Some site users have expressed a desire for greater mod transparency. I recently asked for concrete suggestions on this question, and Castin was gracious enough to offer the following, considered reply:
- Relax the mod PM rule so that it's only prohibited to post a mod's PM without notice if it exposes information about another user. In all other cases let people post mod PMs without having to notify you to give you a preparatory advantage.- Consider locking threads instead of deleting them. Individual offensive posts within the thread can still be deleted. Destroying evidence and records always strikes people as suppression. Doesn't matter what the reasons are.- Relax your policy of conducting mod actions "behind closed doors", so to speak. You do this to protect member privacy, but your problem is you're not on a forum that values member privacy more than transparency, you're on a forum that values transparency more than member privacy. Which means your priorities are at odds with the priorities of your base. Jmo. Start telling people why members were banned, if they ask. If this is already your policy, I apologize. I thought mod actions were currently private unless the subject of the action chose to share the information.Just off the top of my head. I don't know how reasonable or concrete they are. But they were honest attempts at actionable suggestions.When you ban someone, people don't want to hear "that's classified", they want the scoop. When you send them a PM censuring their behavior, they want to show it to people as it is and say "look guys, do you think this is fair". And even when a thread totally crosses the line, they still want to read it for themselves.
From my perspective, the public ban proposal was already put to public debate and rejected. That said, I think the other proposals are reasonable and reflect, as Castin notes, the priorities of many site users. Those proposals are:
1. Allow users to summarily post the contents of mod PMs so long as no non-public information about other users (other = not the sender or receiver of the PM) is revealed by the revelation.
2. Locking objectionable or COC-violating threads instead of deleting them.
I think these are reasonable proposals which can be implemented immediately. I am open to other--serious--suggestions on this question (i.e. what concrete things can mods do to increase transparency) and to feedback on the suggestions put forward by Castin. Please feel free to comment.
