I had to log in to read Tim’s flagged post, otherwise the option to view its content didn’t appear. This is too censorous for my tastes, but still tolerable. I’d prefer if moderator actions were taken mostly against posters rather than posts, e.g. warnings or temp bans, with exceptions for illegal content and spam.
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Surprise! A mod did restore my light-banter post with David. They did that on their own - thanks 
. But, unlike as in previous cases, I did get a system notification of that the post was restored.
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As an example of editing, I normally would have fixed Steve’s typo of his name (and I know it’s a typo as I have never communicated with Steve when he left that second “e” off). But since “Stev” made it clear his view on editing, I’m leaving the typo.
I’m going to leave this post up, but the PSF CoC does ask folks to be " open, considerate, and respectful." I personally think that sentence is not being “considerate” or “respectful”. Nor is that statement a fact in spite of its phrasing based on the private feedback the moderators have received about how we have handled the various threads in question (obviously some of the feedback has been on the other end of the spectrum as well, making everyone’s view of how us moderators have handled things an opinion).
While I suspect some will argue that the mods aren’t being “open”, I’m trying to counteract that a bit with this post.
I believe someone is inferring. I’m personally not aware of any list of people to act against that’s waiting in the wings (but this is off-topic for this thread).
It actually depends. Everyone has a weight to their flags based on their trust level and previous flags that moderators (dis)agreed with. If your weight is high enough the hiding is automatic, otherwise it gets raised to the moderators to handle which can include choosing to hide the post, delete the post, as well as suspending the user.
As I said above, it’s based on weights. A handful of people trigger an automatic hiding on their own, but in general it takes multiple people flagging.
That’s actually not true. Even some people who have participated for a long time have an off day and stray from being cordial. And if a post is off-topic you want to deal with it quickly to minimize derailing an entire topic, and those sorts of posts easily come from long-time participants (myself included 
).
We do both. But we don’t want to leave posts around violating the CoC as they are, well, violating the CoC. 
And that can be important to act on if the post is insulting, harmful or triggering for a vulnerable group of people, etc. This is actually a key reason I personally argued we move away from mailing lists as it leaves “bad” posts in everyone’s inbox and online forever.
That was me. To help pull back the curtain on moderation I will explain what happened:
- The post got flagged as off-topic and the weight of the flag(s) was enough for an automatic hiding
- I saw the moderation notification that the post was flagged
- I read the post and in fact agreed it was off-topic, but since it was a “thanks” post and the rest of the post seemed unlikely to trigger more off-topic posts (please don’t make me regret that decision ), I rejected the flag to let the post show up again (I sometimes get a “agree but keep post” option which I would have chosen as I think the flag was right but the auto hide wasn’t necessary, but I didn’t get that option this time).
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I’m not talking about people not being cordial. Spam is completely different from that, as is the kind of “actually offensive” that was mentioned in the footnote there. Neither of those kinds of posts (which I would agree DO need to be swiftly removed) will come from an “off day”. Nor are they merely off-topic.
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Wait. Are the posts being removed forever or aren’t they? Once you remove a post, is it actually gone or is it merely hidden? I’ve seen so much confusing information here. Sometimes it’s the reassurance that, even after a post has been moderatorially flagged, it is still there (but some people can’t see it); other times, like this statement, it seems like sometimes that isn’t the case and posts actually get hard-removed. Which is it? Do you hard-delete posts or don’t you?
It depends on the action chosen by a moderator, but posts are never automatically deleted.
Depends on the post, but I’m only aware of spam being deleted.
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So… you COULD delete posts but usually don’t? Is there any kind of indication given if a post is actually deleted, because this seems like something that would be very dangerous if someone mis-clicks. The mere fact that it is possible for a post to be deleted and completely excised from history makes me uncomfortable.
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I understand the Byzantine “moderation” procedures FAR LESS after Brett’s explanation than I did before reading it. It simply feels capricious, biased, and like something we’re not intended to understand.
But like Steve, I should simply take my leave of Discourse… And perhaps of the PSF in general, given what it has become.
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Thanks for the info, Brett! I found it helpful.
I’ll confess that I knew my little post to David was “off topic” - but I’m such a scofflaw I didn’t care. Little digressions are a thoroughly normal part of human interaction, and I’m glad you appeared to agree in this case.
An irony is that the vast bulk of following off-topic posts weren’t triggered by the post itself, but by its mysterious auto-hiding. As you correctly inferred, the post itself didn’t say anything worth replying to .
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But don’t assume either that Brett fully understands them and is holding back. I spent some hours digging through the Discourse docs a few weeks back, and there is no complete understanding to be had. I expect you’d have to stare at the source code to suss out the real meaning of many ill-defined aspects of the docs.
Which reminds of me of one of my all-time favorite bits of language implementation code: there was (possibly still is) part of the Perl implementation that attaches various weights to various Perl-source character sequences to try to take an educated guess at which (formally ambiguous) language structure the programmer intended.
That, though, was just plain hilarious .
Na, stick around. Your voice is still important to the Python community. If you vanish, I’ll be all alone in opposing the PSF invading Afghanistan to take over the poppy trade .
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I wouldn’t blame Discourse the technical platform here; the defaults are probably tailored for large communities with many one-off posters, where things like auto-hiding posts with many flags turn out really useful, but ultimately it’s pretty configurable. When I set up a Discourse forum as a replacement for a small mailing list where most people knew each other well, I sifted through the long list of config params (how many posts to gain a trust level, what trust level you need to post images, and so on and so forth), and set them to much more lenient values. What I’m trying to say is that in comparison to a mailing list which offers few moderation tools, a Discourse forum offers more tools but how they are used is still a choice by the admins.
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To get an explicit confirmation on the timeline for myself and others: The post got flagged ~1.5 days ago as of right now and got auto-hidden, and then sat in the review queue, right? Up until a few hours ago when you got online and handled it, right? And no other moderator was online in the meantime with the capacity [1] to handle it?
Meaning that the reason this post was auto-hidden for so long was no deliberate choice by anyone and would not have happened if it more moderators were online.
Be that mental capacity to handle any flagged posts or time-capacity to work through a potential backlog ↩︎
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Don’t worry, I’ll still share and advocate your positions against US (and Western in general) imperialism and neo-colonialism.
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Indeed, no, it’s not a fact. Of course it’s an opinion, by its construction. And it happens to be one which dissents from those in the private feedback you cite. (And which also dissents, for example, from the first couple of replies in the prior thread.)
But if this crosses a line, that’s seriously problematic. This makes it far harder to register an actual complaint that has any actual weight behind it. It takes many more words to explain what “abysmal behavior” looks like than to register that opinion. But praise is easy, and nearly always falls on the good side of any CoC.
I understand that it’s nice to be able to have constructive criticism. But nobody is entitled to be shielded from the disapproval of others.
Besides, a CoC which claims to establish such protection is one that is bound to be applied unevenly. And in fact we have already seen this for years. Where was the moderation when it was Jack Diederich being attacked? In my quite humble opinion, the criticisms levied there went far beyond simply using phrases like “frankly abysmal behavior”, which can only ever be understood as an opinion. Bluntly, they insinuated serious charges that in my mind amount to outright defamation of character.
Yes, someone is inferring. Rather, many people are inferring, including myself.
We don’t know.
Because of the lack of openness.
Which you are apparently not actually in a position to counteract - because you can only tell us what you’re personally aware of.
I assume you also can neither confirm nor deny whether you are a member of the CoC WG.
Sure. Let me take a few moments to give my own take on “abysmal behaviour”[1], from personal experience.
I still remember when I was suspended because I went too many posts in a row asking beginners to actually narrow the problem down to code that others could use to reproduce the problem in a way that the mods felt was too brusque, applied the Socratic method (which apparently nobody likes despite how effective it is for those with an open mind) without adequate meta explanation, etc. (And then I disregarded feedback on this because I genuinely believed I had already incorporated it, but the mods disagreed.)
When that happened, I had a slow-motion back and forth discussion about the topic. I was not given any clarity on how to phrase things better, despite explicitly asking for such. Until I came to my own conclusions about that, explicitly said described what I planned to do, and explicitly asked for the suspension to be lifted (stating a specific reason why I would like to be able to post again), I was not given any clarity on the duration of the suspension. In fact, even then it was some number of days until the suspension was lifted, and I forget that number, because I got no feedback aside from the suspension actually being lifted.
In that exchange, it was suggested to me that I should make sure not to treat this site like Stack Overflow. First of all, that completely misunderstands what using Stack Overflow is actually like[2], but also I haven’t written answers there for quite some time now. I stayed here specifically so that I could answer questions that are appropriate for a forum environment (Stack Overflow is explicitly not one).
But the reason I bring that up is: on Stack Overflow, when you get suspended, the system automatically tells you the duration of the suspension. And for first offenses the standard duration is 48 hours.
Openness is indeed severely lacking.
If posts can be undeleted, that demonstrates that they are not purged from the Discourse database.
Everyone who uses a mail client has the freedom to delete local caches of messages. Nobody is compelled to read through mailing list archives and look for offensive content. (If anything, that’s the behaviour of someone with an axe to grind.)
Moderators can’t be everywhere and in most cases they will only be aware of something offensive because it was flagged. Nobody prevented the user who flagged it, from seeing it.
I don’t mean to argue for going back to mailing lists - just that these supposed advantages are missing the point, and imagining an additional protection that isn’t really there.
If I flagged everything I saw around here that I felt was “off-topic” relative to the OP, I would probably spend more time doing that than writing replies. (And I put a lot of thought into my average reply here.)
Selectively flagging posts as off-topic is definitely something that can be weaponized.
Just FWIW, there is a Meta Discourse for talking about the software itself.
To be fair, the #users section is pretty much like that from what I’ve seen.
With a
u, because I’m Canadian (and I assume David Mertz is not). ↩︎The comment section on Stack Overflow is not for discussion, and you aren’t intended to go back and forth with the OP, except as needed to fix issues with the question. The question is expected to meet a list of standards, and having a proper MRE or specification is only one of those. Those standards exist because fundamentally, the question is not about helping the OP fix something, but contributing to a reusable Q&A library. Other Q&A sites, such as Codidact, are really intended to work the same way - although sites about less technical topics often take those standards less seriously. ↩︎
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I’m not Brett, but those appear to be facts.
Digression: how do you make one of those “…” clickable footnote thingies? I see them more & more, but remain clueless how to make one. Searching online didn’t turn up a clue either 
.
Back to what you said: I’d be extremely surprised if the mods had an objective “book of rules” either. I’d bet two dollars than two mods may react in three different ways . I doubt Brett knows either which mods were online when.
Guess “yes”.
:Guess “we’ll never know”. The people in question probably matter too. I’m not known for being retiring, and if I really cared I would have learned how to contact a mod to complain. But I didn’t care - the post could have remained hidden until the sun burned out, and I wouldn’t have said a word.
And while Brett wearing his SC hat surely does his best to treat everyone alike, all humans are biased. We’ve had cordial relations for years & years, although not so much in recant years as I’d like. He may have been more inclined to give me the benefit of a doubt, even if not consciously aware of it. Which is one reason for why, if I ever did complain to a mod, I’d never complain directly to Brett. I suspect his SC life is hard enough already .
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Correct.
I think the mods see something.
If I’m remembering correctly you have to confirm a deletion via a second modal.
I don’t want to wade into legal stuff, but there may be a situation where we have to. People are obviously welcome to make backups of the site if they want a more complete record than the PSF keeps.
I personally don’t consider that a bad thing. One of those types of comment can be hurtful while the other isn’t. I think you should always put more effort into your words if they can cause harm for someone else.
Correct, but there’s a difference between constructive criticism and being rude in how you deliver your criticism.
I don’t know of any CoC enforcement that doesn’t have some form of privacy which means not everything is shared on purpose.
Correct. I personally don’t do moderation on weekends to avoid a bad interaction ruining my days off and my time w/ my family because they don’t deserve having me in a foul mood for dealing w/ some mean person. I suspect other moderators are the same as this volunteer position that attracts way more negativity and vitriol than appreciation.
That, and what I’m allowed to share.
Why do you think that? My membership is public and I’ve personally confirmed I’m a member multiple times.
If the mods disagree w/ a flag that then gets recorded and if that occurs too much that is also flagged.
I’m not on the SC anymore; I didn’t run for the 2024 council after serving 5 years consecutively.
To try and bring this back around to the topic, if people have specific suggestion on how to moderate within Discourse to enforce the PSF CoC, please make those suggestions, but moving off of Discourse or not enforcing the PSF CoC is off the table (you are obviously welcome to establish your own space if you don’t want those things; the internet is a big place with plenty of space).
As examples:
- Moderators shouldn’t edit posts, only hide them
- Moderators can edit posts to make them pass the CoC w/o meaningfully changing their meaning if they leave an explicit note an edit was made
- Keep doing what you’re doing
…, etc. And a key thing is it needs to be in line w/ what’s feasible w/ what Discourse can do, so you may have to do some homework, otherwise you might accidentally by requesting a 
feature that’s not possible or no one is willing to put in the work to code up.
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It’s the fact that it COULD happen that is disconcerting. Us plebs have no clue that the mods (or a single mod) decided to censor something. One of the huge advantages of email is that it is an open system, built on public protocols.
Disable any form of secret deletion. Prevent moderators from taking hidden actions. Provide actual real openness about moderatorial decisions.
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My apologies! There are too many bureaucracies for an old man to remember .
s/SC/CoC WG/g and nothing material changes to what I said. I still expect you have enough potential conflicts to fret over .
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Can that be disabled in Discourse?
What’s “hidden” to you that’s currently happening that you think we can reasonably share publicly?
In what way?
This is unfortunately all very broad w/o providing concrete steps that you are after.
I don’t know. That’s the problem. It has now been confirmed that moderators ARE able to fully delete a post, leaving it completely gone from view. How do I know how many times that has happened in the past? We’ve had some concerns and complaints, which have not been allayed. All we know is, it MIGHT happen. It could happen. And we would never know if it did, or if it already has, or if it’s actually a regular occurrence and nobody’s saying anything.
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