Would like to talk about the effects of various different moderation polices for discourse community sites. I have seen a few different methodologies have significant impacts on the way people communicate at different sites, and it seems very important to consider the advantages and drawbacks of different policies before deciding to implement them.
There are quite a few different options for how to moderate. While I don’t have experience of being a discourse moderator myself, I have some general ideas about policies that may or may not work well in practice.
Challenges for moderators I can see are if community members are upset or in distress about a situation, they may write with a lot of emotionality that isn’t always polite or considerate. They could proclaim statements that are not accurate, exaggerations, or even outright lies. With something like that a moderator may want to just remove those posts and give the member an official warning to cool off before posting anymore.
That may be good for the overall community to maintain a space of calm civic discourse, but can also have the effect of a member feeling like their voice is being disregarded or any number of other responses.
Anyway would be good to read if any moderators here would like to share their experience of what polices have worked well or not so well for them with discourse sites.
Have you had a look at the Discourse Moderation Guide? There are lots of good tips on how to deal with different issues that may arise in your community.
Generally, the rules should be applied equally across everyone so there can’t be any disagreements about unfairness/inconsistency etc. As for the example you mentioned above, it depends on the context of the upset user. Are they frustrated about something but are posting something constructive eg. how something could be improved or are they are just being plain rude?
There are always things that users should be outright suspended for but in most cases if the user seems reasonable, I’d recommend reaching out with a PM or an official warning and try and find out what is wrong. You just have to find what works well for your community. A good place to start is the ToS and FaQ page on your community if you want some ‘policy’ to work off.
Yes have seen that guide, as link to that is sent out in automatic e-mail when a user account is promoted to being a moderator. When I had launched initial trial sites awhile ago saw that, and with few members who joined promoted couple to moderator staff so they could still login when site was in staff-only mode. Didn’t have a need to do much any actual moderation with that, but if new site gets more members will need to be prepared for moderating.
Consistency is important in implementation of moderation policy I agree, if people see favoritism or discrimination in moderator action towards some members as opposed to others that is a clear sign of a site not being a legitimate place of civic discourse.
With the boilerplate Terms of Service and Community Guideline/FAQ page I printed out copies of those and spent a fair amount of time reading through those and making edits to be specific for my own vision of community site. The TOS seems fairly solid for being official legal terms.
For community guidelines the provided template is good, but when I was going through that editing for my site started to seem like may be better to start over with new specific policies for my own vision rather then built from the boilerplate template.
This is a challenge of how to be respectful of different opinions but not allow conversation to deteriorate into chaos.
One topic that many people in my home town community can be upset about is housing development projects, which there is a lot of resistance against. People are very attached to small town rural culture but don’t generally seem to want to help with improving housing affordability for the general public, which is a problem.
There can be some good discussions at public community meetings but often some folks can take over a whole meeting if the public officials running those allow that to happen. Some meetings are more official than others and are more professionally moderated with time limits on public comments.
Leadership is important for there to be consistent presence from a community leader and/or moderators. I believe in people having opportunity to speak freely but with accountability.