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We can poach and also recruit new blood for here. It’ll be smaller and tighter knit, probably with more diverse topics and threads, but it would be doable. I’ve managed to read every single post here so far. Lowering the standards might help, with manual promotions done for people voted deserving it early. 
Yeah there’s a voting mechanism in place in the one lounge thread going. Could use that mechanism to vote a member in.
Rules and clarity. Rules can be flexible when needed, but that’s where the clarity comes in. Decisions should be accompanied by some explanation as to why the decision was made. Something from 4-H that sticks clearly in my mind was that the most important part of judging was not the order you ranked things in, but your reasons for doing so.
Private Kvetching and Hey Rube type threads can work well, in conjunction with an appeals system of some sort (a “where did my post go?” that a user knows they’re allowed to post in once per incident) for members at TL3 (because by TL3 we should already have an idea how trollish someone is). Long term and perma-bans (especially of higher TL members, basic drive-by spammers and trolls can probably be summarily banished without to much worry) should be justified in a thread that can be seen by more than just the mods, and those justifications should be posted ASAP after the incident. Jokey or vague reasons on the profile are fine for a short term ban, but there should be good reasons for going nuclear.
Uncertainty and anxiety are not my friends. People in general like it when they know things happen for a reason (even if jsome lpeoplew can’t be reasoned with).
Clarity too, on just what people’s privacy expectations should be. The note about userIDs is a good one.
State up front that there are different TLs with different privileges. I knew this ahead of time from lurking and listening to regulars (including those who drifted in and out of staus) so the Lounge threads didn’t come as a shock, even if I was a little shocked by how easily I got in. Maybe that’s why I was surprised by the hostility of certain people towards the lounges. I am of two minds regarding posting the requirements until you meet them. On the one hand, people know what they need to do to get into the higher level, but on the downside, a determined bad actor could game their way in with enough co-conspirators or sock puppets. Instead, just make it clear that certain threads are locked until we know the nature of your character (and that all we want to know is that you know how to behave yourself).
Poaching trusted users works in the short term, but in the long term, this site has to stand on its own, especially since many (myself included) probably won’t visit BB if this site is vibrant enough. And seeing what’s happened in the last 24 hours, I expect it will be.
We need to think ahead - realize this main board isn’t the Lounge of yore, but a site unto itself, that may need its own Lounge. And if thats the case, how we make the Lounge here better and more equitable than the old Lounge. I really liked the nomination and voting system that @gracchus set up in the “Regular Solutions” thread and I’d like to see something like that included in our process. Right now everyone here is pretty much trusted, but that might change so let’s prepare for that.
So we need to outline community guidelines and make sure they’re fair and inclusive but also clear and enforced. We already have a team of volunteer mods, so let’s tap that crew to start the discussion on community guidelines and enforcement mechanisms. And of course, we will need to have a mechanism for moderating the mods, so we don’t repeat past mistakes.
We also need to decide if there is going to be a topic, like Lounge, that is only going to be accessible to a select group of people. For some, that is the whole raison d’etre for joining this site, so I think we should consider it, and define the criteria for access.
TLDR: right now this space is safe, but it won’t be forever. Let’s plan for that.
Is it possible with Discourse to just make all posts hidden unless we’re logged in, regardless of trust level? Much of people’s concerns about safety and privacy would be about Google crawling and scraping everything.
It should be possible. We can also use the .htaccess method to deny Google and Baidu access to the webpages served by the VM.
Copying over my comment on the subject from What Is This Place?:
My concern is about … ahem … “problematic” users from BoingBoing being made aware of this site and invited over.
The nomination vote provides a good balance that doesn’t close the doors on membership: nominate someone, put it up for a vote by the community here, and if the vote passes the nominator gets to go back to BoingBoing and PMs them to notify the nominee. If the community here has doubts about the nominee you’ll find out very quickly. From the experiment on BoingBoing, most passed with 90-100% of the vote – really only one exception who lost out around 40% yea to 60% nay.
For reference, here are the rules I used, slightly re-written:
If you want to invite someone else, please post an “INVITE: user” comment here, a single-choice anonymous Yes/No poll (you can build and insert polls from the gear icon in a new comment), and optionally why you think he/she/they would add value. One user per comment/poll.
Threshold Info: if that comment gets eight or more “Yea” votes within 12 hours then the nominee gets an Invitation, unless he also gets 10 or more “Nay” votes in the same time period, in which case he doesn’t. If someone objects to the “Invitation” comment or a vote feel free to reply to it with an “OBJECT: user” comment detailing the reasons why. If you want to change threshold info we can discuss it in the thread.
Once you close a poll you’ve set up please delete it if you can. If you’ve objected to a user you might delete that too if the poll goes in his favour.
People who don’t pass the threshold can be re-nominated, but only 8 weeks after the poll has closed.
Adjust threshold levels as appropriate to here. The ones I provide give enough people plenty of time to vote and still allows the new user to come here relatively quickly.
I’d exclude Yandex, too. We don’t need Uncle Vlad peeking in. Robots txt should also be configured to allow most search engines.
Oh, do you think that’s likely to happen?
Not everyone who was Regular was not problematic. Not everyone who wasn’t Regular wasn’t not problematic.
“All that is gold does not glitter,Not all those who wander are lost” --J. R. R. Tolkien
I do worry a little about the “popularity contest” aspect of doing a vote that way. But I’m not sure what would be a good way around that other than essentially replicating the old promotion system, and then there would be a possible struggle of making sure that enough content was available to those who had not yet been promoted.
It’s a truism that it’s not possible to make a space safe in general; I think it’s probably possible to make a space safe for some delimited, non-contradictory set of people and activities, but very difficult, both to define the safe things and protect them. I’ve myself played a role in destroying a small online community before – from the best intentions! I cared about that space very much & believed I was doing right! My hope is grace and clear pathways to reconciliation are available to lubricate whatever conflicts are sure to occur.
It just might have already…yes indeed.
Of course, it’s more likely that those problematic users will likely get themselves banned here if they continually derail threads like they did on BoingBoing. We shall see.
Problem users will show up, but as long as we show them out before they become a broken stair, the community will be ok.
And if the HMS is serious about being a (relatively) safe space, the members need to agree that some topics are just not open to debate. If someone cannot accept the most basic tenants of consent or body autonomy, for example, keeping that person around will harm the community in the long run.
We might want to also allow the community to flag comments that (in an overt or sneaky manner) are intended to support or excuse racism, sexism and/or ultra-nationalism.
Also, perhaps there should be a behind-the-scenes mod/admin policy that a user whose “large number of community flags” results in a topic being temporarily on hold due to the derail should be put on notice that if it happens a second time they’ll get a 20-year ban.
I’d like to see more use of the trust levels instead of outright bans.
I’m not familiar with how trust levels work in terms of permissions in Discourse. I’d be OK with such a user being busted down to TL-0 for five years if TL-0 doesn’t allow posting comments. A troll who finds themself condemned only to listen to others on a BBS is a troll deprived of their purpose there.
Whether we’re talking about that or outright bans the admins/mods are still going to have to deal with trolls like BB’s lederman beer-can guy who starts up with sock puppet accounts, but that’s an unfortunate fact of life for anyone running a BBS.
This is a really awesome point. If you really love a community, you’re happy to listen to other members a large part of the time. Hell, I read comments on boards where I don’t even have a login.
But if you just want to talk… that’s what blogs are for. Blogs are fabulous for when you just want to post info – I have two. But I don’t expect/demand any readers.
