I don't know whether this feature exists because my board is not setup yet. I had a negative experience on a phpbb-based forum where I reported a moderator's post, and that same moderator closed the report.
Is it possible for this to happen on a SMF board? If it is, I am interested in helping develop code, whether it be in core, or a modification, so that only admins can adjucate reports against moderators.
Relevant discussion on private messages:
https://www.simplemachines.org/community/index.php?topic=556498.msg3944197#msg3944197 but I'm curious about public messages.
Yes, it is possible.
However, what you are talking about is attempting to solve a social problem through code - which is generally a waste of time.
If an admin trusts their moderators, then they trust them. If they don't trust them, then they would not be moderators.
Instead of a report, just send a pm.
The closed reports should stay in the moderation center though, and the admin can see them even if closed, and can even reopen the report if they want to.
I figured the admin could still see them, but I think still-open reports typically get more visibility because they haven't been marked as having been handled yet.
Would you merge a pull request if I added a setting to disallow the same moderator from closing reports against themselves? Not saying they wouldn't be able to see the report, just not close it. Moderators do get fired and while I now know to send a PM to an admin, many people who do use the report button don't know much about how it works.
I have a lot of thoughts on the matter and here's my $0.02 on it for whatever that's worth to anyone.
1. I personally don't agree with this feature. Trying to inflict social change through technological means doesn't always end well, and while having more choice of tools is usually a good thing, to me this just feels like a way of potentially dividing a team for minimal derived benefit (see later)
2. If it were to be included in a mainstream release, that should go into 2.2 or beyond, not as a change to 2.0 or 2.1. These get bug/security fixes as appropriate, but this is not a bug. I'm not even sure it's a design oversight.
3. This could be wrapped into a mod far sooner than a mainstream release. A mod package can be descriptive, after all, of a pull request describing the changes to different files. Hooks-only is a preference where achievable, but it is not always achievable.
4. The real hearts of the problem: when we talk about a moderator being reported, are we talking about a message report or a member report (as this is a thing in 2.1). In the case of the former, are we saying that this new option would disallow a moderator's post being reported to be closed by that moderator? Or is this strictly confined to member reports? Does it need two options?
5. The rabbit hole continues: what happens if the moderator is not a moderator and is an admin? What if the affected moderator is an admin and is the only admin? In particular, I'm wondering about whether an admin would turn this on by accident (or experimentation), get reported and then wonder why they can't close the report. I also envisage the notion of if this feature were to be mainstream, that some would call for it being permission based as to whether to have an override.
6. Then of course we simply get into the technical complexity; the level of who can moderate what, who is considered a moderator of what and who gets notified of what reports is surprisingly involved and will require some deep study of the moderation cache to successfully implement, I feel. Not only can individuals be board moderators, groups of users can be board moderators, users can be moderators of groups, users can be in groups that just have moderation permissions. The exact set of permutations for 'this person is a moderator' are truly vast.
7. Having such an option also makes the presumption that an admin does not implicitly trust their moderators by default, that there is an implicit 'who watches the watchers' side view to the matter. This dovetails with notions around escalation to the admin. If there is a problem with a moderator, curtailing the moderators' power by default is not the answer - escalating to the admin is. If the admin trusts their moderator, there is a not-unreasonable chance the admin will side with the moderator anyway (thus making this option unnecessary by design), while on the flip side, if they find they agree with the complainant, escalating was the correct choice, and not driven by whether the post being reported was a report not actioned by the moderator anyway. Either way, in most forums I've ever seen, this option would actually make no practical difference to the moderator being censured or not.
The only way it might make a practical difference is if you have a truly large site where multiple sets of people are moderators who may not otherwise interact - and I'd suggest this is a minority case at best. The sort of case where if this really were absolutely necessary, the mod route is a better route to it and in any case... you probably have other problems at that scale than this anyway, that need better and more comprehensive thinking to solve.
Yes, all that. Basically, I would be opposed to including this in Core
I really appreciate the detailed reply, Arantor.
Re #1: The way I see it, admins are humans and make mistakes, including promoting the wrong moderators. I clearly don't have much admin experience, so this is a bigger concern for me. For example, I had a moderator quit without even letting me know recently.
Re #3: Ok, I agree with you and Kindred that a modification is the way to go. Awesome.
Re #4: I'm not sure how a "member report" works; when I searched for this term (with quotes) in the online manual nothing came up.
Re #5: I thought all admins were also moderators? I think the top admin, and probably all admins, should be exempt from this feature and be able to close the report. A solution to someone wondering why they can't close the report would be to display a msgbox that says something like "Moderators cannot (in general) close reports against themselves; this will be adjudicated by an admin." when clicking the "close" button.
Re #6: Yes, I think it's a good idea to keep the scope of this modification limited for now.
Re #7: Trust is also a sliding scale which can be strengthened or broken - I don't plan on giving admin rights to every moderator immediately because I just trust them so much, I don't think that's wise. In my experience with people who are targets of abuse, it often takes a great deal of courage to escalate the situation, especially when the other person has power over them, so I'm just trying to make it easier for the victim to find that courage. A PM is often a better choice, but if they click the report button, I don't want that report to get buried in the ether.
Yeah but that's the problem. Trying to fix trust issues with tech never works out well. You can't tech your way out of humans making mistakes - not where judgement of human values is required.
You see, there is one scenario you haven't considered - that people making the reports also can make mistakes. There's nothing in there about bad faith reports, or the fact that people do things like reporting posts just because they don't like what the post says even if it's correct and absolutely fine in context.
I have to be honest, this comes across as "I had one bad experience, something must be done, this is something". I get what you're trying to do but honestly I feel there are better ways of going about it.
If you're dead set on trying to solve the concept of trust technologically, then you need to go down the road of sliding scales not Boolean choices. Something like... Reports need a number of points to close, junior moderators can't close them on their own, senior moderators can, as trust is earned, they get more points of ability, so what previously might have needed 2-3 moderators to close, they can close themselves.
It still doesn't prevent someone going off the reservation but that's why it's called *trust*. Having the rule in there doesn't prevent bad things from happening, it almost more guarantees something bad will.
Quote from: jeffythedragonslayer on March 21, 2023, 02:53:27 AMRe #4: I'm not sure how a "member report" works; when I searched for this term (with quotes) in the online manual nothing came up.
it has not been completely updated for SMF 2.1.
I also think it isn't set up here.
Quote from: Arantor on March 21, 2023, 04:33:38 AMReports need a number of points to close, junior moderators can't close them on their own, senior moderators can, as trust is earned, they get more points of ability, so what previously might have needed 2-3 moderators to close, they can close themselves.
this seems similar to how stack overflow works... the coding... horror... :D
See also "trust levels" in Discourse which can be earned based on participation, such as to be in trust level 3 you must have read x% of the last so many posts (so you're current), made so many posts (so you participate), given out likes (so you encourage good content) and received likes (made good content yourself). Same genius mind right there.
But again it's a perfect example of the mess of trying to socially engineer through technology, it rarely works out.
I have a very dim opinion of stack overflow. It's definitely not the kind of community I want to build. I've had good experiences with sliding reputation scales on some other forums, but that's more than I want to implement for this modification.
In the meantime, don't ever boot your computer is a great 0 sloc way to prevent cyberbullying too. 8)