I’ve moderated several often contentious communities, with and without Discourse. My initial experience was with a large and rapidly growing community on (the now defunct) Google Plus. The community had been badly managed for some time, then the owner rage-quit, leaving me in charge of a bunch of angry people. I’ll give you the short-ish version:
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Make SIMPLE rules, no more than 5 and no more than one or two sentences each. Make sure they are posted so that anyone can find them easily. You should right out a longer description of how those rules are interpreted and post that too (your mods will need this). Start with rules for Respect and Relevance, as these can be interpreted to cover most offenses. Don’t make rules you cannot enforce. (hint: borrow or steal rules from other boards.)
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A fallback rule for all other situations is “Don’t Waste Time”. Moderation decisions can be tough, and might require considerable time and effort, especially when you are trying to be fair. If you find yourself spending more than a few minutes with a problem, then someone else is imposing unfairly on your time, and possibly on the time of everyone reading the offending post. Make the quick decision, and let the other person spend their own time fixing the problem. That’s is very fair.
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Find some cool-headed people to be your moderators. They should be thoughtful and open to multiple points of view, but not overly sensitive, as they may have to deal with abuse. It is essential the moderation team communicate so that enforcement of rules is consistent. A Mod should act immediately when there is cause to do so, but discuss the situation later so other can understand why action was taken.
That’s how my team put things back together, moderating a community with thousands of active members with essentially no moderation tools other than deleting post, removing comments, asking nicely, and eventual banning (if all else failed). We got things done, and most of our moderation time was educating members on expected behavior so they could self-moderate.
Discourse gives you lots of great tools, which we would have given anything to have back in my G+ days. You still need simple rules, and to talk to people about expected behavior, but the tools are in place to support whatever you need to do. If a person is being difficult, make sure you have an interpretation of the rules ready to talk with them about it. If there isn’t a rule to cover it, consider that they may be wasting your time and act on that basis.
I haven’t written anything yet about dealing with contentious people, which might be another very long post.* VERY briefly:
- There are people who think they should not be subject to any sort of rules; they cannot be helped, invite them to leave as soon as you have had enough.
- Contentious issues tend to draw people who enjoy arguing. Let them, but impose some basic rules right away, and set a topic timer to the argument doesn’t last forever. Arguing is a very popular sport for some, and may quickly generate hundreds of comments. It’s great for traffic. but might not be the tone you are trying to set.
- Some people won’t argue fairly; they may not give sources, or may quote-mine sources, plagiarize sources as their own, make stuff up as they go or (or recently) use ChatGPT. This is generally disrespectful to all involved, so stomp it out when you find it.
- For most other situations I highly recommend this article about Criticizing with Kindness. If you can get both sides of the argument to agree to these rules there should be no moderation issues, but it’s hard to enforce cooperation.
OK, this comment has gone on far too long. Goodnight! 