I do agree. My point is that we need Bona Fides like Irwin to clean out “inaccurate information”.
Now this right here is part of my point. As there are no guidelines to go with these abilities it is purely at the discretion of the users with these permissions and that discretion reflects on purism whether intentional or not.
You deem something just and cleansing another seems it unjust and muddying the waters. Neither party is wrong as there’s subjectivity involved (I’m talking hypothetical here to get away from this single example since there are other examples in these forums as well).
As such anyone’s actions that reflect on purism should, in my view, at minimum be following guidance from purism.
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Common sense is also guidance.
There is some explicit guidance publicly available. This might inform a decision about whether a post is a contribution, adds value, “improves the discussion”, or not.
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They could make a D&D table, with a certain number of experience points to go up in level.
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The user irvinewade suggested that I post my comment in this thread (in what I thought to be a rather snoody tone, btw). So reposting my thoughts here:
Allowing regular users who don’t represent Purism moderate this forum is going to continue to lead to confusion. Especially since there doesn’t seem to be any transparency or accountability when manipulating and changing posts as evidenced by this thread. Whoever from Purism allowed such a thing should reconsider.
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I would like to present at least a counterargument.
By allowing some users who have no formal connection to Purism to make moderation-like decisions, Purism gets increased (free) resourcing and better timezone coverage.
I have seen in the past, Purism developers doing moderation work - and while it is entirely Purism’s business how they operate - that does delay the day when I have working camera, working GNSS, working convergence, … so I am much happier if developers are relieved of having to do this.
I agree that it would be preferable, even important, if it could be communicated clearly that moderation-like decisions and actions are not being taken by Purism i.e. community-moderated when that is the case.
It would be good to be clear also about the exact actions that can be taken by community members (move topic, retitle topic, but is there anything else?) and the other actions that can only be taken by Purism (???sin-bin or deactivate users, hide or delete post, … really I have no idea - would have to read Discourse documentation).
You would be surprised (or maybe not) how many BS accounts get created solely for the purposes of making one BS post e.g. spam. That of course is not unique to this forum.
I would suppose that when move or retitle topic occurs, the OP is notified but I don’t know what content is in that notification or whether it can be customised???
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I’d just like to chime in to say I personally was not aware that users automatically received permissions based on trust levels. I strongly disagree with this but I digress.
I thought moderators were specifically chosen by Purism employees.
Due to this, I apologise for grouping both my issues of shipping estimates and moving the thread into a private section with yourself @irvinewade I can see that these were unrelated and you are simply a user that was given low-level moderation powers.
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Are you willing to comment on the last paragraph of my previous post? e.g. paste the text of any notification that you received when your topic was moved.
LOL. Yes, OK. It’s a bit minimalist. However unless someone wants to start hoeing into the source code for Discourse …
Even having guidelines where any moderation actions must be noted in the thread and/or PM and then enforcing that by taking away those permissions from “regulars” whom repeatedly don’t follow said guidelines would be better than the current situation IMO. Sure, not automated and not ideal but better. It also opens a dialog for those whom have had their posts modified; letting them know not just that it was modified and by whom, but a post/PM could include why and is a reasonable starting place for any objection.
This doesn’t require digging into code nor using up a bunch of developer time and in turn might be a pretty reasonable option.
I think we’ve seen though how this can derail. I would opt for PM (particularly since the system automatically starts the ball rolling by sending a PM from ‘moderator’ to ‘OP’).
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Modified by a 20th Level Master Moderator …
This was a setting that was enabled by default in the forum settings for what discourse calls “Regular users”. We could debate what the discourse developers consider “sane defaults” for a community in a forum, but that would be for an off topic round table.
Given this report, we have debated the issue internally and removed this default setting. And now “regular” users can no longer edit other users posts.
We also defend that as a general rule, users should not be able to edit other users posts. As this can be a can of worms. And such a power cannot be automatically given reaching the level of “regular”, which basically relates to the time a person spends on the forum and number of posts that person makes.
Asking another user to change something in his post is totally ok.
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I apologise to all the 3rd Level Ninjas who have just lost the right to move or retitle posts.
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Don’t apologise mate, you just helped identify a flaw in the forum. You just helped improve it. Sorry I took it out on you.
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Oh no, what will I do without my super powers?
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fixed: just type sudo before the command. The code below still works
sudo retitle-post post new-title
sudo move-post post new-category
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