!bobaland
OP
OP
Webmistress

The First BoboBan Postmortem

Hello Boobies,

as you might have heard if you hang out in !salt or in our social discord server, we had to take strong moderator action for the first time since this website's inception. This was not a decision taken lightly, but the rules violation was so blatant and systematic that it left no space for hesitation.


In this thread, I'd like to do a small Postmortem of what happened. In tech, a postmortem is a document that blamelessly outlines an incident and discusses what went wrong, what went right and, most importantly, what can be learned (or built) going forward to prevent the same incident from reoccurring.


[Sections Inside]

  • What Happened
  • What Went Right, Wrong & Lucky
  • Potential Action Items
»I'll be writing this here throughout the evening
»so the sections won't appear immediately
OP

Action Items

  1. Further formalizing our CoC was proposed in !volunteers. I don't think that's strictly necessary as a consequence of this specific accident (see the discussion), but it's work that should be done regardless.
  2. Delineate the deanoning process somewhere in the welcome guide for full transparency. We might want to develop better guidelines as to when this is warranted, but for this stage "at discretion of the webmaster" is still a valid choice.
    1. Make sure to delineate explicitly what we deanon (posts flagged for abuse, if confirmed to be coming from the same person) and what we don't deanon (personal posts that have not been reported).
  3. Create an integrated reporting system, with tiers of urgency and a field for a description of the accident. Urgent messages can ping the Webmaster (and other mods in the future) on Discord for a quick look.
  4. Create a system to flag posts for abuse and automatically surface "repeat offenders" when they reach a certain threshold. Deanoning shouldn't be automatic, but should allow for human review of the flagged posts.
    1. Open Question: what levels of transparency should we have for flagging actions? Should flagging guidelines be public?
  5. Add the ability to have per-post identity in an already-joined thread for specific roles. This can, for example, be implemented as a special permission assigned to a role.
  6. Add the ability to lock threads or comment chains to give the Webmaster more time to act. Tie this ability to a permission, so different tiers of mods might be able to take this action without having full access to all moderation options.
  7. Create a document matching user accounts with their onboarding history and (potentially) Discord id, to be used in case of urgent actions needed or to further investigate this type of incident.
»as usual, open for comments