Lets assume for the sake of this discussion that people should be given the chance to contest mod decisions (personally I’d rather just keep folks banned for life).
How does your community handle it? Do you have a separate group of adjudicators? Does that separate group have staff access to the forum so they can view and review all the history of said decisions? Or does it just go to the owner of the site (assuming this is a single person working as the admin)?
I may come back and refine my question as I get responses.
Zooming way out, it is a nice experience to be able to contact someone to clarify a possible misunderstanding.
On the other hand, how many “misunderstandings” result in a permaban?
This is not an official Discourse answer, just my personal experience from running half a dozen community sites of smallish size: there are plenty of fish in the sea, and it is okay to ban the ones that make your forums a bad experience for the other users.
I agree that having a neutral third party can be good in some situation! I’m more concerned about the logistics of how contesting mod decisions does/would work in practice.
I think it’s good for the community when we acknowledge that we’re all human, we sometimes make mistakes, sometimes we act under pressure and we may have been emotional.
So a DM conversation with the mod team about a mod decision could be OK. Ideally, a different mod, who didn’t take the action, can look at the situation and see what they would have done, hopefully in a calm and logical way.
But it has to be understood: sometimes the decision was right! In fact, hopefully, usually the decision is right. And the user does need to accept that the review came out reaffirming the decision.
I think a single review should be enough. If the user is still unhappy, perhaps they don’t fit the community. Perhaps the mod team is terrible and the forum does not deserve to have the membership. Hopefully that’s not the case, but of course it’s possible.
