process for knowing who blocked/deleted whom/what

Posted by greggles on September 2, 2009 at 9:38am

We (Josh Koenig and I, the people who respond to the "contact" tab on this site) have had an increasing number of reports recently that posts are getting deleted inappropriately.

In many cases the block is appropriate, but it takes a lot of time and effort to understand what happened. I'd rather have some more transparency on this. Here are some possible ideas of how we could get a better "paper trail" for this. These are not set in stone, so I would love suggestions and more ideas:

Use something like Journal to record a lot of actions.
Create a new policy that whenever something is deleted, the person deleting should also contact the author to let them know why
Be like d.o and just have an issue queue or wiki for this (my least favorite)
Reduce the number of people who can delete and use a group voting system that builds a queue of offending content (I like this, but it takes a lot of work to maintain)

What else? Is the process working well for you as editors? What tools or policies can we give you to make it easier to moderate content?

Comments

What I do

Posted by Michelle on September 2, 2009 at 2:20pm

If something is not totally obviously spam or duplicate posts, I unpublish rather than delete it or at least hop on IRC and get some other opinions. That way the content is still there if the author comes back and questions it.

When I block someone, I stick a note in the signature along the lines of "Blocked for spamming -- Michelle". I use the signature because it's a handy text area right there on the account that anyone with perms can look and see why the user was blocked. If I'm in a hurry and the user is an obvious spam bot that's never going to complain sometimes I don't, but I do it 90% of the time even for obvious spammers and 100% of the time for anyone I'm not completely sure is a spam bot.

I don't know if these are good enough to be adopted as policy, but they work for me. :)

Michelle

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