That is exactly what I am trying to avoid!
I prefer this quote from British law:
“Not only must Justice be done; it must also be seen to be done”.
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Agree. That’s what WP has… and it works for very few.
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I think, to be really godlike a moderator has to be open and accessible, in touch with the community (he is a mod and an user) and, most importantly, he has to own his decisions and be accountable for them. If mods operations are visible people may learn. Also mods abusing their power will be immediately spotted and questioned, so they may learn too. Community will trust mods. And a cooperative environment is better than one where Justice is administered from high above in an hidden way IMHO.
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And that is exactly what I am trying to avoid. This is not the court, this rules are not the laws and this is not about Justice at all. Moderators tend to feel their job as a kinda quite serious activity and the most important thing in the whole Universe. But it’s not. Moderator is not a policeman and not a super-duper charged man who dictates grown-ups how to behave themself and what to say. Moderator is a kinda waiter in a restaurant. He just serves needs of people who spend their time to write posts and contribute. And “rules” are just a reference that hepls to make some desicions in some controversial cases which are not so often in healthy community. This have nothing in common with Justice.
Haven’t you noticed that all that “moderational” discussions brought more contradiction and negative excitement than any other content ever?) Check latest topics for last week. Then dig week deeper and compare. We did not need those rules at all until we faced a small incident and started to think about rules predicting and regulating every hypotetical trouble. And now I understand that @timkaye was right when he wrote about too much fuss for a small incident.
And the fear of “Oh, WP had troubles acting that way” is not an argument as this was a result on many factors. If someone falls riding a bicycle that does not mean that bicycle is the thing to blame. Personally, I think that WP negative experience is based on abuse of power (? not sure if I use a correct term here), when moderation was excessive. This is exaxtly what I describe. Too much influence of moderation, wrong priority.
By the way (joking, but check the idea):
This discussion is “religious”. Let’s ban all of us for a week or two)
These detailed rules allow to close/delete almost every thread 
I’ve spend an hour translating those rules to my native language and the result seems to be excessive and unfriendly. Hope this is because I’m a bad translator
Thanks for the long, thoughtful reply. Yes, I agree with this. But can I ask you then, what would be your solution to stop abuse of power by moderators?
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@ozfiddler: Great job in getting this started!
I think @joyously is right that it’s too long, but I think it’s fairly easy to cut it down. I would simply remove everything after 9.2. We don’t need to define all the terms in the document. If people want to know what something means, they can Google it.
Then I’d suggest two other changes to the text. I’d delete 4.9, because it’s unnecessary. Religion is off-topic anyway. Then I’d rewrite 4.1 to say something like this:
Threads are deleted if they are unlawful, defamatory, or fall into one of the categories detailed in the rest of this Section.
I am not sure that this is enough, though. I think there are at least three other issues that need exploring:
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What requirements should we have before someone can register on the forums? I think one of the issues that has been overlooked about the recent episode is the question of anonymity. I don’t think we should permit anonymous registrations. Obviously, others might disagree, so I think we need to discuss this. And what about disallowing certain email domains?
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What requirements should we have before someone can create his/her first thread? No hyperlinks seems a good start to me, but are there others? And what about first comments? Is having such a requirement just for first threads/comments enough?
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Until now, the biggest issue we’ve had in the forums has been mods splitting threads when they think that some comments have veered onto a different topic. I realize that this has been done with the best of intentions, but I don’t think this approach has generally worked very well. Context has got lost and people have got very confused. I think we should stop this practice and simply close such threads with a suggestion that a new thread be started. Again, I realize others might disagree, so I think we should discuss this.
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Moderational guildelines/rules. Do not say users what they allowed to do, but tell the moders how to treat their input. This looks similar, but those concepts differ greatly. Users have no administrative power, so they need no limitations. But the moders do. So the rules are for moders. not for users.
I had a practical case on another forum. This is not a proposal as the situation differs too much (e.g. mods were payed for their job there). But it was an interesting experiment and I hope it would make my position more understandable. When faced first signs of “abuse of power” owners 1) limited a number of moderational actions per day for each person in charge and 2) added a strict requirement to write a report for each action in a special thread. That decreased activity of moderators by 50-70%, but their decisions became trully balanced and argumented. Writing reports is pretty easy when situation is clear and some action is obviously required (e.g. spam). But it is really annoying to explain decision if situation is controversial and had a huge context with intersection of interests of different people. There were cases when moders decided to undo their own actions or claimed they were wrong just because they realized that while writing a report. They also tried to hold on their “guns” as the number of “bullets” was limited. In that conditions they had to decide what discussions was really worth intervention.
I mean that moderational actions are potentially more harmful than any user input. It’s not a real problem if a post contains 1 rude word along with a useful solution with 1000 strings code snippet. So moderators should intervent the discussion only in extreme cases (except direct help by direct users request). Understanding that is not very simple within a classic “policeman-style” ideology, so moderators need a guide to learn that. Moderators, not users.
I don’t know that there should be requirements to registration, but I like the concept of one person - one account. But that gets into researching is they already have an account and what to do about it, and when mistakes are made when signing up, what to do about it…
For requirements about the first post, you have to ask “What is the goal of the forum?” On sites like StackOverflow, it’s asking questions. You can start a topic, but you can’t comment unless you earn some reputation points. It hampers the flow of just going there to help people. There might be different requirements for different sections. The Support section needs to be able to create a topic and that should be able to have a link to the site in question. But not all sections need that.
I agree that splitting topics into different threads can help keep things organized, but everyone’s got their own definition of organization. It might make sense to the moderator, but not to those in the conversation or those coming upon it later. It makes it very difficult to follow a conversation across topics. Again, “What is the goal of these forums?” comes up. And is there a plugin for annotations or threads or something that keeps the side comments separate but together with the main conversation (perhaps like Slack threads) or nesting?
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I have been working on Community Guidelines this weekend, I am just getting some feedback on them then will post them here. I think Guidelines should be easy to read and understand, while the TOS should be where we use the more “legal” document that no one except moderators really (but everyone should) read. I think @ozfiddler’s post above falls more into the latter category.
Continuing this discussion, I would like some input on this thread as well: Community Team Function
I’m not terribly interested in having a very long, detailed set of rules. What I would like to see is a clear statement about what behaviors are unacceptable: including defaming another person, whether they are part of the CP community or not; including racist posts, including sexist posts; probably other stuff.
If we have that, we empower the community to flag posts, and possibly let the poster know directly that ‘we don’t do that here’, and the moderators would not be the only ones keeping the forums healthy.
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I think we should stop this practice and simply close such threads with a suggestion that a new thread be started. Again, I realize others might disagree, so I think we should discuss this.
Please don’t do this, it destructs the entire flow of the conversation in the first place, I’ll go for a split, that’s a calm approach rather than closing a whole thread to start a new one. Split, and it goes on smoothly. At least, in my opinion.
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I think this is a really important point to emphasize. I never saw these as rules that users would ever read. As @azurecurve pointed out, users don’t read the rules. They may glance at them, and if they are pulled up for something they will dig through and find the specific rule that caused the mod to take action. But I doubt if even 1% would read them thoroughly.
The rules are for the mods.
The same as the laws of your land are for the police and the courts. You probably have a vague knowledge of them as a citizen, but you have certainly never read them all (well, except Tim). But if you get arrested you don’t want the policeman to just say “you broke the law” and throw you in jail… you expect him to say which one, and give you a chance to defend yourself.
So, you are saying that the requirement for a mod to post a reason for their action caused them to have a rethink and maybe not do anything? Isn’t that the same idea I was proposing with the transparency in moderation? It’s right there in section 1.4 “Moderators use more caution knowing their actions are visible.”
The trouble with that is that it wouldn’t say what the consequence of such behavior might be. Then we’ll get inconsistency, and that will be much more destructive of the community than the odd incident of bad conduct.
Oh, no! Please don’t do that! Not unless you really want to turn the forums into a torrent of legalism. Because then you’ll create two problems: (a) what happens when the two conflict, and (b) what happens when the two say similar things, but one is a rule and one is a guideline?
Either we want rules or guidelines. Don’t even consider having both.
I’m strongly in favor of rules, because then everyone knows – or is capable of knowing if they care to take a look – what will happen, and there’s no question of any judgement being personal or playing favorites. Yes, we still might have the occasional issue when something unforeseen crops up, but those will be minimized.
If we have only guidelines, then one of two things will happen. Either decisions will be inconsistent and arbitrary, or else they will be consistent and predictable. The former is a terrible idea; the latter is just rule-making by the back-door. So let’s do this properly and in a transparent manner.
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I don’t think listing behavior that is unacceptable precludes stating possible consequences.
And if it’s rules or guidelines, I’ll come down on the side of rules, in as concise a form as possible.
I’ve seen Wade’s doc and it’s very gentle and readable. I actually think that users might be able to get to the end of it without nodding off. Would it be OK if it made no reference to either rules or guidelines and was instead called something like “Introduction to the ClassicPress Forums”? It could then include a link to the full rules. Could that still be seen as a possible cause of conflict?
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Funny thou, I read the forum rules the first day you posted it, and I meant line by line, although I agree that it’s only a few that does this but then rules are rules. We hardly adhere to regulations on anything, be it your country or forums, but as a good guy that has a good understanding of how things are constituted, you know what is wrong is bad, and what is right is good.
In short, rules are made to be broken because if everyone adheres to the rule, I am not sure we can expand as a community.
Challenge the rules and make sure you step out of them when it’s right, and that doesn’t mean you should break them for the mere goal of just breaking the rules.
Imagine if you guys had effected a rule on me when I was new here, but instead, @wadestriebel took me up and encouraged me to ask for help even after posting in the wrong place, wadestriebel guided throughout that section, and I will be forever be grateful. Those are the kind of rules you should break.
I love this place so much, please don’t turn it into WordPress forum, their mods are like a semi-god, harsh voice as if life isn’t too short.
Thank you for the opportunity, break the rules when it’s right, and make sure you read them thoroughly. So you know if breaking them is worthwhile.
A new user posted in the wrong thread? Tell them nicely and guide them. Don’t close their thread shabbily. Break rules on stuff like this
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I absolutely agree. Moderating should be done nicely, more guidance than jackboots and barbed wire. And I’ll say it again… the point of transparency is that we can keep an eye on this. If a mod is turning into a “little dictator” we can all see it and the other mods or the team lead can take them aside and counsel them.
[But we still need rules, cos being nice doesn’t always work]
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Yh, sweet and simple! Please go on with the rules formatting, at least I read all already. I read the rules because of the way the community helped in here, I wanted to understand how things are structured, you know, so I’ll apply common sense next time I post.
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It is this experience that I want to ensure that no matter what we decide this is the experience all users get. My concern from the beginning is the risk of rules taking away from the experience users get.
And I have heard everyone’s input, I see there is a general consensus around needing more rules. But, I have taken it slow and been methodical about what and how we word and enforce these new rules to ensure experiences like this aren’t lost to a sea of rules. We can’t be rushing into red taping everything because of one post and some aftermath, we shouldn’t approach this from a panic point of view. I have already stated I am working on new rules and guidelines.
Until then, I think this thread has gone off topic, if there is still some discussion to be made please start a new linked thread, in the meantime I’m closing this thread.
Thank you everyone for your input.
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