Forum Moderation

The post in question had an expletive in it. The moderation told you to remove it.
You chose to replace it by asterisk-ing most of the letters out but it was still rather obvious what you meant at which point another member of the moderation removed the post AGAIN because this is a clear violation of the PG CoC.

Which led to you complaining and messaging the moderators several times about it.

Sometimes no answer is an answer, too.

I think there is a major issue with consistency in moderation here, clarity in what the rules actually are, and unwillingness by moderation to actually discuss there decisions in good faith which is also making this conversation more difficult.

For example, a major and I think good rule is:

When you see bad behavior, don’t reply. Replying encourages bad behavior by acknowledging it, consumes your energy, and wastes everyone’s time. Just flag it .

However, once, there were a series of replies in a thread which in my opinion were derailing a thread, so I reported them for being off topic. I was open to a moderator disagreeing with me and leaving them up, but I wanted to raise it to staff’s attention. Instead, I was shocked to have a moderator globally silence my account for two weeks, saying I was engaging in a mass flagging campaign with another user, who I don’t know how I was expected to control their flagging activities or even what they were, but somehow both of us flagging these posts led to my silencing.

The best explanation I got was that I “Consumed disproportionate amounts of staff time”. However, I was even more confused when a decent number of the posts I had flagged were removed for being off topic. So, wouldn’t the person who consumed the disproportionate amount of staff time be the ones who had been posting off topic replies? Further, in the same breath I was told “You are NOT supposed to fight it out in the thread yourselves, notify the moderation and let us deal with it.”, which was exactly what I was doing that apparently got me muted. I mostly tried not replying to the off topic posts except to point out they were off topic (I expected those replies to get removed alongside the off topic posts if moderators took the action I expected).

When I tried to engage with moderation and explain that I flagged them in good faith but I understand if they disagree with the flags and I just didn’t understand why flagging a series of off topic posts would lead to me getting silenced since it is a rule on the forum to flag things you think might break the rules, I was told to leave if I didn’t like it.

I understand this is your forum and you can run it however you like, but it is also a community, and there doesn’t seem to be a good faith relationship between the community and moderation any longer. Moderators did not have any willingness to hear my side, they basically just told me to screw off when I legitimately came to them confused about what happened.

I have tried not raising this as a public issue because I generally feel doing such a thing is in poor taste, but I see that others might have similar thoughts and my experience might be a good example. I don’t think I was perfect in this situation, but I think the handling was shockingly poor and frankly inexplicable on the moderation side.

Thanks for doing this, I do have some personal experience to share.

I was once a core moderator of a online community with approx. 10k members, at times there were heated debate, and of course there are plenty of misinformation, false claims, defamation, etc.

I don’t usually remove posts / threads as it doesn’t resolve conflicts, nor helping with busting myths. What I do was

1. Slow mode for heated debate where people were seemingly losing self-control.
2. Mediate and facilitate discussions, also to deescalate by asking relevant parties to chill out, help clarifying things to avoid miscommunications / misunderstanding, etc.
3. For people persistently acting bad baith (such as refuse to become civil, persistently abusive, continue to intentionally spread blatantly wrong information) , I would firstly warn, then warn + temporary mute, and then lastly ban. Each warn expires after certain period of time. Each moderation action was clearly logged with reasons quoting applicable group rules. The log can be inspected by anyone at anytime, by themselves.
4. For blatantly wrong information, I would request OP to clarify or remove, if they refuse, I would then clarify and then lock the thread.
5. There was appeal mechanism in place, where they could raise a thread, the moderator which took the initial decision needs to justify their action, and they are not allowed to vote in the appeal.

I remove contents if and only if

1. Contains links or files that is malicious for illegal.
2. Contains sensitive personal information without explicit consent from relevant persons.
3. Spams / scams (more or less equals to 1. but with subtle difference)
4. At OP’s request.
5. Received multiple reports and found the content could cause actual harm to personal safety.

I do find the above measures are quite effective in both moderation and community education perspective.

Just my 2 cents. Sorry it gets longer than I was expected.

I don’t think stuff should be deleted unless it is graphic or illegal/unethical. Even if someone is spreading FUD or being disruptive, I’d rather see their account locked with maybe a message implying what happened. It is more transparent and allows other users to decide their own opinions, with all the knowledge of the conversation. There can definitely be exceptions to this, just a general feeling I have.