I am now an active moderator at the Sponge(Powered?) Forums, and I’ve noticed a missing feature in Discourse: public moderation logs.
There have been issues in the past in related communities with forum moderator transparency, so I think a public log of deletions would serve to increase trust in the forum staff by the community.
Design example: 4chan ban logs (NSFW) hxxp://www.4chan.org/bans
A few notable qualities:
There is a coherent reason displayed
The moderator performing the action is visible (Wikipedia)
All deletions are logged
The deleted post is sometimes visible to the public
Here’s what I think I would want to see in a Discourse deletion log:
Post number, topic number
Owner of deleted post, with fallback to “(deleted user)”
Details of any flags on the post at deletion time, as well as if the post was marked for self-deletion (even if a moderator deleted it immediately via restore→delete)
Moderator who deleted the post, with special display for self-deleted posts cleaned up by the system
Raw (non-cooked, no clickable links) content of the post
Additionally, admins / moderators should be able to censor certain columns here, and there should be a quick way to hide the raw content immediately after clicking the delete button. (Quick paint mock)
One of the places I did a tour as a mod has a very transparent process, with all users able to see which posts of there were deleted and why. The majority of deletions were bycatch. Sometimes it’s necessary to stomp on stray embers to prevent more fires from breaking out.
And TBH, I’m not convinced that a relaxed-but-dictatorial style is a bad thing.
Giving deletion reasons and dealing with the fall-out from those reasons takes a huge amount of time and effort for little reward, it needs a greater number of mod-staff, which in turn encourages an us v. them attitude, along with needing almost constant recruitment due to mod burn-out. And this is even before you start having to actually write rules to keep all the mod team on the same sheet.
And you don’t end up with page after page of “Post Deleted - because Reasons”
I have no problem discussing the eg. “Dictator! Why did you censor my post?” with the member that posted a sexist hate rant midst a lengthy otherwise helpful reply.
But I think if such actions were to be publicly visible there should be member anonymity
Let’s just focus on getting the private logs good first.
At the moment there is no place you can go as an admin or moderator and see the list of content that got deleted (potentially filtering by moderator)
We should possibly extend the staff logs to include this. I find it much more compelling to need this feature as a moderator (catch up cross time zones etc)
This is an unquestionable need, lets solve this first.
But yes, I agree whole-heartedly that a Moderator Log “paper trail” type of thing would be a great thing.
I’ve been known to have made mistakes :shock: and if it would help in correcting them that’s a good thing.
Since I talked about this, Boing Boing has switched to a partial public sanitized log of significant (not mundane, like spam removal) moderator actions… I think this is a nice middle ground, but it’d be hard to automate.
