Archived on 6/5/2022

Moderators & admins

Dave
24 Oct '20

I’m confused. Is @anon5422159 still moderating this forum or not? I would have thought that any splitting / editing would have been a job for @moderators and should have been made clear in @moderator_actions but from the exchange about it seems like (a) moderators were unaware and (b) someone with this admin role can change site content attributed to others without any obvious flagging of the change.

This seems deeply worrying to me, particularly because the person editing the posts of others was a part of a contentious discussion. Switching from player to referee mid-match seems out of order.

ForestHull
24 Oct '20

No.

But splitting and editing posts can be done by anyone at Trust Level 4 or above, but is rarely used by members at that level and most often done by moderators.

When moderators take these actions we don’t record these events in #moderator-actions, but they are self-evident in any case. Splitting topics looks like this:

When a member post is edited, we normally message the author to explain, and @anon5422159 did just that. I believe the system also notifies the original author that an edit was made too, and some members may have already seen this when posts have tags, thumbnails or times and dates added by us to keep things neat. The edit history is recorded on posts too with a little orange pencil icon.

Admins have the same options available as moderators, and actions are recorded and logged in the same way.

In this case the edited post had some redundant part of the message owing to the split so was cleaned up. I think that was probably unnecessary, but I don’t think there was anything nefarious about this,.
@anon5422159 may have jumped the gun with the edit rather than recuse himself. He was helping out in the in the capacity of a Trust Level 4 member in this case.

As for the admin role itself, and as noted in the banner at the top of the site, we are looking to hand over ownership of the sites on 1st November. We have to wait to give fair notice of the transfer to members, and are currently co-admins.