I see the “baristas” group provides us with a list of mods and some indication of how active they are on the forum, which is useful. But I think for the sake of transparency regarding the expected/assumed culture of this forum, it would also be useful to know:
which mods are involved in user-related decisions (e.g. banning, hiding other users’ posts);
in which countries mods are located;
which [natural] languages mods are accustomed to using IRL (or, specifically, given that this seems to be an English-only space but many users probably don’t use English outside online contexts: whether mods live in a majority anglophone environment).
I think it would be useful for this information to be available in a stickied post so users can draw appropriate conclusions about the culture that is implicitly assumed to exist here.
N.B. I’m not on the discord so if similar points have ever been raised there, I’m not aware of them.
hey there! the culture here isn’t implicit; it’s explicitly outlined in our community guidelines, ranging from what kind of interaction with our community is appropriate to explicitly explaining how we handle mental health discussions. our reporting bad behavior section also explicitly states that decisions (including ones to ban, hide users’ posts) are shared across the entire team.
as far as the other information, i’m not really sure the relevance when the culture is explicitly stated. we have european, american, and aotearoan mods, if that’s helpful.
Thanks for the response and the reminder to review the community guidelines again! I appreciate the level of detail they provide. To clarify on my part, I certainly don’t believe that there hasn’t been an effort to explicitly clarify what the culture of this forum involves, but of course these sorts of guidelines will never fully address every possible aspect of what the space will be like – so no matter how much is explicitly set out, there will always be some degree to which a shared culture is constructed based on implicit norms. To give an example, seeing as I have a particular interest in the assumed linguistic culture(s) here, there doesn’t seem to be anything in the community guidelines regarding the use of languages other than English. But all the posts I’ve seen have been in English, and I assume if members started having lengthy conversations in other languages it could be difficult to maintain effective moderation. Mais si ce n’est pas le cas tant mieux, il serait super super bon de cultiver un espace plurilingue pour parler des sites web indépendants !
With that in mind, I believe that having information on whether mods are located in majority anglophone environments (perhaps in the guidelines) would help clarify some of these implicit assumptions and give some indication of the extent to which a shared culture is assumed. Even the fact that mods are across different continents is useful to know and it would be nice for that to be noted somewhere more official. As someone who uses English in > 99% of my interactions both online and off, I am hugely privileged in these implicitly anglophone settings and it would be useful to know if this also pertains across the mod team.
This isn’t something we’re looking to tackle here. But we encourage members to branch out and start their own communities. This sounds like something that interests you and could be the seed that grows the multilingual plant! Good luck
I would never cut it as a forum mod having to deal with shite like this haha. But I hope that example illustrated my point that not every divergence from expected behaviour can be explicitly accounted for!
