Forum:New Community Roles

Hello folks, today Wikia has introduced two new community roles: Discussions Moderator and Content Moderator. I won't go in details, both the blog post and the help page explain the roles very well. I just wanted to bring this new change to the wiki attention because I think it's quite relevant for our wiki, especially for these reasons:


 * IIRC, we are using some custom scripts that "use" the rollback role in some ways and for that purpose we requested staff to change their privileges to add some new rights. I believe that change is now unnecessary and the "user right" should be reverted back to its original role, while the group should be "converted" in content moderators. Off course we can promote new rollbackers but once agains they will have less impactful power on the wiki.
 * Give the extensive use of the blog feature we have here, the role of "discussions moderator" can be useful IMO. Probably we should pick the candidates from the current chat moderators.
 * These two roles were created specifically to aid admins to manage the community and will address the problem that this wiki has sometimes of not having admins online. Basically, think of these groups as "junior admins".
 * With the creation of these new roles, a more definite user hierarchy/area of supervision will be established like shown in this picture.

Your thoughts.

Discussion
I'm not sure discussion moderators are that important, but content mods are vital. If there's no admin online, locking a page could be really helpful. I do think we need a crat to promote either of these rights, but Yata is active, so no problem.

17:32, January 14, 2016 (UTC)

We are in no need for discussion moderators. However, content moderators would most definitely be useful Roranoa Drake II (talk) 17:36, January 14, 2016 (UTC)

As I said we should contact staff and restore the original rollback rights and convert the current "rollbackers" to content moderators, since basically it's what they are now. We can then discuss if we need further "standard" rollbackers (since it's a quite minor role, but can come in handy) or other content moderators. Discussions moderators are somewhat less impactful here because we don't have either message wall or the new forum, therefore they are limited only to chat and blogs. Maybe we can promote some/all chat moderators to discussions moderators.

Blogs don't really need moderating. They're either fine or locked.

17:44, January 14, 2016 (UTC)

I agree that we don't really need discussion moderators. Content moderators are imo a great idea, though. And yes, changing our rollback rights back to normal would be a sound idea. 18:00, January 14, 2016 (UTC)

Ok, this is a pretty big change. Definitely needs a lot of community discussion first, due to the nature of it. User rights issues have a history of not going over smoothly. I'll divide my thoughts into sections:

Discussion Mods I think maybe one or two would be useful. I haven't been keeping nearly as close of an eye on blogs as I've wanted since... forever? With all the admin stuff I do and life, there's no time for reading and deleting blog comments, and I'm probably not the only admin who thinks that. We don't have the forum thread installed here, or article comments, and we likely never will, so the scope of this position is more limited than on other wikis. Overall, I say yes let's get one or two. Maybe look at trusted users with a lot of blog and chat experience.

Content Mods This is an interesting one. They can basically do everything an admin can expect change user rights and block people. It's a lot of responsibility that we don't normally like to give out. It could be useful for a lot of editing as a temporary right though, instead of giving people full admin rights. With Kage out of the picture for 6 months, I could see one or two of these people being very helpful to us. Ultimately though, I'm not 100% on this. People for this position would mainly include users that have been strong candidates for admin in the past, I believe.

Activity Requirement Both of these positions involve the wiki in a more serious way than chat mod or rollback, and things could be negatively effected by their absence. So much like how admins must remain active, I think these rights should have a similar activity requirement. Discussion mods would only have to worry about blog activity, I think, but may need more frequent editing that the one we have for admins now.

How do we assign the right? The importance of the right is somewhere in between Chat Mod, an appointed position, and admin, an elected position. So do we have admins appoint these editors, or elect them? Or some kind of mixture of nominations with appointments? I don't know, really. I'm leaning towards admin appointment right now.

So those are my most important thoughts right now. What does everyone else think? 21:01, January 14, 2016 (UTC)

The amount of spoilers and bad edits on this wiki when the chapters come has reached an all-time high, we really need content moderators imo. No real need for discussion moderators. 21:04, January 14, 2016 (UTC)

The straight-forward solution if you want avoid any kind of election and tedious community discussions is to convert all existing rollbackers to content moderators and all existing chat moderators to discussions moderators. The reasons I propose this are: If we do this we should be kinda set on the moderators front, so from that point we can evaluate if we need other lower-right users (chat mods and rollbackers).
 * 1) Our rollback user rights was edited and is basically Wikia's new content moderators. Therefore our rollbackers are already content moderators.
 * 2) Discussions moderators on this wiki are basically chat mods that have also some tools to manage blog comments since we don't have Wikia's new forum or message wall enabled. They should be trustworthy users and should already know and be know by the community and I think the wiki blog-sphere and chat-sphere kinda overlap. Needed or not, I'd say why not.