Did they ever introduce any further transparency as to who actually moderates the site? That was sort of my hang up on things, not knowing who is actually responding to tickets Outside of moderators who share their position themselves I’m not sure how else to tell
Some choose to opt for a mod account separate from their personal one to separate work and play so to speak, and also because people will be weirdly negative about being a mod sometimes, but it's technically optional and sometimes people just use their one account for everything
Is there any transparency for tickets though? I think that’s the main thing for me, if things start changing again and some mods make unfair ticket responses. Even if you appeal it’s all just one big black box from a user perspective and you just have to trust whatever generic “staff” reply you get
We actually did toss this idea around, but I don't think it's on the horizon at the moment. The main concern is people would harass individual (volunteer) moderators for decisions they disagree with, and we don't want the small-ish team to be targeted for their hard work by people upset at them.
See the problem is that there was some real shit mods in the past who specifically went out of their way to ignore and mark as handled any tickets of people reporting people for posting nazi shit and hate speech, they stopped showing who it was because people were complaining about it so like, you
can see how having no transparency as to who is answering these tickets can ALSO lead to problems with mods abusing their position
I don't understand how some former moderators functioned, I'll be real. I don't want to speak ill of every former mod, and I won't because some were great, I hear, but there were some Choice Decisions made. Anonymity or not, that shit does not fly anymore from any point in the chain of command tbh.
Could there not be mod aliases at least, that are only used for tickets but not associated with a public facing account? Just so that there’s at least *some* way to uniquely identify who is responding to a ticket, without having a path to be able to harass them elsewhere
Transparency has just always been a big thing for me. And I do get the harassment concerns, and I do trust you. But I dunno, I’d rather have transparency over just being told “trust me things are fine” by staff
This was actually basically the proposed solution suggested - sort of like Google docs "incognito X" but more perpetual. It's not tossed out, it's just. We're focusing a lot on finally living up to promises regarding long requested features and improvements, and we only have so many people
I mean, if there are ever any dev positions, I could try and help in my free time. It’s something I’ve thought about for a while now, but if I’m totally honest I’ve heard mixed things about the internal dev processes on FA, but that was a few years ago
The dev team has changed drastically but sadly the codebase is exactly what you'd expect for a project as infamous. Adding the document viewer introduced so many bugs, it was almost comical. Worth it, but sheesh...
I mean I’d still be willing to try and pitch in time where I have it I haven’t really worked a ton in PHP but I could either learn it or look for other improvements that could be made
The Amin hurdles, I'd imagine, would be 1) All moderators would now have to be trained on what to do if a targeted campaign hit them for a decision they made publicly. Nightmare logistics. 2) We would have to get our code team that's already stretched thin to change how the site's code works
main*
It's definitely not impossible, but......it's unfortunately a low priority. And it's also not something I've seen discussed outside of the babyfur community's early, initial discussions with site staff a year ago as a potential site improvement for the exact reasons you gave.
Xd that was proposed during the great tumblr migration , every one with total difent color text to doferiation between user witch could work
As for appeals, I can personally vouch for the absolute quality team member(s) handling that side of things. Appeals are in fantastic hands.
They keep it intentionally hidden to protect identities due to issues with harassment in the past, is my understanding I can say from a position of having some inside information that the moderation is much more reasonable now, especially in terms of babyfur/diaper representation
I guess I just wish there was a way to have more transparency and such in that regard. Staff can change over time and always replying to a faceless “staff” reply just keeps all of that clouded at best. Even if there’s representation now how do I know it’ll stay that way?