"Community Moderation" Trial

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Hi All,

For the last few months we’ve been running a trial of “Community Moderation”.

You can read about it here .

It’s been remarkably successful at reducing moderator load, improving the rate at which reports get handled overall (and reducing the dreaded “culled report” problem). It handles “routine reports”, allowing full moderators more time to do the tricky ones.

It’s now at the point where it’s becoming routinely visible to us all - as witnessed by this recent thread . The message being discussed in this thread, and the “semi automatic system” referred to in there is this trial.

The goal is at some point to have an automatic system that can offer “community moderation” powers to users, based on their interactions here (much like “Stack Overflow”, for those nerds among us who have seen that).

We are nowhere near that yet though - we just have a few folk kindly shouldering the load of trying out the system. The question of “what will we want to see to make an automatic offer of being CM” is well in the future.

The most “visible” part of this system is the messages that users receive, which the “Community Moderators” vote for.

Those messages are available for review - they are here .

So each time someone receives one and is offended, we have the opportunity to see whether these messages meet community expectations with full transparency.

If you have feedback about them, I’d appreciate a single thread for one message under review.

Questions and suggestions about the system in general (other than message content) are welcome here.

We’re gradually adding trial volunteers manually - we do have enough right now for testing out the system without overwhelming it ( * ) .

GaJ

( * ) I probably mean “without overwhelming me with input (bugs)” :slight_smile:

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I’m wondering if this will delay the full moderator from seeing my report?
Does community moderation have the ability to determine the outcome of a game?
Will the full moderator only view reports escalated by community moderation?
Does an ongoing game have a higher priority? Contains correspondence games?

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Well, I haven’t had to report an opponent for a long time (at least several months); so it seems that community moderation is doing fine.
Good for the extra time it provides the ‘real’ moderators to deal with matters that really do matter.

Thanks!
:+1:

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I don’t think even a real moderator has this ability. At best they can cancel the game.

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No, full moderaotr does, provided the game is not over.
The game results will show that Black/White wins with moderator decision.

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Perhaps that is the nuance I was missing then. But I guess it’s pretty rare for moderators to intervene on ongoing games? (I may be wrong)

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I don’t know, I’ve only seen it on other people’s history pages, not myself.
In fact, I have a game waiting for a response from the moderator, and I don’t know if it will be the first of its kind that I’ve personally experienced :rofl:.

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Community moderators (CMs) currently see reports of escaping (Stopped Playing), Stalling, and Score Cheating. Full moderators (mods) can see all reports if they click on them, but generally concentrate on reports outside those categories. The CM categories are the ones that are most routine and compatible with the CM system. Escalated reports (those that are problematic or where the CMs disagree) are handled by the mods. Sometimes mods do spontaneously pick up reports in those three categories for reasons of their own.

Yes, CMs can decide games in progress. This rarely happens because it is difficult to get three votes in time (I have suggested automating an alert such as an emergency button or the color red to tell CMs and mods that a game-in-progress report is in the queue). Without such a feature, even mods have difficulty deciding games in time, because of the volume of reports.

Without an alert mechanism, as described, reports are generally handled in the order received. Speaking for myself, I do vote on in-progress Score Cheating and Stalling reports when I see them. Escaping-in-progress is not a legitimate report because escaping has not occurred until someone times out by disconnection or by exhaustion of the time specification. I vote on those when the timeout occurs. The reports that CMs see do include correspondence games.

The CM idea was discussed slightly several years ago, and I was skeptical because it seemed unworkable. However, this experiment/trial has shown that a great many details did need to be worked out, but it is clear, I think, that this is a great approach to resolving more reports in a timely fashion.

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Yes, that’s what I’m worried about.
I reported an ongoing game yesterday and it still hasn’t been resolved after 19 hours.
I finally contacted the full moderator directly to get the solution.
Such efficiency makes me worry that most of the ongoing games will not be resolved through reporting.

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It probably would have taken longer before the CM system was implemented. The mod queue is large, and the CM role was introduced to help alleviate that.

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Let me reassure you with some personal statistics. Since last winter, I have voted on 1,051 Score Cheating reports. 735 were resolved by consensus (three votes in unanimous agreement). 286 were escalated by me (due to frequent-offender status, game-log problems, system errors where the game needed to be annulled but no cheating was involved, etc.) The majority of escalated reports were resolved. 30 votes were non-consensus and auto-escalated (due to mistakes by me or someone else, differing opinions, and unresolved ambiguities in the system). It should be clear from these stats that the CM system provides a huge help to the mods both in terms of speed of resolution and percentage of resolution.

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