Originally Posted by
Q Shoe Guy
Of course after the new volunteer committee rules on what is appropriate they can then ask the senior moderator(s) to action the ruling. No need for other volunteers to be involved.
And I'm saying as someone who spent 18 months on the review team, that that is not a workable solution. Having to farm out all aspects of enforcement to a group of mods who are not part of the decision making process is not a good step forward and given the inevitable delays with working with a group of people online would really lengthen out the whole process.
In addition, having a group of people who are not moderators manage this would actually make the situation more confused. At the moment, if you (or anyone) has a problem with a signature then you report it to any moderator. They notify the review team, but all other mods can also see the notification, so you know if someone has already alerted on a signature or not. The review team deliberates and acts if they consider it appropriate. If the member refuses to comply with their request then the review team discuss, cajole, warn, suspend and ultimately permanent ban as required in an escalating process where they are in control of the process.
Under your idea, someone sees a signature they don't like. They probably won't know about this volunteer group (there's a significant proportion of members who don't even know who/what mods are afterall, let alone TB and we have a TB election every year - some members are entirely focussed on the important things about FT and not the management and regulation), so would probably still report it to their mod, who would then have to forward on the concerns to the volunteer group. There's then no co-ordination between mods, so they don't know if anyone else has reported the concern, and if the signature is concerned with something in particular that is happening on a specific forum, then the review team cannot be told of the background which might provide mitigation.
The review team would then start the process of review and deciding to act - if they decided that action was required, they'd have to ask the senior mods to start engaging with the member to change the signature, since I don't think a non-mod person can act officially to try and enforce the TOS. At that point it effectively moves firmly back into mod control, and a group was not tasked with this originally due to their workload already is now having to run the whole thing. Even if you allow that a non-mod volunteer could make the original approach to the member but the member remains unresponsive (and given that it's a non mod making the request, the response from many members might be to tell them to get lost since the paradigm of mod as TOS enforcer is the accepted one, anyone else might look like they are butting in), it would be against mod practice just to ban on command - it's not something as a mod I would be able to do - we are expected to communicate with the member to inform them how and why they have been banned etc. And we obviously could not share any communication about that banning with the non-mod committee.
So I foresee a number of practical difficulties, from my experience on the committee and what the work generally entails. Yet, you don't seem prepared to listen to that, substituting what you think should/does happen, with what actually happens.
Originally Posted by
kipper
Why not try adding one or two non-moderator volunteers to the committee, and only have it deal with the signature portion of any issues?
As Q Shoe Guy said, that committee would make a ruling, and then senior moderators would implement it.
kipper, the signature committee already does deal only with the signature portion of the problem. But as a completely fictitious example, a mod might say to the review team 'Member A has a bit of a thing for Member B. They had a spat recently in which they both got warned and now member A has a signature referencing the incident - is this acceptable?' and we'd go and check the signature and if it said something like 'Member B is a big fat troll' it wouldn't be; if it was a veiled but negative illusion then it probably wouldn't be; if it said something like ' there are big fat trolls on FT' then it probably would be as being too generic to be traceable back to one member. If you didn't know the full background between the pair though, you would not necessarily know the second one was still an attack - but member B could and would still feel attacked and harassed (which could lead to levels of further escalation etc). So sometimes, you need to know the context to be able to see what is the message behind a signature and that the member may be using their signature to send a message - and not one which is necessarily welcomed on FT.
Adding 'lay people' to the review team could be a better option than turning it over entirely to them, but the bigger the team gets, the more complicated it becomes also. Would the benefit of doing so be greater than the cost of enlarging the team? It's hard for most to judge since they don't see the deliberations - I would say it's better to ensure you have a group who have divergent opinions, so on contentious issues you get a good discussion from all points before you reach a group decision than the mod/non-mod divide you seem to be seeing again.