On Mon, Jan 26, 2009 at 2:16 PM, Philip Newton <[email protected]> wro > And if someone other than a maintainer is going to pick them, I > foresee drama. Imagine if the backup maintainer removes the owner as > maintainer, and two minutes later the owner decides to come back to > activity and finds out that they were kicked out of their own > community by someone they never intended to run the place.
It seems to me we're also getting (besides the excellent potential-for-massive-Drama point above) away from the essential issue. 1) There needs to be some sort of policy (earlier is better, but we probably don't need the perfect answer this week, either) about how apparently abandoned communities are handled. Where 'apparently abandoned' is defined as - Problems (trolling, spamming, harassment, etc. that can only be handled by a mod) occur. - Community members try to contact the mod, and nothing happens in a reasonable amount of time (by which I mean a week or two at the bare minimum, not a matter of hours) - There is no response to further requests to either check in with the community, or hand it over to someone else who's willing to (again, for multiple weeks.) At that point, it's sensible to say "There are people interested in this particular community, there are problems, we want to deal with this somehow." (And it's worth noting: there are some kinds of issues, like copyright violations or some more specific forms of invasion of privacy/threats/etc. that the service has to be able to deal with somehow. There's also some stuff like harassment/trolling that's a pain for the community and should be dealt with somehow, but doesn't have the same legal implications for the site.) 2) I wonder what would happen if we let creators of community pick their preferred option as part of the creation process (and obviously, change it later if they changed their minds). i.e. if they were non-responsive for an extended period of time (don't respond to emails, have not accessed their personal account that's the moderator, etc), would they rather have another moderator assigned, have the terms of service team pick from a list of names of people they think would be good, freeze the community somehow (no new posts, but existing ones other than the problem posts/comments would remain), or delete the whole thing? I can see drama potential for this - but especially if there was some way to make it easy for the community creator to make it clear up front (like a section on the profile page), at least people would have advance warning. And, of course, if they don't want the site to take any steps, all they need to do is make sure they either won't be unresponsive for that length of time, or make sure there's a co-moderator who won't be. There's a few cases that might miss (sudden illness/family changes/etc.) but those are relatively rare if we're talking a month or more of non-responsiveness before any significant change is made. This'd take some coding, but I'm not sure how painful it'd be to include it. And it would give a greater level of transparency to the process, and make it less likely communities would end up in total limbo. -Jenett _______________________________________________ dw-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.dwscoalition.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/dw-discuss
