Bloodshade wrote:I'd rather you not make this about yourself again and detract from the thread's main point. For your sake and mine, it's for the best that you do something more productive than waste your time on this thread. Maybe I should follow suit and go do something more productive as well
You were talking about me, that was the cause of my response to set things straight. Bit of an odd attitude to have: "I can talk shit about you but you aren't allowed to respond to it!"
Attempted Socialism wrote:While I am notoriously curious and would like to follow along, there are good reasons why not. I don't know the exact internal tools or reasons on the NS boards, but my experience as mod and admin elsewhere gives me a short list:
- Private or otherwise confidential information. While site policies most often allow for broad collection of data, sharing that data publicly can be problematic for legal reasons. Especially if you're also doing business in the EU, and the information could be used to identify a specific person and data protected under GDPR. I have been made to sign DPAs before moderating to protect both company and user data before, for instance.
- Maintaining trust with users. Sure, you want to know. The issue then becomes, would you like everyone else to know in case you got banned for something? Having a moderation forum as open as this is, in my experience, very much not the norm because you don't want to have discussions with or about warned or banned users out in public.
- Internal procedures. Revealing what lead to a ban is also revealing much of what tools moderators have and how they work. While many things can be inferred, they may not want to open their mouths and reveal all doubt.
- Open discussions lead to flamewars. Both directed at users, especially if a banned person belonged to a clique at odds with another clique, and at mods.
- "Full transparency" can be a lot of hard work, and only doing it partially or on request leads inevitably to claims or partisanship. It may also risk revealing internal policy disagreements in a team that for morale and consistency purposes tries to defend the collective.
I don't think there's anything new to this list for people with broad internet fora experience. I also don't know exactly which points weigh heaviest for the NS moderators. But why should moderators disregard good reasons for keeping some decisions close to the chest, to satisfy what is essentially our curiosity?
Pretty much it. Enforcement of rules naturally entails a certain level of closed door policy. Having some kind of public trial system where we can see all the stuff that the Mods are acting on could seriously undermine their ability to moderate, as you can bet your bottom dollar that potential rulebreakers would scrutinise it to discern the mod tools and methodology. There is also a risk that letting everyone see the dirty laundry of a user would be degrading/humiliating.