Allow Maintainers/Moderators to Post As Community

[triadruid]

Title:
Allow Maintainers/Moderators to Post As Community

Area:
community moderation

Summary:
Community owners (and maintainers/moderators, if given the right privs) should be able to post in their community AS the community account. Doing so would create a more "official" posting mode, and possibly allow for in-community moderator discussion (see below).

Note: This is a collation of several comment-level suggestions and discussions lately in <user name=dw_suggestions>.

Description:
Right now, community owners/maintainers/moderators have to tag their posts, thread titles, or otherwise indicate when they are making an "official" post in the community, as opposed to their own personal account as a 'member' of the community. It also creates difficulty in finding all such posts at once, and it is not possible for one maintainer to update another's post, if information changes.

Creating a permission for posting "as" <user name=community> IN <user name=community> would solve several of these problems. It would also create the possibility to allow Private-locked posts that only maintainers/moderators could see, for tracking trolls, banned users, discussing changes to policy, or whatever.

Difficulties in implementation would obviously include anything in the site code right now that assumes community accounts cannot post. It would also be difficult to decide what the default, retroactive setting would be. My personal preference would be owner-only, but I could see allowing full-priv maintainers to do so as well, especially when the owner has disappeared/abdicated (more of a problem on LJ than DW).

Poll #941 Allow Maintainers/Moderators to Post As Community

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 62

View Respondents

This suggestion:

View Answers

Should be implemented as-is.
46 (74.2%)

Should be implemented with changes.
9 (14.5%)

Shouldn't be implemented.
3 (4.8%)

(I have no opinion)
4 (6.5%)

(Other: please comment)
0 (0.0%)

Comments

[7rin]

I'd be interested to learn what reason the vote against this being implemented was for.

[yvi]

The problem I can see is that if you have a lot of mods, no-one can tell who posted this. So the name of the logged-in user should definitely be added to the post.

[tejas]

This is an excellent point. I wish I'd thought of it. ;-) An audit trail would be great.

[cesy]

Yes, there should be some sort of audit trail, but otherwise, it sounds great.

[tejas]

Hope it sees the light of day soon. I want to use it. :-)

[turlough]

+1

[ciaan]

Good point.

[triadruid]

Oh, I agree, now that somebody mentions it. :)

[archangelbeth]

So the name of the logged-in user should definitely be added to the post.

Agreed, definitely.

[kate_nepveu]

I like this.

[ratcreature]

I'm not sure. I kind of like that there is this distinction between "people" and "places" in the accounts. I see why having official posts in a community could be useful, but I also like that I see the person who posts, even when they act in their function as community maintainer.

[triadruid]

I definitely agree that seeing who the originator is would be a useful addition. :)

[elizabeth_rice]

But this would be an option/choice for administrators? An administrator wouldn't be forced to make all posts as community?

[triadruid]

No, I wouldn't see it as a requirement, though perhaps a best practice.