So, this may be a terrible idea and I’m extremely sorry if I sound like a flaming idiot here, but I’d just like to pitch this in case it may be of any help.
I quote “Become a wikiHow Admin”:
Any wikiHow administrator can nominate any contributor that they are willing to devote time to mentor. In addition to a time commitment, these admins will be investing their credibility in their ability to choose nominations wisely. If at least three other administrators second the nomination, the contributor can become a “trial administrator” for three months. However, any administrator can oppose trial adminship as this nomination is unfolding. An objection is defined as a strong “no” that must have a good reason, backed up by an example. If more people are opposing than supporting, the candidate doesn’t get approved for “trial adminship”. If the candidate gets approved, we give them provisional access for a three-month trial.At any point during the three month trial period, any administrator can suggest that the candidate lose trial adminship privileges. If after discussion, it becomes clear that significant support for de-adminship exists, a vote will be held and a simple majority of the voting existing administrators will revoke a trial admin’s access. If no such issues emerge after three months, the trial administrator will then “graduate” to regular administrator.
I was thinking, since the three-month period is a trial and the trial admin is “getting their feet wet” being an admin and all that, and we don’t have any other purpose for the Trust Level 3, I was thinking maybe trial admins would be on TL3, and once their trial is over, they go the the normal admin trust level 4. If any problems arise during the trial and the adminship is revoked, then they can simply go back to level 2.
Please share your thoughts. Once again, apologies if this is a bad idea
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I can’t speak with absolute certainty mostly because I’m only one admin, aha - but I believe we wouldn’t do that because TL3 doesn’t grant the same moderating permissions that TL4 does. When we give someone a trial, they’re not getting limited access to any of the admin (or booster) tools, they’re getting full access and are being monitored and assisted to make sure they’re learning their way around and not misusing the tools. So I don’t really see a need for using TL3 like this, because it wouldn’t give trial admins the ability to moderate the forums like they would if they passed their trial (and therefore, other admins can’t see if they’re using the tools properly). Not to mention that TL3 would need to be manually set, which just seems like a bit more trouble than it’s worth
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Oh, I didn’t take that into account. Thanks for bringing that up!
Manually setting TL’s does sound agonizing if it has to be done repeatedly, I have to say
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TL3 is intended to differentiate experienced forum users from learners (TL2). Usually…
TL4 allows for anything except topic deletion. It is exclusively for community leaders and not for average users. Most admins are TL4, some are also moderators.
But of course, it can be changed on a forum-by-forum basis.
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Hmm…
This may be painstaking to do, but…
Maybe we manually set some of the permissions for TL4, such as closing topics, pinning/unpinning, and splitting/merging, to TL3, and leave the rest for TL4.
Like I said, this could be painstaking and tedious, but just a thought.
Why, though, when TL4 works just fine? I’d understand if this was for a role other than adminship where they wouldn’t need access to the full permissions, but a trial admin gets access to all the same tools a regular admin does, not a limited version of them - I don’t see a reason to change that for the forums, particularly seeing as existing admins need to be able to tell whether a trial admin is using those tools properly. We don’t want to be using TL3 just for the sake of using TL3.
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Now that you say that, I see what you mean.
JayneG
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All ideas and suggestions are valid and welcome, @That21PilotsFan
- it’s nice to know that you’re thinking about wikiHow and how to make it the best experience possible for wikiHowians!
With this one, I think Alex’s point here that we don’t need separate permissions for trial Admins compared to permanent Admins is spot on, but appreciate the thought!
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IMHO, TL3 would be good if used as suggested on the Discourse website. It utilizes autopromotion like TL2 and TL1, it allows regulars to do basic actions helpful for the community and makes the forums and wikiHow less bureaucratic, as now anyone can move posts around, provided that they are active, experienced, and not been removed from TL3. It is also good to have TL3 make their own posts editable as it allows anyone to add and update information as needbe.
Discourse I believe was really intended for community-driven moderation. While we do have a few leaders, moderators, and staff, much of what happens happens automatically is because 10 people flagged a post, not because a moderator decided, “no”.
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We don’t utilize the feature of others making their own posts editable - we’ve never had a need for that. The only time admins really edit someone’s posts will usually be if there’s something that’s not appropriate but the entire post doesn’t need removal, like if someone swears excessively in one sentence. I think the wiki itself serves that purpose fairly nicely. lol
Also, honestly, there are a good chunk of people who would probably qualify for TL3 on paper, but do not have the skillset necessary for moderating forums. We’ve had to push people back to lower trust levels before for endangering themselves or others, and some of those people would have theoretically been on TL3 if that was enabled here.
There could be use of TL3 if there was good reason for it, just like how NAB is separate from admin responsibilities - but just allowing autopromotion of any user who happens to meet the TL3 requirements is not necessarily in our best interest, particularly because not everyone is ready for that. (Our community, particularly on the forums, tends to skew fairly young, and you don’t learn the same skills on the forums as you do on the main site.) I could potentially see a “junior mod” type of system for trusted long-term users where they get manually promoted to TL3, but that kind of promotion would likely need to be discussed among admins as well, and I’m not sure how much it would be used anyway given that the admins are generally fairly responsive to flags here.
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Of course, I do not know how “must not have been suspended or silenced in the last 6 months” would work because we block people on the main site… although the silencing feature would be nice to stop people who are otherwise productive users trashposting in the forums. Our goal of blocking/banning users has always been to prevent further disruption to the project; if a user is silenced, it is to ensure that the forums remain a civilized, relevant discussion place while encouraging the silenced user to go make productive edits somewhere or risk being blocked from the main site as well… but this is just my two cents on how this could work…
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I’m not sure how silencing relates to promoting someone to TL3 or how it would be used here.
I prob should have been clearer: how Discourse recommends it is that users should not have received a silence or a ban on the forums to get to TL3.
Maybe have a Discourse bot that automatically copies bans from the main site onto the forums, and vice versa.
And then we have the “lock trust level” button that we already use to stop people from being autopromoted.
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I’ve kind of been sleeping on this, and I thought of something that might be of use. Again, forgive me if I sound stupid.
Maybe NAB users that have been NAB for over a month (have unlocked NFD guardian) could be promoted to TL3.
Obviously, some NABers who fit this criteria still may not have the required skillset for basic moderation, but just a thought. Maybe it could be on a case-by-case basis, but that might be painstaking to manually set.
Speaking from direct experience: not everyone who has NAB rights is ready. I definitely wasn’t at that point, baha. (Took me like… three and a half years, honestly.)
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Wow. We could have a Discourse bot to do that:
Exactly my point with the case-by-case thing, lol.
Can I ask more of a general question?
Is there a genuine need for TL3? Is our current group of moderators/admins not responsive enough to situations or missing a lot of what’s going on? Because I honestly haven’t really seen anything that implies we need
the use of TL3 to keep things under control here, but I am happy to stand corrected if it turns out a lot is flying under the radar with how things currently are.
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If people are behaving inappropriately on the forums by posting potentially endangering stuff, the trust level can always be locked. That way, they won’t get to TL3 or TL2 or TL1.
That one made me think for a moment…lol
Thinking it over again, it would probably be a tad unnecessary to add another trust level. We already have TL2 for non-admin, non-restricted users.
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