Mods need to talk to problem posters before banning. Most posters here are reasonable and will tone things down when requested. Bans should only be issued after requests are ignored.
Mods must be willing to discuss decisions. As a community run board, mods should be responsive to the community and be willing to engage regarding their decisions (and modify their actions based on community input).
Silence - not ban. When issuing a “ban”, the silence feature should be used. Ban should only be used for community approved permanent bans or where a community member is found to be abusive via DM while silenced.
Mods cannot act on a post involving themselves or where it is in response to their involvement in a discussion. Another moderator must act if the post is actionable. Where this is impossible, the mod team as a whole may vote on the correct course of action. An exception can be made in a situation where a poster is doxxing or directly threatening a mod, or other unforeseen extreme situations. In these cases, the rest of the mod team should be alerted to confirm the decision.
Failure to follow these guidelines would be viewed as reason to remove a mod within the existing RFC process.
My understanding is that silence just stops you from posting, but you can still do everything else.
I don’t think mods should have to discuss every ban, but I think their should be some avenue for people to raise concerns that a mod is overacting. Right now, that only avenue seems to be an RFC to remove the mod, since otherwise complaints are just ignored or dismissed out of hand.
I guess the alternative is we just accept that mods can do whatever they want for their term - but to me that seems to defeat the purpose of having a community forum. That also leads to the problem of what happens when mods disagree - do we just let them fight?
I think this avenue exists. Like, after your ban I posted that I thought it was a bit much. Or one could send a pm. If you want to give feedback or raise concerns, there are ways to do that.
With 1 and 2 - these should be goals, but making them hard rules makes it easy for bad faith actors to make being mod really annoying.
3 seems fine by me.
For 4 - We already have a rule that applies to mods posts. Meb’s motivation for this seems to be when Riverman banned a poster for a day for calling him a “fucking asshole”. I don’t think this requires a meeting of minds and overcomplicates things unnecessarily.
Briefly restating my points in the other thread so they’ll be part of this discussion.
How would we know?
This will be weaponized.
One issue here is that if 60% supports a moderation style and 40% does not, the mod must either reject the majority or decline to modify based on input.
We should expand this, perhaps? Or what about adding to the rule, “unless another user flags the post, in which case they may act but should refer it to other mods for later review.”
This feels redundant but I don’t have an issue with it. Any violation of community rules by a mod should be just cause to bring an RFC to demod.
While we’re at it, I think we should speed up the RFC process for demodding. We need an express lane, but it should require a supermajority. This has absolutely nothing to do with the current discussion or Riverman, it’s just a weakness of our current system that a mod run amok gets like 2+ weeks to cause chaos if they want while we’re voting them out.
I couldn’t really read the forum while banned so might have missed it. I just recall that any objection was dismissed out of hand as the usual agitators complaining and no justification was given - other than I was trolling.
I also think a few other decisions have been criticized and similarly dismissed.
I’ll be real honest and say that I am not going to put any more effort than I do now in justifying my actions. My nomination passed and that should give me enough leeway and freedom to mod as I see fit for the forum.
I’ve tried to avoid arguing about my ban, but I’ll point out that it too was for a post responding to Riverman post pointing out that he is a hypocrite when it comes to what investments he moralizes about (i.e. he loves to point out all the bad people that are involved in crypto and that us “crypto bros” are on the same side, but ignores that there are equally as bad people involved in stocks).
I saw your post. You were being a dick, at a minimum. Argue all you want over whether or not you deserved to be banned or if you crossed whatever line, you clearly got personal in an attempt to slam someone else down.
Being banned isn’t the end of the damn world, and bad bans happen sometimes. You’re taking things far too seriously if you’re still bent out of shape about that ban.
FWIW I think RM does get too aggro in the crypto thread and that gets people heated and they lash out. Seems like something we could smooth out without rejiggering the site rules.
I’m not bent out of shape in the slightest - you’ll note that after my ban ended I just returned as normal to posting - I didn’t go into the mod thread and create a storm or anything. The only change in my posting is that I no longer respond to RM in the crypto thread (wish I could put him on ignore) so that I don’t catch another ban.
When this discussion started, I decided that I’d try to improve things - both by offering to be a mod and providing my thoughts on how mods could do a better job.
Finally, sure I was being a bit of a dick - but Riverman is consistently a dick in the crypto thread - that was sort of my point. He makes drive by troll posts that look at these horrible people in crypto, how do you guys feel to be on their side. What sort of response does that deserve? If a mod decides to get in the mud in these arguments (which is fine) he should take off his mod hat when a bit of mud gets slung back his way.
I feel like the first thing I should think of is what is best for the community and encouraging mods to act in the best interests of serving the community. I thought we had accomplished that to a pretty high degree, but we’ve seen now that we likely need to codify some things to prevent people from power tripping and thinking they’re above the community they are meant to serve.
Both @rugby and @otatop used this method to good effect, IMO
would see the end of sockpuppet accounts and alt-voting and leaved the ‘banned’ party feeling less aggrieved - especially when most bans are handed for posts not echoing in the chamber
In summary, good OP - shame the usual suspects are trying to pull it apart to suit there own agenda