Also, the fact she’s not fluent in English and uses auto-translate tools to interact with us, which can potentially lead to misinterpretation, miss nuances in our suggestions, or things like this. I’m not saying it’s the case, but it could be sometimes.
3 Likes
Just as an extra datapoint, I’m a member of another forum that has one main admin/moderator who works traditional business hours and a selection of TL4 community members who act as ‘mini-mods’ (so not even any category moderators), and as a TL4 on that site I find I have lots of powers to edit public post content when it’s inappropriate [1], close or unlist topics as necessary, set slow mode, etc. We don’t have Personal Messages or Chat, which makes things easier, but you can gate those features behind trust levels if they’re being misused on your site, as well as locking certain user’s trust levels below that threshold if they persistently misuse them.
FWIW, I find that there are some quite powerful tools available to trusted community members without needing to grant full moderation powers (whether TL4 or category moderators), and you can also revoke these if you find those community members are not as trusted as you thought.
I think in another topic you mentioned being reluctant to check the staff logs to review behaviour, but I would say that these can be excellent for keeping track of users with higher abilities - and you can quickly revoke any from users who aren’t in line with your forum’s ethos.
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doubly useful in conjunction with having no public edit history ↩︎
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Even if you could block their ability to delete accounts couldn’t they still simply delete every post from the person? Or continue tampering with them? Especially if you already don’t want to check the logs, they could simply come in and wipe out as many back posts as they want constantly.
Not to mention silencing, anonymizing, suspending, trust level limiting, merging and splitting topics, there’s essentially countless ways to cause a severe amount of calamity that you’ll either 1. Remain unaware of until it will require a lot of work/reset to fix (at the cost of losing progress) or 2. something you’ll have to constantly monitor. Neither of these sound fun.
The option of just removing all powers one by one circularly brings you back to don’t have them in the first place. If you can’t find someone to trust them IMO your second best option is to find something with the very least amount of power required, and then try to add on whatever specific thing you need them to be able to do vs. giving them a ton of power and trying to block it piece by piece. As mentioned looking at Category Moderators, or Trust Level 4 options. First identifying what you NEED them to do, instead of what you DONT want them to do
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It would be interesting to know what extra powers you want to give out.
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If you enable the setting checkbox for high trust flaggers auto hide posts, you could get the TL3 and TL4 users to flag the posts to hide them until you have time to look at them. It’s also possible to remove the ability for users with high TL to edit other users’ content.
I only give people TL4 access on my forums (not moderator), because it’s too risky. I use webhooks to ping me on Slack when there is a problem. The webhooks post to a Firebase cloud function that decides whether to send a Slack notification.
2 Likes