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.

[dawna]

Ideally, I'd like to see a system where a community's maintainer can selectively choose powers for moderators. Some people I wouldn't give the ability to ban or remove members, but after a period of time and earning of trust, they may be up to that task and it would be nice to be able to grant levels of privileges (or remove privileges)...

I've always wanted a heirarchy of maintainership so that I could appoint someone and not have to worry about whether they get a wild hair and decide to remove me from the community I created.

[lost_cosmos]

if a maintainer has given essentially the rights of a maintainership to the community to another person within there, trust should NOT be an issue in the first place.

have moderators is another thing entirely. you can create a separate community just for them to discuss people and their posts/issues or they can speak to one another via the LJ msg system or email. then get ahold of you [the maintainer] or another to take appropriate action.

if you aren't going to be responsible for your community then don't MAKE it.

[delux_vivens]

IAWTC.

[leanasidhe]

this is exactly what i've always wanted.

[baby_werewolf]

Re. the second poll - it should be an option, if the original creator wants to make sure they stay involved, but it shouldn't be automatic. A lot of maintainers do drop out and need replacing, and it's no good if no-one can remove them.

[lost_cosmos]

thats when you go to LJ and say "maintainer has abandonned community" you tell them that you are active and want to take ownership of the community. if they cannot get ahold of the original maintainer etc then you'll get the community.

people who just randomly make communities should be banned from LJ. if you make a community BE responsible for it.

[tanwen]

I think the creator/maintainer of a community should be able to pick & choose which powers they decide to give another mod. For instance, if I want to let someone help me with tagging I can choose to give them that ability & no other or if I want some help with customizing the look of the community. That way there won't be any drama or confusion.

[galbinus_caeli]

The owner of the community should be able to set individual permissions for the moderators.

Default to "everything" but let the owner remove permissions.