Tighter moderation - 2 suggestions

[Brefugee]

It appears that MN wants to tighten moderation here.

I have 3 suggestions that might help:

1. unhide the report button - if it is obvious a post can be reported it is more likely to actually be reported
2. a deletion message and reason to be sent to the user's account when a deletion has been made. Mostly people don't even realise they've had a post deleted (I found out by accident the other day, asked the reason and the answer was "oh, yes, we looked again and it was deleted in error we thought it said something it didn't" - i found that quite staggering tbh)
3. related to point 2 - the chance, for less egregious rule breaking (or "not in the spirit" deletions) to amend the post easily

These seem reasonable ideas

Also, if you want to tighten moderation up, then do. I have got a fair few 'we'll take a look at that now' which I have worked out is code for 'yeah, we're not doing anything'. If the moderators are acting, the message tells you afterwards, ie 'we've deleted that now'.

have seen elsewhere, so repeating it here in the hopes MN sees:

for a deletion why not send an automated message to the persons account under Private Messages? that makes more sense.

Good idea @Brefugee but a lot of posters have turned off private messages.

Very good ideas. It's crazy that the poster doesn't get an automatic email telling them they've breached guidelines.

It could come up as a banner as they view the site.

there are ways for MN to make it very clear to a person when they access the site that there is something they need to address/know.

I'm sure their Devs know all this 😀

Oh snap, I've just started a thread asking if an auto-generated warning could be PM'd to posters when they get a post deleted

They could put it in notifications with a red number instead of blue.

I think a 3 strikes and you get an email makes sense. Being notified every time someone has gone to hq to get your comment pulled would be annoying.

They could make it so you can’t turn off PMs from moderators quite easily.

It would be helpful if the deleted message was replicated as well. I have had posts deleted and been unable to remember what it said.

Though I’m not aware of frequent deletions!

Realistically though, Mods don’t want to get into a conversation about individual deletions. That way, banning lies!

It could be sent as a 'no reply' PM.

That way if someone really wants to take it up with them they can email like they do now.

to be clear, i'm only talking about actual deletions.

As i said, i stumbled on a post of mine in a thread that had been deleted the other day. I didn't think i'd said anything awful, but i wanted to be clear if i had, so i wouldn't do it again.

And the message that came back was: oh sorry, we thought you'd written something you hadn't, we've reinstated it.

And in only found out by accident. A message - or email - would have been a great help there. especially if it included the text of the post. (I am not even asking them to say what in the post was "wrong". Just that it has been deleted)

Also agree that it should be possible to get a PM from the mods/site that overrules any "pm switched off" blocks

Yes a copy of the post would be helpful because sometimes they're not reported/deleted until the next day.

And I can barely remember what I ate for dinner the day before 😳

I think it would help us all to moderate our own behaviour too because sometimes moderation can be a bit on the sporadic side.

If they want to make things better they are going to need to make either the website usable again, or the app have some of the same functionality so you can get messages, notifications etc

Excellent suggestions, OP.

I would also like to see a clear reason being provided when people report posts and the moderators choose not to delete them. Rather than the standard code message "thanks, we'll take a look at that now", which generally means that they're going to leave the reported post to stand. I appreciate that this would be time consuming, but if the moderators had to at least explain their decisions, they might think about those decisions a little harder, and people might have a bit more faith in the moderation process.

good suggestion, @MrsBennetsPoorNervesAreBack that would be helpful

Whilst I remember, when a post is deleted, the note says ‘Here’s a link to the Talk Guidelines’… well that link hasn’t worked for at least a year.

I think that's a workload issue, tbh. There aren't enough moderators as it is.

Good idea but far too time consuming sadly.

it would be helpful then, if the Talk Guidelines were updated and the deletion message had a link to the direct guideline that has been broken.

That can be automated especially if the post has been reported using one of the categories (which might be updated to match the guidelines?)

Yeah, I get that, but there might be ways of minimising the time that it would take. For example, the mods could select from a list of reasons to choose from when making their decision not to delete.

It basically boils down to whether MNHQ actually want to invest in resourcing the moderation process adequately or not.

Yes agree the holding message “we are looking into this” means we are not doing anything.

I’ve reported a few times and it’s usually to do with racist posts and. I’ve been told to challenge robustly. No thanks. As I’ve been on the receiving end of racism I don’t want to be doing that when im reading mn.

If you regularly get comments deleted, might you not be sensible to have a think about why that is?