Current Events > It's weird AF being on the other side of moderator secrecy.

(+) Yeah! (+)

Banned someone today on a forum I run. It's basically the first (non-spambot) ban in the 7 years or so I've been running the site, and a lot of what lead to it wasn't publicly visible, and there's a lot of members who get paranoid about "am I breaking rules without realising it" etc (despite being extremely loose rules-wise in general) so I made a post just clarifying that that was more to it and that he'd received several warnings first.

Now everyone's going on about how much they'd like to know what happened, and I'm just sitting there like... yeah, I probably shouldn't say. Of course being head admin it's not like I'm obliged to be quiet about it but still.

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Yall are our greatest fans. You know that, right?

I recall someone being vocal about killing all pedos and that was something people carried
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You run a forum? How many people there do you tell to shut the fuck up?

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that's why I give a lot of benefit of the doubt to moderators. think of how much fucking babysitting bullshit they have to put up with.

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On some forums, every publicly-viewable action that receives a warning gets that warning permanently appended to that post, so that everyone can see "this is rule-breaking content!"

Transparency is the best way to go.

Otherwise it's your word against his.
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OrangeWizard posted...

On some forums, every publicly-viewable action that receives a warning gets that warning permanently appended to that post, so that everyone can see "this is rule-breaking content!"

Transparency is the best way to go.

Otherwise it's your word against his.

Well yes

anyone telling you that muting discussion on a forum is a good thing is sending you in the wrong direction

as much as we like to shit all over resetera, at least the moderators leave reasons why posts were removed and users banned, instead of empty holes in threads and user-generated "[user] is Warned!" threads about it.

Heartomaton posted...

You run a forum? How many people there do you tell to shut the fuck up?

None, because I'm pretty sure none are you.

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OrangeWizard posted...

On some forums, every publicly-viewable action that receives a warning gets that warning permanently appended to that post, so that everyone can see "this is rule-breaking content!"

That's the issue - a lot of it wasn't publicly-viewable. Everything that was publicly-viewable, is still there - the public stuff was generally things that'd fall under Disruptive Posting here, so didn't particularly need to be removed per se.

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Trumble posted...

None, because I'm pretty sure none are you.

...but not 100% sure.

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Trumble posted...

That's the issue - a lot of it wasn't publicly-viewable. Everything that was publicly-viewable, is still there - the public stuff was generally things that'd fall under Disruptive Posting here, so didn't particularly need to be removed per se.

Then reveal what isn't publicly-viewable to your users. Do you give your users an expectation of privacy regarding the things they put on the site? If not, lay it all out. Dish the PMs or whatever.
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I do some modding on reddit and you get the choice of private communication or leaving it public.

Most of the time i send them a canned "your comment has been removed" PM about it because it is super obvious what they did.

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OrangeWizard posted...

Then reveal what isn't publicly-viewable. Do you give your users an expectation of privacy regarding the things they put on the site? If not, lay it all out. Dish the PMs or whatever.

I may consider things like that if any concern comes up about the ban being unfair. At this point, the people discussing it are pretty clear their intentions are more of the gossip-y nature.

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mmo3HFa2vjg
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i was a mod on a forum and by far the biggest headache was PMs from users trying to get each other banned

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Biscotti posted...

i was a mod on a forum and by far the biggest headache was PMs from users trying to get each other banned

Thankfully there's not much of that here. I think the fact that serious discussions (outside of those relating to the forum's actual subject) are pretty rare, helps a lot with that - and when it does come to the actual subject, the community has gotten very good at the "attack the idea, not the person" mentality.

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i'm a mod in some discord servers and yeah there can be a lot of babysitting and handholding that can go into moderating

like you, there hasn't been someone who needed to be actually banned in a hot minute tho

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Trumble posted...

None, because I'm pretty sure none are you.

O snap

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