Meeting notes - 29 December 2020

[Joshy 4,364 / 44,940]

Moderation Team Meeting

Date + Time: 29 December 2020, 7:15 PM Eastern
Where: Moderation VC

 

Attendees:
@Ben
@Joshy
@Shuruia
@Salad
@Bue.
@Lachaine
@Fafy
@BlazingArson
@Harakoni
@jarm323
@JGuary55
@Serenity
@TheThirdReaper

Agenda Items:

 

[FORUMS] Alt. Accounts

 

A recent incident occurred on a person making alts and posting in their own appeals. We should look and see if it is worth creating a rule that you cannot have more than one forum account.
 

General consensus: No rule necessary for alt. accounts.  Would like if possible to include in reports alerts or a ping so that moderators are aware.  The problem is not with having the alt. accounts alone, but more of what the person is using the alt. account for (their intentions).

 

Post meeting (2 January 2020): This is under discussion.  It appears unapproved alt. accounts may become against the rules.

 

[DISCORD] Division Specific Rules

 

Adding specific rules for the Division Discord to prevent unnecessary moments - for example, pinging server admins for absolutely no reason at all. 
 

General consensus: Can’t contradict general/main rules ie. shouldn’t have a server that says they reject the racial slur rule, but can be Server Manager or Division Leader dependent to add more rules (Division Leader gets the final say).  Examples where this might be useful is servers like HnS in main discord rules there’s nothing about “Ghosting” another person and so it would be reasonable for HnS to have a rule about Ghosting.

 

[FORUMS] Forum automation: Filtering Out Severely Bad Words

 

The IPS (our forum software) includes a feature about filtering out words. We discuss if it’s worth enabling to filter out severely bad words (e.g., racial slurs and words included in the docs for Discords). Thread link

 

General consensus: Agree to censor severe words such as the N-word (Discord list seemed to be suggested or supported).  Other words such as R-word would need to be revisited.  We did not want to issue warnings nor automatic warnings for it, but if it’s possible…  would like to receive a kind of an approval queue if someone uses it so that it alerts the moderators that someone is trying to use that word.  Person can get in trouble for skirting around the censor.

 

Specific Senior Mods

 

Discuss the possibility of having future Senior Mods that either tend to a specific section of moderation (Forums/Discord) or the possibility of having Division specific Senior Mods who watch over the moderators within a division.

 

General consensus: This received support although would like to keep informal no specific title or role for it.  Promote people in specific channels or area to Senior as a kind of “goto” person for those Discords.  People made it very clear “Senior moderator does not equal global moderator.”

 

[FORUMS] Retaliation or Harassment Rule 

 

This usually happens on ban appeals.  There area lot of reports or request us handling maybe if somebody has a short burst of anger they might reply with a curse word or something like that ie. “Joshy is a b***h” we’ve loosely tied the rule to harassment.  Maybe we can probably ease up and hide the post instead of a warn; if a warn, then maybe have an extra rule for retaliation, but something that is more clear for those circumstance rather than loosely tie it with and use harassment.  Sometimes fuel is being added to the fire with a warning and maybe one small outburst might explode or continue downward with our intervention.

 

General consensus: No extra rule.  One time outburst should be tolerable (more lenient no official warning) although case-by-case depending on the severity.  Can use next section on "user notes" if there repeat offenders.

 

[FORUMS] Report Categories

 

Would like to update report categories.

 

 

General consensus: Would like to add a "lock and close" for things like Ban Appeals and Applications.

 

[FORUMS] More Moderators

 

Would like to see if we can add more Forum Moderators. From his comments: “I’m curious if we can take on more people (like 2-3 more by the end of January).  I agree we have good numbers to run on nominal flow and the work is not hard…  other positions such as senior mod when they open up we will have a very limited selection to choose from in the future.”

 

General consensus: “Okay” supported.  We discussed the idea of about 2-3 more moderators.  Not urgent or a hard number (if there are no good applications we don’t have to accept).  Ben said applications can be opened.  We don’t want any lingering or old applications so process might be about 1-2 months no longer.  Applications that aren't accepted will be closed.

 

What actions outside of GFL constitute punishment in GFL?

 

If some GFL Member calls some other GFL Member “a f*****” in some non-GFL Discord, then they report it to a Moderator in GFL, what is the policy? Tell them it’s out of our reach? Punish them in GFL as if they said it in GFL? There are no official guideline on this. What if they do something more extreme like post gore in a safe for work [NSF] Discord? This wouldn’t just apply to Discords, obviously. Game Servers, Community Forums, etc. are probably ripe for the picking too. The assumption is people will answer “do this case by case”... but there can still be guidelines, and especially for the extremes cases.

 

General consensus: Ben plans to write a thread on this.  It will go through the chain of command: Report it to Senior Moderator, then Mod TL, then Council.  We’re not expecting for this to happen and also very case-by-case as noted in the description.  Example brought up was people DMing others to advertise another community.  If the intention is to hurt GFL, then might consider something with Council involvement; but could also be like on a server where everybody has hopped off and just suggesting to a friend to hop on another server for the time being (technically advertising another community server)…  then not a problem.

 

Other topics?

 

Several decisions were made on Discord moderator applications.  Names were scrubbed for public notes.

Edited January 3, 2021 by Joshy