Our Communities Concerns and Wishes for the Moderation Functionality

[mcwil]

The change in the moderator cp panel was a bit of a shock to us. It seemed heavy handed and negative to the point of possibly being counterproductive to encouraging members to abide by our communities code of conduct.

So, we waited a while, let people get over the shock of having a warning points link displayed with their posts before we began to try to see if it could be helpful to us.

We still find it heavy handed.

What we like

• Members and moderators can see easily past messages from moderation
• We can require that members look at the 'warning' before further posting
  

What we don't like

• Points being visible to members. We would prefer that this be something only mods can see and that the link be titled something more neutral like Mod Message.
• The loss of the ability to add notes to a member record without it appearing as an empty warning to them.
  

What we wish

• Integration between Reports, warnings, and profiles. If a report results in a warning/message from moderation we currently have to manually add a link to the report in the moderation section of the warning.
• The ability to search/filter warnings/reports by reason, reporter and reported
  

• The ability to repeal warnings
• The ability of members to reply to warnings so that their response appears in the record.
  

As a team, we try to stay on the same page and be consistent with our community. As things are, this is a big challenging.

I hope that IP continues to develop the moderation functionality so that it facilitates communication between moderators and provides tools that are useful to communicating with our membership.

Perhaps this point system is something that other communities find helpful. But for us, it's visibility to the membership is not helpful. Rather it's insulting and demeaning. So, it actually makes people more angry just by it's nature.

Because we can no longer add notes to records without the member knowing, we've had to reinstate the practice of using an admin forum to document issues.

We also at times have to use personal messages rather than the warn system and document for other mods on the team what has been said..........so we don't 'over mod' someone.

In short, it's created more work for mods as they work to communicate with each other and our membership.

As more and more discussion is happening in the comment section of reports.......and this is not searchable by reported or reporter......we now have to 'remember' what report it was or just search record by record in order to refresh our memories on past issues.

Overall, the system has some good features but, it still needs quite a bit of love in order to become an asset to community building.

Thanks for listening!