Communities: enforce comment/no comment rules, etc.

[kyrielle]

Title:
Communities: enforce comment/no comment rules, etc.

Area:
communities, posting, community admin

Summary:
Allow community administrators to set posting defaults (comments allowed, screening, minimum security) as rules instead.

Description:
In at least one recent suggestion, the comments moved into a question of rules of a community vs. posters desire. Some communities have rules that posts be members-only, or (more commonly) that comments always be allowed or always be screened initially or the like.

When the default settings for these things are created, I propose administrator have a drop-down next to each that makes sense (what do make sense? I think the three I listed, but are there others?) that offers choices of "Just a default" or "Required for non-administrators" or "Required for all".

Just a default does what it does today.

Required for all will block, with an error, any post that doesn't use the required setting. The user may choose to correct it and then post, or decide they don't want to post based on the rule.

Required for non-administrators does the same thing, except administrators are allowed to break the rule, for example if they want to put a public notice up. When they get a post confirmation it will include a note about any non-standard settings so they can confirm they meant to do that, but it won't block them.

The advantage to this is that it gets rid of scenarios where a community admin has to delete someone's post or leave up a violating post until they can contact the member. It should reduce drama a little since the rule would be enforced at the point of participation, not after the fact. It reduces work for community admins, since this is one less thing to watch for.

Drawbacks: adds another option (albeit in a spot that's intuitive to find and will call attention to it). May need to also tie into moderator vs. administrator - and I know there's changes planned there as far as permissions; this would probably complicate those changes. (Worse, I can see a case where you might want to let someone break one rule - ie public posts - but not another such as allowing comments. That would <i>really</i> complicate it, from a user and technical standpoint.)

Poll #2510 Communities: enforce comment/no comment rules, etc.

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 50

View Respondents

This suggestion:

View Answers

Should be implemented as-is.
25 (50.0%)

Should be implemented with changes. (please comment)
2 (4.0%)

Shouldn't be implemented.
5 (10.0%)

(I have no opinion)
17 (34.0%)

(Other: please comment)
1 (2.0%)

Comments

[kerravonsen]

This seems a bit too complicated to be worth it.

[zvi]

How would you simplify it?

[kerravonsen]

Leave the settings as is, where there is a default, and give community administrators the ability to change the security and screening settings of a post (without editing the content of the post).
The thing is that 90% of the time, anyone making a post is going to leave the security and screening settings at the default, without changing them, so adding an extra, more complicated setup for communities when most of the time it won't be needed, doesn't seem worth it to me.

On the other hand, giving community administrators the ability to change the security levels of posts in the community (while still preventing them from changing the content of the post), would be more generally useful, not just for this case, but for other cases. For example, I recently made a one-off "gift" comm for a friend, where people made flocked posts before a certain date, and then the comm was revealed to the friend. I would have liked to have been able to un-flock the posts in the comm at the same time, but I didn't have the ability to.

[zvi]

The conflict with giving the moderator the ability to change it later is that (that feature is coming actually) the way it is planned, the poster will be able to override the mods' change. This proposal is to prevent things from getting to that point.

[ciaan]

I would have liked to have been able to un-flock the posts in the comm at the same time

And I hope you can never do that. I think mods should mostly only be able to take things in one direction. If I post locked to a comm I do NOT want the mods to be able to make that post public later. I locked it for a reason and my security and privacy are important. On the other hand, if the comm is supposed to be locked and I accidentally post public, it's fine for the mods to be able to lock the post (So long as I am a member of the comm or can become a member of the comm. If my post is locked away where I can no longer access it then I lose my ability to later edit or delete it or to deal with comments on it, and that is bad.).

[msilverstar]

As part of a suite of moderating tools, that would be good.

[confliction]

This is basically what i was talking about when i rudely posted in the Bug #11 thread over on bugzilla.

If users generally leave their post settings on default when posting to a community, then those defaults should be the defaults for that community.

This is especially important in debating communities where having comments enabled is a MUST. The communities are not the posters own personal soapbox, they're places for public discussion of the topic in hand.

If the user does not like having comments enabled then:
a) they do not have to post.
and
b) should not be joining a debating community!