We’re looking to put together some more detailed rules on what should and should not be submitted to the instance. Things such as, but not exclusively:
- What types of message you would always like to see removed on sight
- Whether there are any types of message which should be left up (borderline, with strong corrections from the community)
- Where the line is drawn on political views (and how gray areas should be treated)
I’ll make no bones: Moderating uk/ukpol has been a learning experience for me.
I’ve learned that there often isn’t much difference between “leaving a comment up because the community has done an excellent job highlighting flaws” and “I should have removed this hours ago, the community shouldn’t have to do this”.
As there isn’t a way to mod-tag a post, inaction on negative posts can reflect badly on the instance as a whole.
Having some clear guidelines/rules will hopefully simplify things.
And more admins should mean that if a report isn’t looked at, someone can review it as an escalation.
I’ve also enabled the slur filters. And we’ll be listening to see if anything needs adding/removing (the template had swearing blocked :| )
So…Answers on a postcard, I guess!
Illegal stuff should be a hard rule. By that I mean calls to action and explicit hate speech should be aggressively removed. It puts the instance at risk.
Auto-filtering might be useful for catching especially egregious words. They’re easy to bypass but I guess it should deter some trolling. But it could be tedious if it is overly sensitive. Is it going to block people posting or commenting? Does it let you know you’ve been caught?
I’m really not sure how well policing “political” topics would go. It’s political by nature, so I think even coming up with rules will end up devolving into political discussion. It’s probably easier to just say “no hate speech”.