| Moderation Policy |
Per the Charter, the Admin Team is presenting the following Moderation Policy to the Assembly for discussion and feedback.
------------------------------------------------------------------------ Forum Moderation Policy LIVING DOCUMENT The Forum Moderation Policy is not set in stone. As moderation issues arise, these policies will be updated. It is your responsibility to stay up to date with policy changes. The Moderation Team will alert users to changes in the Operations Center. SCOPE The Forum Moderation Policy covers the official forums of The South Pacific. It does not govern behavior on the Regional Message Board or any IRC channel. Those communities are governed by their own separate rules and administrators. MODERATION AIMS The forums are a community hub for the region. Many people of differing opinions, beliefs, ideologies, cultures, and experiences use these forums. People will end up disagreeing, and sometimes having very strong feelings about their disagreements. The purpose of the Forum Moderation Policy is to maximize the quality and quantity of discussion that can take place. The Moderation Team strives to act with fairness, but no matter what, somebody will have an issue with the Team's decisions. While unfortunate, we cannot please everybody all of the time. Decisions are made based on what is best for the forum overall. While all members of the Moderation Team are active on these forums, we cannot possibly know everything that is going on. It is the responsibility of all members of these forums to ensure our community is great. That means, first of all, follow the Forum Moderation Policy. If you see somebody violating the policies, report them to the Moderation Team. HOW TO REPORT VIOLATIONS To report a violation of the Forum Moderation Policy, either report the offending post using the Report button, or send a Private Message to a member of the Moderation Team. Note that the Moderation Team will exercise their own discretion in addressing all reports. That means not all reports will be acted upon. Please only report a post once. DON'T AGREE WITH THE FORUM MODERATION POLICY? That is very unfortunate. However, the Forum Moderation Policy is not optional. If you want to use these forums, you must abide by it. Otherwise, please do not post. LEAVING THE FORUM If you decide to leave the forum, the Moderation Team will not delete your account or remove your posts. Assume that every post made on these forums is permanent and public. THE RULES 1. Always be respectful of other users, moderators, administrators, and the forum itself. 2. The forums are not the place for advertisements of any kind. 3. Please do not threadjack or post off-topic comments. While discussions will naturally drift from the original topic from time to time, excessive off-topic comments and threadjacking will be addressed by moderators. 4. Do not insult other users. If someone insults you, do not insult them back, otherwise you will also be in violation of this rule. 5. Do not incite illegal behavior of any kind. Discussing illegal behavior in the academic sense is fine. This includes, but is not limited to, posts discussing how to pirate illegal content, hack, etc. 6. Do not publish personally identifiable information (“doxing”) about any user without their explicit permission. 7. Do not post any obscene images. This explicitly includes pornography, violence, and death. Images that disturb other users will be deleted. 8. Please attempt to keep image sizes on the lower end of the spectrum. Try to not break the forum layout with excessively large images. 9. Do not post in ALL CAPS, unless you actually want people to think you are screaming at them. Even then, nobody likes a shouter. 10. Do not post anything that would be illegal to post in the United States of America. 11. Unless otherwise stated in regional law, a moderator's decision is always final. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ The only issue left remaining is punishments for violating the rules. MyBB does have a points system similar to IP.Board's. We could use that and define points for the more strict rules.
Seems somewhat ok. Could use abit of edit
I have to stand opposed to this policy. It's incredibily vague.
Quote:1. Always be respectful of other users, moderators, administrators, and the forum itself. We've seen before that some of the more conservative members of the forum have a particularly gentle definition of what "respectful" and "insult" mean - and then this behavior is of course, enforced selectively, with insiders given more leeway to bully outsiders and the rules doubly enforced against outsiders. In fact the moderation seems to have ignored almost every suggestion from the community. Which is why we should have pursued the original draft, instead of letting a bunch of apparently self-appointed, self-privileged technocrats write a founding document. After all we went through with the Hileville administration - this policy manages to avoid talking about any of it: moderators enforcing selectively, ex post facto rulings, selective warning decays, no necessary respect for our democracy and no transparency. This policy could have been written in 2012 for all I know. Seems like nobody learnt a damn thing. None of my proposal's expectations have been required by this policy. 1. All staff are expected to be, Citizens of The South Pacific. X Law-abiding. X Trustworthy. X Responsive and active. X Observant. X Objective, fair and non-partisan.X Tolerant, patient and reserved. X Helpful to new players. X 2. All staff should apply policies uniformly without favour or prejudice. X 3. All staff should recognize all internal policies. X 4. Punitive measures and the closure of threads should only be exercised insofar as necessary and justifiable in a free and fair democratic society. X [...] 1. Moderation policies should be simple and freely available to all (i.e., even those who do not have access to the forums). X 2. Warnings should elapse or decay over a fixed, reasonable amount of time. X 3. For first offences, players should be given an unofficial warning. X 4. All warnings should be recorded and documented. This process should aim to be transparent and open. X 5. A free and fair system of appeal shall be open for all members of the forum to seek recourse over staff decisions. X 6. Policies and bans should not be applied retroactively (i.e., ex post facto). X And then to cap off the insult even more.. Quote:That is very unfortunate. However, the Forum Moderation Policy is not optional. If you want to use these forums, you must abide by it. Otherwise, please do not post. "If you don't like these forums, go host your own". - Hileville. Not all of this is the administration's fault. Some of the admins were in favour of pursuing a proper piece of legislation, but other members of the community in their infinite wisdom said, no, let's do the same crap over again and trust that our admins can regulate themselves with no oversight. So, instead of a proper piece of regulation, we've got a policy that does nothing but enforce the old Hilevillian Status Quo vaguely. Cue the old loyalist rage about how great blunt authoritarianism is....
First, let me make clear that this is not an Administration Policy, which is what you're seeking for when you talk about addressing the problems that led to Hileville's actions. The Moderation Policy is about how we moderate forum discussions, not about how administrators are chosen or removed.
Whether or not the Assembly should be the originator of forum rules, the fact is that the Charter places that power in the hands of the administration. There was an Assembly discussion on administration policy, where no clear majority was in favor of any certain document. So regardless of where we think these policies should originate, the Assembly hasn't been able to come up with something workable. I'm going to ignore your comment about Kris, Tsunamy, and myself being "self-appointed, self-privileged technocrats," because I think our actions since we created these forums speak for themselves. Regarding your criticisms of the substance, rather than the process, I disagree with most of what you're saying. You take issue with rules about respecting one another and not insulting each other, because you think some moderators have been more conservative than others in the past. How exactly is this supposed to be addressed? We can't create a ruleset that takes into account every possible insult and all varying degrees of disrespect. Moderation is by necessity subjective. Mods are humans, not computers. No ruleset ever produced on the internet has ever been objective. So this is a criticism I'm going to have to overrule. You're just going to have to trust the judgement of the admins and mods, or deal with your dislike of them. I do it every time I go on the NS forums. The rest of your criticisms show how different you and I would moderate a forum. I prefer a hands-off system. I would much rather our community self-moderate, than to require a team of admins and mods handing out warnings for bad behavior. Unfortunately, MyBB doesn't support community moderation a la Stackoverflow, reddit, etc. I wrote these policies, and they reflect a hands-off approach. The policies you would write would be very detailed, attempting to cover all possible scenarios, and would likely not be followed with any close attention in the end. However, this thread is the right place for suggesting changes. That's why our Charter requires these policies to be put up for review. So what do you want, exactly? From your post, I've taken away the following suggestions: - A section on what makes a good moderator, and what qualifications somebody must have to become one - A section outlining a warning and points system - A guarantee that moderation policies won't be applied retroactively (which honestly goes without saying, but I have no qualms saying it if we must) Everything else is either inappropriate for the Moderation Policy, and should instead be in the Administration Policy, or it's already part of regional law (e.g. appeals). Am I missing anything? Lastly, regarding the section you consider an insult, I'm going to keep it. The Moderation Policy will not be optional. If somebody doesn't like it, they shouldn't use our forums. We are not obligated to provide a community for one and all. We have rules and laws, and you don't like them, either go through the system to change them or leave. Either way, they aren't optional and you must follow them in order to use these forums. That's common sense.
(05-26-2014, 07:44 PM)Unibot Wrote: And then to cap off the insult even more.. To add to what Glen said about this, we are saying that once agreed upon, moderation policies must be followed. We can discuss them, and modify them as needed, but that doesn't affect the fundamental fact that everyone here must abide by them. That is quite different from what Hileville said, specially since we all agreed that moderation policies at the time weren't even being followed. Like Glen said, also, these are supposed to be moderation policies, not administrative policies. I have no problem with having both in a single document, but just because we haven't yet included administrative policies doesn't mean that we won't consider them at all. Former Delegate of the South Pacific
Posts outside High Court venues should be taken as those of any other legislator. I do not participate in the regional server, but I am happy to talk through instant messaging or on the forum. Legal Resources: THE MATT-DUCK Law Archive | Mavenu Diplomatic Archive | Rules of the High Court | Case Submission System | Online Rulings Consultation System
I'm uncomfortable with the vagueness of parts of the proposed policies, especially in pottential relation to debate. I don't exactly like the prospect of moderation becoming involved in fundamentally political matters. 1 and 4 mainly here.
11 is also fundamentally unconstitutional. A moderators decision is never final according to our appeals process. Minister of Media, Subversion and Sandwich Making
Associate Justice of the High Court and Senior Moderator ![[Image: B9ytUsy.png]](https://i.imgur.com/B9ytUsy.png)
Oh hilarious. What a dog and pony show this is shaping up to be.
"We couldn't agree to an administration policy - so we just didn't make one" "What good are policies for..." "Why do we need to lay out the expectations of our administrators? Surely no administrator has ever systematically failed to uphold any reasonable expectation and continually been patted on the back for his authoritarianism until the day he started crossing more influential people..." "You're allowed to complain about the ruleset today, but after that - this vaguely legitimate document is non-negotiable!" At the end of the day, this moderation policy is more nebulous than a bowl of vegetable soup. It's total open to the varying judgement of moderators, who have in the past had vastly different standards over what is "abuse", "insults" and such and then selectively applied these selective standards to insiders versus outsiders. I can't believe that Glen and Kring think we're stupid enough to think that this document is clear enough to be used as a "if you don't follow this, you're out and you have no right to complain" social contract. Your rule is vague enough that it might as well be written as "don't do what we don't like". I want to see the administration policy. How are we choosing administrators? What standards are they expected to be held to? How are we integrating the administration into our democracy? One admin claimed the administration was above our constitution, another admin said it was covered by our constitution.
I completely agree Unibot. The administrative team should have been open and transparent enough to post its proposed moderation policies in the Assembly for feedback instead of enforcing them from the Operations Centre.
Oh wait. Former Delegate of the South Pacific
Posts outside High Court venues should be taken as those of any other legislator. I do not participate in the regional server, but I am happy to talk through instant messaging or on the forum. Legal Resources: THE MATT-DUCK Law Archive | Mavenu Diplomatic Archive | Rules of the High Court | Case Submission System | Online Rulings Consultation System (05-26-2014, 11:12 PM)Kris Kringle Wrote: I completely agree Unibot. The administrative team should have been open and transparent enough to post its proposed moderation policies in the Assembly for feedback instead of enforcing them from the Operations Centre. No. You've proposed a limited form of a moderation policy (covering only the responsibilities for forum members and not the responsibilities for moderators). The overarching administration still lacks any sort of policy. And you know as well as I do that the purpose of bringing the policy here was to get a rubber stamp - not "feedback". That's why we never should have agreed to have moderation write the rules and then the Assembly "approve" it. The Assembly should have had a role in drafting from the beginning, otherwise it puts pressure on the Assembly to "approve" what moderators and administrators want. It changes the dialogue from being an Assembly-led discussion on the role of moderation in our society to being a negotiation between the Administration and our forum community over the minute details of our forum punishments - without even discussing the overarching system of moderation and "administration" (a false divide - since most moderation comes from the administration). |
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