General moderation policies

Community
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Hi,

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.

Best regards.

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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.

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Hi thanks for response,

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.

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This is good article from few years ago: Dealing with Toxicity in Online Communities

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.

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I have some strong suggestions.

You no more than fives rules, and they should be simply stated. For example, these serve me well:

  1. Be Respectful.
  2. No Hate Speech or Bullying.
  3. Keep your content Relevant.
  4. Links, Images, Memes, and Videos.
  5. Don’t waste time.

Five rules because that’s about the most anyone can remember, even the moderators, so keep it simple.
Explanations and interpretations of the rules can be much longer, paragraphs longer, and this text should be linked or readily available where people can find it.

#1 Respect covers a multitude of sins aside from just being nice to other people. Spam is disrespectful, p0rn more so, etc..

#2 is really part of #1, but sometimes you really want to emphasize a certain point.

#3 Content should be obviously relevant. A question, an opinion, a topic for discussion, or a written description of linked content and why they think it is worthwhile. Auto-generated text or text within an image doesn’t count - the OP was to actually write something about it. Moderators should judge relevance by how the OP introduces the content, NOT by judging the content itself. If it isn’t obviously relevant, then moderators are free to approve/remove the content as they see fit. It is the OP’s responsibility to make their content relevant when they create the post.
This rule makes a moderator’s job much easier, because it reduces difficult judgement calls. It’s also very easy to meet this bar for relevance, only minimal effort is required (but Spammers won’t make this effort).

#4 Link to a longer statement of policy about media content, minimally “No Naked Links”. A picture might be worth a thousand words, but most memes are not.

#5 A catch-all for other situations and content. Hard decisions demand too much of your time, so bounce any content that isn’t an easy decision. If some content or comment is not obviously appropriate, then it’s NOT appropriate. In other words, if you can’t quickly decide if something is appropriate or not, it’s not the moderators job to fix it. Send it back to the OP and ask for changes. It’s also useful for rules-lawyers or anyone who’s sole purpose in life is to make more work for the moderators.

I also have a Rule #6, which states, “There is no Rule #6, but now we know you read this far.” I ask “What is Rule #6” in the New Member questions on FB, and the answers are quite revealing. :slight_smile:

I see some FB groups with 10-15 rules and have to laugh. There’s no way to have that many rules and not have them be redundant, or worse, contradictory. Either the author hasn’t really thought it, or they are a control freak, or both.

Consistency is absolutely necessary. Moderators need to communicate with other mods so they know how situations are being handled. Mods should also avoid moderation discussions/arguments they are a part of, so to avoid the appearance of bias. Call in another mods to handle the situation as needed.

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That is great, lol. Wonder what kind of answers you get for that if someone hasn’t read them and is just guessing, then you know they have lied to you!!

This is good first main statement, I would describe core main value is respect for essential human dignity in communication.

Also important.

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Usually boring, along the lines of “Be Respectful”, but still you know right away.

Rule #6 is a Monty Python reference, if you didn’t know. :slight_smile:

“Respect” ought to cover this, but for a while FB thought this was important and might shut down groups over accusations of bullying. Not so much now.

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