Friends of Captain Awkward

Currently, we keep reports completely secret - even just the fact that a report has been made is not mentioned unless we have no other option. This means that confidentiality is complete, and that nobody who wants to make a report needs to worry about anyone guessing it was them. It also means that all the heat is taken by the mods and not by you folks! It's OK, that's what we signed up for.

However, this has led to a few difficult situations for the admods, when people dislike the moderation and can't understand why we've done it. It would make things a lot clearer if we could say "we took this decision because one or more reports were made. We're trying to take everybody's needs into account."

So. Should we do that? Don't worry - no matter what we choose here, we will never divulge the details of a report or who made it. This poll is confidential. No one but you can see what you voted on as an individual.

This poll will be open for one week.

I like the idea of keeping it simple. That is, just mod the post, and say what you do now. "modded to add triggers" etc. If someone complains about it, then if needed you can say that people complained, and such. Maybe point them to a thread if you know of one that deals with the issue they are complaining about.

Especially since I do not think the mod team would edit a post, even with a report, unless they thought it was a just/appropriate reason. (for example, y'all wouldn't TW hot tamale, while a racial slur would get TW).

And you are understanding, I mean there was the post in -isms where a user was allowed to rephrase a sentence that came across as ablest, when they didn't mean it the way it came across.

One other thing you could do is make the Forum Rules appear across all forums, not just Administrivia, like this thread does atm. Which might help encourage people to read and follow them.

I voted "keep secret" and *then* read the part where you said that makes it harder on the mods. Mine is looking like a minority vote anyway--- I guess my gut feeling is that the mods should get to say "Because that's how this forum works, is why" but I don't want things to be any more difficult for you. B/c the Mods are AWESOME. I love the way y'all run this space. Seriously, thanks for all that you do!

The reason we're asking is that we have been getting complaints, and several users have said they feel like we're modding based on our own preferences. In fact, mod actions usually start with a report from a user who is not a mod. Mods sometimes notice a violation of the rules, and sometimes mods are triggered (because we are real people with triggers, too!) but usually it comes from users.
It really doesn't feel good to get accused of being tyrannical when we're only doing as we were asked, as we wanted to know whether this increased visibility would help you all, like we mods think it will help us.

I'm in favor of transparency, personally. You can mention that a post was modded in response to a user report without identifying the user. But... Well, it's my experience that people ALWAYS complain about moderator tyranny on teh internetz, regardless of whether it's a thing. Do you think openness is likely to reduce the frequency of the complaints?

This is a move to help users who are dealing in good faith understand why the mods do certain things that might otherwise seem arbitrary or confusing. If someone has already decided we're dealing in bad faith, there's really nothing we can do to fix that.

The rules tell our users to assume good faith. We're going to do the same. If this helps some people understand where certain mod actions come from, I'm okay with it not being a perfect solution.