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 colorto 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):
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.
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.
