DPR Update Introducing new Community Manager, Mathew Anderson

[Mathew Anderson]

Thanks Jim!

 

[Mathew Anderson]

Thanks! I hope the forums have been treating you well.

 

[Mathew Anderson]

Nice! You are a long-term member, that's impressive. From what I understand, many of the mods here have at least several years of community involvement, and moderating?

 

[Mathew Anderson]

Hi Tom! Absolutely, you all are very important to the community's success. As a Community Manager (I really don't like the term "manager"; I prefer "guide"), it's always been my mandate to take care of the community leaders and shepherds.

That sounds like a practical approach. Are any changes documented or communicated to the rest of the mods?

You have to re-invoke admin mode each time? Eek, we'll see if we can find another solution to that... I have an idea on how to do so, actually, but it may take a few weeks.

Consider me that Admin if you ever have a question on which way to moderate - it's what I am here for. Once we get the moderator handbook updated, and in sync with the community public guidelines, it hopefully will all be easier to act upon. Even so, moderating a community is tricky even in the best of times , there's always gray areas no matter how many rules are in place. But, that's again why I'm here.

I think we can improve on the tools you use to resolve issues through IP searching. We may hit privacy concerns at a point, but I'll see what we can do. Checking IPs is also tricky because often times an IP will be from, say, an airport where literally thousands of individuals are using it.

"One of our moderation issues is accusations from member of other member's multiple memberships."

You are saying that folks are creating multiple accounts and using them nefariously? What kinds of nefarious activities and concerns?

"Last thing and not a current issue"...

Agreed. I should be communicating to you changes to the actions you've made. This may be after the fact if something is urgent, but in general, this is my standard as well. We need a leader of the moderators to make a final call when necessary, which would be me now, but if that ever has to happen for whatever reason, I will do my best to ensure you understand the reason why, and in advance if possible. My door is always open too in case you have questions in making a call yourself.

I've written down all these issues to eventually address. Thanks for the heads up! If you can, attend our opening voice chat once its schedule, I'll have an interesting potential resolution to some of these things then...

The other forum you speak of, I would like to have a separate chat with you all about the external community and how they interact or are viewed by our community... that'll be a long chat I suspect .

Thanks Tom for the fountain of background info, it's appreciated!

 

[Mathew Anderson]

Thanks for the background on sandboxing. I'll have to think about this more and how we can make it consistent.

I want to avoid you all having to parse down to a single forum too much... if someone is misbehaving and needs a 'timeout', it's better they are timed out from the entire forum instead of us micromanaging that relationship. But, this will depend on your moderation interest too.

Ideally, we'd have a sandbox AND timeout capabilities, so you can monitor sandbox'd users and separately pause activity for someone else entirely.

Just an idea on past moderation experiences I have, but these tiers of moderation are often more effective for general communities:

- Sandboxing ('throttling' their activity to a tighter level, basically and separate in enacting from the remaining in this list)

- Timeout (a brief pause to all activity, perhaps just 24-48 hours or something short)

- Suspension (a longer timeout... perhaps a week or two)

- Temporary ban (a longer time removal from the forums with possibility for coming back someday)

- Permanent ban (they aren't coming back...)

These actions should also apply to every other known account of theirs (to which someone really shouldn't need to have more than one account here... right?).

 

[Mathew Anderson]

Thanks so much Footski!

 

[Mathew Anderson]

Thanks so much pdqgp!

 

[Mathew Anderson]

Thanks Martin! Your tenure is impressive, very nice. I would like to learn more about your history in the forums and what's kept you here for so long. What drives you to stay?

I've heard about the Canon APS-C but never had one in my hands.

I was going through the forums and saw that some of you do indeed moderate together. I think that's great, especially if it works for you and helps to cover a particular forum. If you feel you have too many forums though, let me know...

I look forward to the pitch, please do! You can put together a thoughts list and post it here in the forum for collab with the other mods, or if you like, DM me. Either way, please keep it as concise and bullet-point friendly as possible if you could. Background info is great, but I want to get to the meat n' potatoes of whatever it is you're after, so to speak .

I'll get a forum post started on this in the meantime everyone can chime in on.

Thanks again Martin.

 

[Tom Caldwell]

Sandbox - new user or a member we wish to keep an eye on for a while to make sure that they are posting is vetted, and

Ban - short term or full ban

Should be all the tools we need - it should not be too complex as we are all volunteers and lead "other lives".

Basically the system works very well as it is currently set up. Just a few tweaks to make it smoother. "New" sandboxing should be only per-forum as a watching brief for the Moderator that invokes it. Other Moderators do not wish to have another member to moderate on their forum who is behaving on their forum(s). If the issue requires "global" discipline it should be a short term global ban, not sandbox.

 

[Victor Engel]

Sandbox - new user or a member we wish to keep an eye on for a while to make sure that they are posting is vetted, and

Ban - short term or full ban

Should be all the tools we need - it should not be too complex as we are all volunteers and lead "other lives".

Basically the system works very well as it is currently set up. Just a few tweaks to make it smoother. "New" sandboxing should be only per-forum as a watching brief for the Moderator that invokes it. Other Moderators do not wish to have another member to moderate on their forum who is behaving on their forum(s). If the issue requires "global" discipline it should be a short term global ban, not sandbox.

We also need to be able to lock threads and delete posts. That is currently available and working fine. IP lookup is also there, but I find it to be pretty useless. Run it on me, for example, and you get dozens of people who use the same IPs. This is because I have used and currently use VPNs (also I just switched VPNs).

I was thinking about this the other day, and a better way to track if someone is using more than one userID is with cookies.

 

[Martin Ocando]

Sandbox - new user or a member we wish to keep an eye on for a while to make sure that they are posting is vetted, and

Ban - short term or full ban

Should be all the tools we need - it should not be too complex as we are all volunteers and lead "other lives".

Basically the system works very well as it is currently set up. Just a few tweaks to make it smoother. "New" sandboxing should be only per-forum as a watching brief for the Moderator that invokes it. Other Moderators do not wish to have another member to moderate on their forum who is behaving on their forum(s). If the issue requires "global" discipline it should be a short term global ban, not sandbox.

We also need to be able to lock threads and delete posts. That is currently available and working fine. IP lookup is also there, but I find it to be pretty useless. Run it on me, for example, and you get dozens of people who use the same IPs. This is because I have used and currently use VPNs (also I just switched VPNs).
I was thinking about this the other day, and a better way to track if someone is using more than one userID is with cookies.

Good idea. It can shows a cookie disclaimer, and just track using that. I don't know the technical details, but makes sense to me.

 

[Mathew Anderson]

Great feedback, thanks for the thoughts on moderation. I want to keep rules and guidelines as simple as possible as well, especially for the public's view of them. Naturally, our internal policies and procedures will describe a bit more for our own value in ensuring clarity.

Good to hear that most things are working fine and the system isn't missing too many key pieces and features. We have some ideas on that I'll be sharing in our upcoming chat though, good stuff to mention you'll like to hear.

Gotcha on sandbox, so this is viewed more granularly. When you sandbox someone, what happens... do they get a notice and what does that notice say?