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Outside of Barbelith I don't have much experience of other boards, so my following comments are based on my imaginings of an ideal board, and not comparing Barbelith to anywhere else. Please note, I do really like Barbelith, on the whole, and my comments are meant in good faith.
One problem I have with Barbelith is that it doesn't always appear transparent and accountable with its moderation. e.g. if you have a moderation request denied, you're not given a reason for this.
Similarly, it is notable, for example, that often thread summary's are provided or changed by members who didn't start the thread (for whatever reason), but there is little if no indication to (e.g) non-moderators and the rest of the interweb that this has happened (i.e. one has to rely on one's memory).
Now, I know often there will be a post in the "moderators request thread" discussing such a summary change, but sometimes there isn't even that and (to be honest) I don't think such brief discussions equate to proper transparency, as someone coming to a thread with fresh eyes and with no knowledge of the moderation request thread is therefore not likely to know that a summary has been changed.
For example, regarding Dragon's "illegal immigration" thread summary, in the "moderation request thread" I asked for this to be changed. Haus then tried to put a change through, but (for no apparent reason) the change was vetoed. Why? I still have no idea, although it has since gone through, mainly due to the perseverance of Flyboy.
However, more importantly for me, during this "can we change the thread summary" discussion I posted the following:
In regards to changing the Dragon's intent, could we put "(moderated)" after the new summary, and maybe even insert a similar tag along with the original summary in Dragon's first post? This way, there are at least clues that this summary has been changed and that there was a reason for it (maybe even put a link to my initial post in this thread for further explanation?)
Indeed, although there was some concern over the potential ugliness of such markers, I still think Barbelith would benefit from having some kind of visual indication that posts and thread summaries have been changed; perhaps (for posts) in the left hand margin just below the original time and date of the original post? We could also employ a symbol for thread summaries that have been edited (e.g. [M] ) and add a note in the wiki to explain what this symbol means.
I also think that if one's request is vetoed one should be informed of who vetoed it and why they vetoed it, especially seeing as we (rightly) have to provide a reason for why we are requesting moderation in the first place.
Hope all that makes sense. |
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