Make category tag rules / restrictions apply to moderators too

[jwf (Justin W. Flory (he/him))]

Hi, I am adding my +1 that this feature is useful for large communities with decentralized approaches to governance across tags.

I am adding here a few additions to the last thread:

@mattdm

I don’t want to be able to accidentally violate intended tagging rules. (Are non-admin moderators also able to accidentally do this? I can’t easily test, even.)

@codinghorror

I understand the concern, but it isn’t a huge issue in practice, at least not over the 10 years I’ve been working on this project.

@mattdm

It also doesn’t prevent me from accidentally violating constraints I set up on purpose (like the tag rules, or posting in categories which are supposed to be read-only).

This is a challenge for the Fedora Community because both leadership and the community follow an open policy for managing tags. Any registered group in Fedora can request new tags and assign tag discussion moderators. The Fedora leadership works with the community to create new tags and promote them across the community (e.g. documentation, wikis, websites, word-of-mouth). Additionally, as a large community that covers a wide range of topics, we also have a lot of tags! I don’t always know every tag in Fedora Discourse.

So, when a site admin (who actively participates to varying degrees across Fedora Discourse) adds tags to a post or participates in a tag with specific rules, it becomes an easy mistake for a Fedora Discourse admin to break Fedora’s open policies. The open policies are how we make our global site governance more inclusive and accessible to the community. In this way, our site admin privileges can sabotage our open approach to how Fedora leadership runs the Fedora Discourse for the community.

@Tris20

Instead of this, have you considered using the test account in a browser you don’t regularly use? Then it can just stay logged in.

While this technically works, it is an onerous task for a site admin who posts actively across several tags. It is a negative user experience because sometimes I don’t have a lot of immediate time on hand (e.g. in a short break between meetings with follow-up actions). Patience is difficult with the extra user flow before I get to the thing I was trying to do in the first place (i.e. make a new thread across relevant tags I know exist and think might exist).

@Jagster

Admins must have ability to override everything. And when one is an admin the basic assumption is he/she/it/bot knows what can do and what not.

I don’t see this feature request as taking away an admin’s ability to override. Instead, it gives informed consent to a site admin vis-à-vis active site poster that they are breaking site rules and tagging norms during the action of doing it, not after.