Some Context Staffs are not gods from the heavens. Sometimes they can have a bad day, or just have a kind of behaviour that just don’t go well with someone else. As an admin of a community, I can see that happening and given that not all communities have paid staff to moderate, it’s also unfair to ask for professionalism all the time from the moderators/admins. Which lead to users frustration when they try to mute someone from staff and discover that they can’t. I mean, it makes sense, as a post from staff members would usually be important. However, sometimes staff just want to participate in a discussion just as “another user”. Proposal Default behaviour is that mute works on any user Staff can PM bypassing the mute Staff posts will be displayed anyway if they get the Add staff color to the post This should guarantee that a staff member can still perform its duties and be noticed by everyone, no matter a mute state, but allow users to feel in control if they decide that a user is just getting on their nerve and they want to mute it. As this has been closed, I’ll add my final consideration here: Continuing the discussion from Allow regular users to mute staff (more details inside): [image] Moin: Muting staff is already possible. Sorry, life got in the way. I simply reported what plenty of users where complaining about. And, unfortunately (?) some forums are not communities with paid staff which means that you have to consider also that you deal with humans that gift their free time to keep things civil but must also have their right to express frustration or have heated discussions. Or even that the users complaining simply don’t know how to participate in a discussion and would prefer not to see the other person opinion rather than being triggered. Plenty of other point of views, here. In any case, the fact that you cannot mute by clicking the user’s card is reason enough to justify opening a request. Also, if muting completely mute a staff member, then something is not right. As explained, a staff member should bypass a mute, in my opinion, when something is being written “as staff” and not just its personal opinion. [image] Dan DeMontmorency: I agree with @HAWK in that you need to choose your staff wisely. Regardless of volunteer or paid Volunteers should generally typically restricted to tl4 or category mods Imho there should also be a Top Mod Level without the need to be an admin to be able to manage other full site mods. That can silence/suspend other non top mods. Because of the powers a full mod has. They can easily without care destroy a community with abuses of power. In my specific case, I arrived fullfilling the role of admin after this community has been around for 20+ years. A mod team has been existed since way before I had taken the role and I can’t believe that this is an unforeseen scenario. Admins are not gods among the rest as well as mods should not be. They both come and go depending on the circumstances. I’ve read the point for TL4 users but that makes things incredibly slow to process. As far as I learnt, TL4 moderate the content. Mods moderate that and the users. If a TL4 edit a post that is being troublesome (offensive, sensitive, etc) and the owner of the post edit it back, would that be an acceptable “war of the edits”? According the this, they can in fact edit other users replies and topic but cannot lock the edits. Beside the incredibly difference perceived act of another user editing your own replies compared to a moderator doing it so, it does’t really feel like TL4 should be the correct role for “voluntary moderators”. As mentioned, not all communities are for profit and can afford to pay their “staff”. The whole heriarchy of moderation, admins, etc is to be reviewed in Discourse but that’s an IMHO and not the scope of this topic.

Muting staff is already possible. You can add staff users to the mute list in your preferences. [Screenshot_20241214_231328_Edge]

[image] Crius: given that not all communities have paid staff to moderate, it’s also unfair to ask for professionalism all the time from the moderators/admins. I can’t ignore this, sorry! Volunteer staff should absolutely behave professionally at all times. If they don’t, they should be removed from the role.

Interesting that option exists but there isn’t a link to that at the user card profile for staff members that is there for non-staff members, don’t know if that is intentional to make that more difficult to figure out?

At the user page guess not the card isn’t there but there is drop down notification options by the message and chat links: [Screen Shot 2024-12-15 at 6.48.20 PM] Isn’t there at Sam’s page: [Screen Shot 2024-12-15 at 6.50.32 PM]

[image] Crius: This should guarantee that a staff member can still perform its duties and be noticed by everyone, no matter a mute state, but allow users to feel in control if they decide that a user is just getting on their nerve and they want to mute it. This could make sense, but may require the ignore feature not mute for what you are talking about to hide posts in a topic that aren’t specifically addressed to an individual who wants to mute/ignore a staff-member. That may already be possible as is the mute feature for staff members but requires user be at trust tier #2 to be able to use the “ignore” feature. In the context of if a staff member is making posts on a topic that are not important staff announcements, then those could be minimized out if folks are wanting to focus on talking to other people.

I suspect we hide it there because it’s not generally a good idea to mute staff, nor should you need to. But the option exists should it become a necessity, you just have to look for it.

[image] Crius: unfair to ask for professionalism all the time from the moderators/admins With this I can see that being reasonable depending on what your definition of professionalism is. Seems like you are talking about people (that are discourse mods/admins) wanting to just have general chit-chat that isn’t super professional administrative or moderating announcements? That seems like would be fair in general contexts for those folks to be free to mingle with the common member folks. If volunteer or paid staff members are not being civil and/or going too far in non-professionalism then they probably shouldn’t have mod or admin privileges.

I agree with @HAWK in that you need to choose your staff wisely. Regardless of volunteer or paid Volunteers should generally typically restricted to tl4 or category mods Imho there should also be a Top Mod Level without the need to be an admin to be able to manage other full site mods. That can silence/suspend other non top mods. Because of the powers a full mod has. They can easily without care destroy a community with abuses of power. A member in my community at one time created a tampermonkey script that added an option to block/mute users in the form of an external theme component browser extension. The idea though if extending the block option not hide posts decorated by staff colour is a cool idea. Members need to know if they are having issues with one of the mods they can contact another mod to intervene if needed. A problem with muting a mod. If that mod realizes they are blocked they could choose to use mod powers to cause the user a lot of greif. Here is a link to his topic. It was at that time I believe Discourse did not have a block feature. Also provides some other nice goodies. https://community.openmr.com/t/tampermonkey-script-to-extend-usability-on-the-pimax-forum/8223/2?u=heliosurge It would need to be updated to reflect changes in discourse since it was made. And could likely be made into a TC or kept as a browser mod extension

[image] Dan DeMontmorency: A problem with muting a mod. If that mod realizes they are blocked they could choose to use mod powers to cause the user a lot of grief. That would be no good, they definitely shouldn’t be a mod in the first place if they would do that. [image] Dan DeMontmorency: Members need to know if they are having issues with one of the mods they can contact another mod to intervene if needed. That is a good reason to have at least two competent moderators.

[image] Architect: That would be no good, they definitely shouldn’t be a mod in the first place if they would do that. [image] Heliosurge: Members need to know if they are having issues with one of the mods they can contact another mod to intervene if needed. That is a good reason to have at least two competent moderators Having a mod team is definitely key. Paid or not they need to act professionally. Awhile back I was looking to improve mod integrity by having it so a mod would be restricted from managing a flag they made or were the target of. Unfortunately at the time my CSS/JScript skills were not there yet and I still need to work on improving them still It is true paid or not a mod can have a bad day this is where the individual needs to know when to take a break and to also heed ty counsel of not only fellow mods but also respectable community members I had one community member reach out during a is when things had become a bit rough. I had started to become more aggressive. Where prior to the is I was a community support helping members with their VR headset issues Due to him reaching out, I realized I needed to do better. I made an apology to the community and returned more back to myself

Allow regular users to mute staff (more details inside)

Product Support

HAWK (Hawk) December 16, 2024, 2:28am 5

I don’t understand what you mean. Where on the user card?

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Allow regular users to mute staff (more details inside)

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