Community maintainers and moderators

[marta]

We've been having some conversations about how to avoid a co-maintainer removing other maintainers. As part of that, we are looking to expand the rights of community moderators - so that maintainers can appoint moderators to help them with a community, instead of co-maintainers. What do you think a moderator should be able to do in a community?

Poll Should moderators be able to:

Comments

[teacoat]

I think the ideal situation would be maintainers being able to assign certain duties to different moderators. If it's a large, heavy-traffic community, some maintainers may not trust their moderators with too much power. I maintain quite a few small comms, however, and in those cases, it's in the maintainers best interest for 'mods' to have as much power as possible, since there's relatively little damage they can do.

This probably is not feasible, but if it is I think it would be the best idea.

[elfy]

agreed.
there could be some sort of table with names of mods on the one side and then, above, possible duties and then you can just set checkboxes to yes/no.

[dobie]

This. Definitely.

It's how many mailing list managers work. Yahoogroups, for example - you can specify exactly what permissions a moderator can have, up to and including all the privileges of an owner, and the owner can pick and choose what each moderator can do.

[kyrielle]

Yes yes yes. The ability to assign each of the abilities to each person is handy as well because that way, you can create as many tiers/roles of moderator as the community needs. Smaller communities may not need many different roles (but different smaller communities may have different needs among the roles they do have). Bigger ones may need some people with lots of privileges, and lots of people with basic privileges, just to keep track of and control the traffic. Instead of doing that with moderators/maintainers, the explicit abilities you want could be assigned. So much better.

[lanthirel]

Yahoogroups does something like this. Really, LJ could learn a lot from YGs. Sure, YG isn't perfect, but one thing that they do right is to allow a user to register several addresses and passwords under each Yahoo ID. This is very helpful, because if one loses access to an email addy, there are those others to get back into the account.

[katiethewriter]

That was just what I was going to say.

[teacoat]

And I'm not sure how I feel about the second option. It's a tough question, because anyone can "go rogue" whether they are a new maintainer or an old maintainer. If a new maintainer hijacks a community and removes all the other maintainers, that would be terrible. But if an older maintainer starts throwing a hissy fit and messing with the community, they should be removed, perhaps only a newer maintainer could do that.

Perhaps it could be set up where all other maintainers have to agree before another maintainer can be removed?

(Also, first? Booya)

[polyfrog]

That is also fraught with peril, though. I recruit you as a maintainer, you recruit your friend and now there are two of you and you agree to kick me out.

Ultimately, if the person who created the community thinks it is going the wrong directing and decides to get medieval, that's their right; they created the community. But if they just sort of fade away, that's a different story.

Maybe if the rest of the maintainers agree to remove the senior maintainer they can do it, but there could be a way for the creator to get control again (the same way the person whose email address created regular user account can always get it back even if it was given to someone else...)?

[jobuni]

But if they can get control again what's the point of the functionality in the first place? If the moderators have the rights to do everything to keep the community running smoothly would there really be a need to get rid of a lost creator?

If the creator is taking the comm in a direction the other mods (or members) don't like they are always free to go and start their own comm.

[polyfrog]

I guess it's a philosophical question: Who owns a community? The person who creates it, or the people who use it?

[jobuni]

Now there's a good question that could go on forever ;o)

[polyfrog]

Indeed yes. And unfortunately, it is at the core of how this issue is handled.

Ultimately the LJ staff will just have to make a decision: Whose needs overrule whose?

[marta]

Just as a point of clarification, kind of unrelated to the current proposals, despotic community creators are completely allowed.

Even if a community were to open a report to get them removed, the one who created a community won't have the community taken away because of their despotic tendencies. In that case, it's probably better that someone else start another community where they could manage it the way they wanted to.

The only requests to transfer maintainership of a community that we currently act on are ones where there is a need (like the community getting hit with spam, etc.) - and, even then, we email the absentee maintainer asking if they'd like to continue maintaining and give them a period of time to respond.

[titania7]

I agree with this as well.

[manna]

This is an excellent suggestion. It would be greato ,for example, be able to recruit half a dozen people for a community tagging project and give them access just to the ability to create, edit and assign tags, without having to give them all control over the whole community.