage the idea that changes are made to posts in secret. I can think of a couple of instances where a mod request contained confidential details, but I don’t think they were ever necessary to the request.

ONLY NICE THINGS

10:43 / 04.04.07

We're not, though, Smoothly. The question at issue was about people revealing the _reason_ for a moderation request, rather than that the moderation action had taken place - that is, making the user transparent rather than the moderator. I'm generally all for moderators being open to being asked about why they proposed, approved or did not approve requests, but at present there is nothing to tell non-moderators that the text of the requests they make will also be transparent. That gives moderators a bit of an advantage, because they can then decide whether and how to use that text. If it's "desnark", that's not so bad, if a bit bewildering, but if it's, say "I'm worried my abusive boyfriend will be able to find out where I am from this post", it's a bit trickier.

10:59 / 04.04.07

Yes, I understand that. I am suggesting that the _reason_ be transparent too, otherwise what does it mean to be transparent about a moderation action taking place? How, for example, can a moderator be open about why they approved or did not approve a request while keeping the reason for the proposal obscure?

Yes, it might be trickier in some, rare, instances. But I think giving the reason ‘I accidentally betrayed an identifying detail’ would be as good as the one you characterise. I think most people are sympathetic to those cases (I’ve moderated posts for that reason myself), and you don’t need to mention the abusive boyfriend. But YMMV I suppose.

ONLY NICE THINGS

11:12 / 04.04.07

Yes, that's fine. My point is that at present we don't have that ruling. If we did have that ruling - that text sent along with moderator requests was considered public and could be reproduced at will by the moderators who received it, using their own good judgement - then that would also be fine, as long as you trust the good judgement of moderators - in this case, I think UR's decision would still be questionable, as it seems to serve no useful function in terms of the thread.

At the moment we seem to think that this text is a bit like a PM, and should not be shared without a good reason. I don't see a huge problem with changing that attitude, but we should probably make it clear that we _have_.

11:41 / 04.04.07

Well, all I was saying is that I don’t think ‘we’ do all think that that bit of text is a bit like a PM. At least I don’t. And if we were to have a ruling on it, I’d prefer it to go the other way.

As for UR’s post, he was just calling you snarky, wasn’t he. Pointing out, more precisely, that the snark he perceived in that post remained after an effort at ‘desnarking’. I agree, not a great contribution, but I’m not sure it’s an abuse of moderator privilege in that – as you say – it’s not established that that is privileged information.

ONLY NICE THINGS

12:15 / 04.04.07

It's information which the system is designed to make available to a finite number of people. We can, if we choose, decide that this is a fault of the system, and that moderation request text should be totally public, as indeed you have. As I have already said, however, this is not how the system is currently set up. If you feel that this is how it should be from now on, I suggest canvassing opinions on that. At present, however, you appear to be arguing as if we had already made that decision, which we have to the best of my knowledge not.

I agree, personally, that mod requests are not personal in the same way that Personal Messages are. However, Barbelith is designed for them to be exclusive. I think there is a problem with deciding that the content _can_ be shared but not changing the system, so it is only shared if a moderator feels like it, rather than universally. Possibly there should be a note on the moderator requests screen to that effect.

12:39 / 04.04.07

The system is also designed to make exclusive the fact that a mod request has been made on post, whether it was agreed or disagreed and by whom. But that is information that you say yourself are all for being open about.

I know that the board isn’t currently set up to make all moderation activity public – I only linked to that previous Wishlist discussion because some of my reasoning for more openness was made in it. But if I’m the only one who doesn’t think that the reasons given for a mod action should be kept secret, then I’m very happy for that rule to be made explicit.

I might be misunderstanding you, but I certainly didn’t mean to suggest that we had already made the decision that request text should be totally public. In fact my intent was to say that I didn’t believe we had already made the contrary decision (ie. that this text is private).

ONLY NICE THINGS

13:28 / 04.04.07

Fair enough - I think from my angle, though, there is a difference between the fact of the request having been made, the action of a moderator having voted on it, the reasons for that moderators decision (on one side) and the text of the request itself (on the other). Moderators are expected to be responsible to the board as a whole when they act as moderators, whereas individuals generally aren't. As such, Uncle Retrosepctive saying that he had vetoed, say, a moderator request, and giving his reasons for it, for reasons of moderator accountability, is not the same as Uncle Retrospective quoting a moderation request's text, for reasons that remain unclear.

16:59 / 04.04.07

I tend to assume that the text of my moderation request is private and most of the time I write things in a way that I might not if it was public. Most moderation requests I see are one word; 'desnark', 'spelling', or 'typo'. Unless of course it's Stoatie in which case I frequently find myself laughing at the content.

I would wager that if mod request text was public people would probably take a lot more care over their wording, and I also think that it is fine for it to be public, but that people should be made aware that it is potentially public.

If it's going to be quoted in thread as an example of someone not doing what they allegedly said they were doing, in this case desnarking a post that UR obviously still felt was snarky, then Haus at least should have been informed that his mod request reason would be quoted. I don't really mind if mod request text is private or public, but I do think that at the moment people assume it is private, and so we should be aware of that if and when we quote it.

ONLY NICE THINGS

17:07 / 04.04.07

Just so.

22:59 / 07.04.07

My image is missing from here. We're obviously not allowed to approve our own edits?

jentacular dreams

09:31 / 08.04.07

There's no mod request pending. Can you try again?

jentacular dreams

09:34 / 08.04.07

Have just jumped into the post and fiddled with the image. New mod request pending.

12:04 / 08.04.07

Sorry, llamas - I think I disagreed that edit because it didn't appear to work.

Regrettable Juvenilia

08:31 / 10.04.07

This thread needs an abstract, but I'd like to get other people's ideas before I clumsily propose one: I guess the key words will be safe space, gender, trans, inclusion, exclusion, maybe actually add the terms FTM and MTF in there as well? Thoughts?

Hallo, Paper Spaceboy

13:40 / 10.04.07

Random fit of grammar-neurosis, but can someone fix the summary for this thread so that it reads "A look," rather than "An look?" Because it drives me loony looking at it.

Regrettable Juvenilia

12:44 / 12.04.07

Dunno if there's any point in posting to this thread since my last post was roundly ignored. But there's a mod request to move this thread to the Music forum. Really? I kind of suspect it's more likely to end up belonging in the Policy...

14:00 / 12.04.07

I think it's more of a policy issue personally.

Regarding your other request, I saw it but was leaving it for someone with more brain than I.

Also, has anyone else got this phantom mod request? If we can work out which forum it is by which mods share it, we can put forward another request in order to get rid of this one.

jentacular dreams

14:08 / 12.04.07

All I can tell you is it's not the lab.

One down, thirteen to go....

Our Lady Has Left the Building

14:58 / 12.04.07

I've made a fake request to edit someone else's post in the hopes that someone who moderates the same fora as me will then be able to piggyback into it. It's not Lab, Creation, Art, Music, Headshop, Policy, G&G or the Temple, which I think are the fora I don't moderate. It's probably the Conversation or Comics, those are the two main things I seem to get requests for...

15:01 / 12.04.07

I don't have a phantom mod request (I do HS, Temple and Lab).
Flyboy, why not propose it and see if anyone complains? I'd go with 'WOMEN vs TRANS SMACKDOWN' which is why I left it alone.
Seriously though, I'd say anything along the lines of 'MTF/FTM exclusion from gender-specific safe spaces' or summink would do fine.

STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK

16:39 / 12.04.07

I've not got a phantom request and I mod in Convo and Switcheridoodah.

MattShepherd: I WEDDED KALI!

17:50 / 12.04.07

We've got a broken link here (extra BR tag):

http://www.barbelith.com/topic/27023

17:52 / 12.04.07

I've put in a request

Our Lady Has Left the Building

18:50 / 12.04.07

I think the phantom request was to do with the Bleach thread in Film and TV and I THINK I KILLED IT! But... how do I know? How do I know?

09:59 / 13.04.07

I don't know. Mod requests with no requester and no request are absurd things in the first instance, but then when you factor in the frankly Pythonesque past time of having to work out which forum they came from using the process of elimination we are currently doing it all becomes very peculiar indeed.

Our Lady Has Left the Building

10:05 / 13.04.07

Well, if you make a fake moderation request for something, that will get listed first, another moderator can then hopefully disagree that and automatically be plunged into the malfunctioning moderation request and also disagree it.

13:13 / 13.04.07

If it helps, I got your Fakey McFakefix mod request, but never had the phantom. I'm a mod in Convo but not TV, if it helps.

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