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Moderating the moderators

posts: 179 France

This is a visionary proposal, so I thought it would be more appropriate to present it here rather than in Dev.

The classic political structure of a forum is members, moderated by moderators. Everybody assumes that that is naturally sufficient, right? However, it can happen that moderators must be moderated themselves.

Some moderators will apply sanctions in total disregard of the Charter of conduct they published on their own site. They can do that because they dislike the poster personnally, or they didn't understand what the poster said, or they want to join one of those lynchings that can happen on forums, or because the poster is a potential competitor in the administration of the site, or more generally because they want to assert their authority as godfathers of their forum.

When disregarding their own Charter of conduct, they can make their misdeeds totally invisible to the other members, by deleting the messages subjected to unfair sanction, by deleting the protest messages of the victim, and eventually by deleting the account of the victim. Which resembles a mafia situation.

They can also apply a humiliating nickname close to the name of the member, insert derogatory comments in the member's messages, change the title of a thread in an insulting or misleading manner, etc.

I have witnessed that quite a few times on community forums.

I am convinced that more and more high-end users - such as Tikiwiki will want to attract - will demand guarantees against possible abuse by moderators.

One of the possible features would be the right by members to monitor the recent acts by moderators, and the explanations given.

There are other possibilities, such as the possibility for the victim to report to another group of members, who won't be moderators.

There are many things to imagine. But for example I think that educated adults for instance, will be relieved to benefit from some sort of protection against illiterate teenagers.

In general, high end users will want the moderators to be "servants", not "masters", as they will be able to handle grown-up educated conversations by themselves.

Now to give a very concrete example, I was shown recently a mail exchange between a moderator, 20 year untrained girl, and a 40 year old highly trained woman. The highly trained woman needed to be allowed to post urgently on the forum, because it was a professional help forum. And the 20 year old stupid idiot forced her complete superior to "promise to behave". Yep, that were the exact words. Like a child. And in a context of professional emergency.

I am completely convinced that high end members desire sites with a guarantee against moderators. There is a market for that.

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