Background Pony #6C09
@Brass Beau
>Publicly viewable mod forum on site policy.
Most discussions are probably regarding boring details on particular picture deletions and whatnot. Maybe a “talk page” on pictures (think wikipedia) for mods to discuss things (read-only for normal users)? Not sure how workable or useful that would be.
>Community vote on policy changes.
>Site wide banner announcing voting.
As Barhandar said, completely impossible to implement with sufficient trust. If the poll results hold no mandate, then the losing side will be invariably highly bitter.
>Moderator being an elected position.
Same as above, since it requires polling. What’s needed is trust in the topmost levels of management; if that exists, then they can be trusted to select good moderators, and if that’s lacking, then no amount of posturing will fix that. North Korea holds elections, or for less extreme cases consider China or Russia.
>Opt-in program for users to assist in moderator tasks.
This would actually be a good idea, and could work with proper mod action audit logs and transparency to ensure rogue actors are caught swiftly and their actions can be reverted. Also kind of reminds me of Stack Exchange moderation privileges, though there’s nothing on derpibooru that readily avails itself for use as a “reputation” score.
>Not allowing anonymous posting in forums.
Everything on derpibooru is 100% usable without an account. Locking away the forums behind a requirement to register seems weird and counter-intuitive to the design philosophy of the entire site. Not that I would be terribly upset at being forced to register, the main reason I haven’t done so is lazyness more than anything else, but it just seems weird.
>A karma system for comments.
For what purpose
>Uploaders being able to disable comments on works.
Change that to artists, and it might be tractable. In fact, Ponybooru is implementing a way for artists to claim uploads of their work, which should let artists edit the descriptions on their works and then you could also consolidate stuff like comment and rating restrictions.
>An audit log showing who made what changes to site pages or removes comments.
Pages like the rules already have changelogs, but the diffs could use some serious improvement, plus commit logs. In general, mod audit logs has been one of the most requested features from all this, and I think Raptorshy has said that it’s probably planned.
>Hiding rules violating comments instead of deleting them.
I personally would very much support that, but I could see why this might get dismissed. Still, important stuff often gets screencapped. Maybe this could be made part of the audit log, requiring users to actually dig in to see what got deleted, thus making it available but still effectively removing the comment from the conversation.
>Publicly viewable mod forum on site policy.
Most discussions are probably regarding boring details on particular picture deletions and whatnot. Maybe a “talk page” on pictures (think wikipedia) for mods to discuss things (read-only for normal users)? Not sure how workable or useful that would be.
>Community vote on policy changes.
>Site wide banner announcing voting.
As Barhandar said, completely impossible to implement with sufficient trust. If the poll results hold no mandate, then the losing side will be invariably highly bitter.
>Moderator being an elected position.
Same as above, since it requires polling. What’s needed is trust in the topmost levels of management; if that exists, then they can be trusted to select good moderators, and if that’s lacking, then no amount of posturing will fix that. North Korea holds elections, or for less extreme cases consider China or Russia.
>Opt-in program for users to assist in moderator tasks.
This would actually be a good idea, and could work with proper mod action audit logs and transparency to ensure rogue actors are caught swiftly and their actions can be reverted. Also kind of reminds me of Stack Exchange moderation privileges, though there’s nothing on derpibooru that readily avails itself for use as a “reputation” score.
>Not allowing anonymous posting in forums.
Everything on derpibooru is 100% usable without an account. Locking away the forums behind a requirement to register seems weird and counter-intuitive to the design philosophy of the entire site. Not that I would be terribly upset at being forced to register, the main reason I haven’t done so is lazyness more than anything else, but it just seems weird.
>A karma system for comments.
For what purpose
>Uploaders being able to disable comments on works.
Change that to artists, and it might be tractable. In fact, Ponybooru is implementing a way for artists to claim uploads of their work, which should let artists edit the descriptions on their works and then you could also consolidate stuff like comment and rating restrictions.
>An audit log showing who made what changes to site pages or removes comments.
Pages like the rules already have changelogs, but the diffs could use some serious improvement, plus commit logs. In general, mod audit logs has been one of the most requested features from all this, and I think Raptorshy has said that it’s probably planned.
>Hiding rules violating comments instead of deleting them.
I personally would very much support that, but I could see why this might get dismissed. Still, important stuff often gets screencapped. Maybe this could be made part of the audit log, requiring users to actually dig in to see what got deleted, thus making it available but still effectively removing the comment from the conversation.
