Changing the Role of the Moderator

[AveshCSingh]

@sscluck and I were discussing an idea:

What if we change the role of the moderator from event approval to event review.

So here's the potential new workflow of event creation User submits event -> Event goes live ... Moderator sees event on Moderator View and may decline it

Event edit: User submits edit -> Approval requested from event creator ... Moderator sees edit on Moderator View and may decline it

Advantages: -Instantaneous event creation & editing -Tool appears to be more democratic to the end user

Disadvantages: -Potential for abuse (But we can ban users if they abuse Teudu)

This is similar to the model that Wikipedia uses: Allow anyone to edit articles, then ban the spammers.

@sscluck @MasterPie @byee01 @vwirantana @kggriswold

[vivek-pai]

We did discuss originally of letting the system be as lax as The Fence where anyone can advertise anything and we just trust everyone (and go after people later). The issue is that it's different on the internet where the barrier to creating content is much lower (you don't have to acquire paint, don't have to worry about people watching you paint, etc), such that you can't easily trust people to hold back any desires to spam or post something inappropriate. So, we ended up not starting at that level of freedom.

Eventually, the goal would be to make it more open (like Wikipedia/The Fence). We chose to be more restricted initially...let only a few people (members of organizations) post stuff with strict approval. Then, as the whole concept catches on, you could maybe open it up to more students (lax the restriction on it being for organizations).

We felt it's easier to grain traction and acceptance from the higher ups if you can make some sort of initial guarantee that at all times the system will only have clean content. After gaining that acceptance, they'd be more willing for change.

It's also more manageable this way, especially since it's a new project.

(Note: Marcia, the UC director who is our client, would rather it be approved first and then displayed)

[vivek-pai]

So, I talked to Marcia about this and she's more than welcome to discuss changes to the approval process (making it approved by default and then the moderator would reject it). She would want to meet with everyone to get your perspectives and in such a meeting, the actual guy who would monitor stuff would be present to give feedback.

But for now, let's stick with what was originally decided, and then we can discuss alternatives during the meeting I will set up with Marcia later.

[AveshCSingh]

We basically came to the same decision at the meeting on Sunday, with one small change:

If a user wants to edit an event, the user must create a new event, and then email the moderator requesting that he take down the old event.

The email listed for the moderator will be a gmail that we all have access to. This means that, for the time being, we can collectively deal with event edits. This will lower the stress on the moderator during the launch.

-Avesh

On Sun, Apr 1, 2012 at 12:52 PM, MasterPie < reply@reply.github.com

wrote:

So, I talked to Marcia about this and she's more than welcome to discuss changes to the approval process (making it approved by default and then the moderator would reject it). She would want to meet with everyone to get your perspectives and in such a meeting, the actual guy who would monitor stuff would be present to give feedback.

But for now, let's stick with what was originally decided, and then we can discuss alternatives during the meeting I will set up with Marcia later.

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Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub: https://github.com/ACMCMU/BoredPrototype/issues/24#issuecomment-4867591

[vivek-pai]

Actually, that was part of our original process too. Because of the way approval works, you can't just accept a modified event as being approved...it would have to be sent back into the approval "queue." But it would probably be easier and simpler to just recreate the event.

There isn't a time limit for hitting the submit button - people shouldn't really make mistakes on a simple form like that. Though, we did figure that there would be sort of a "My Events" page for users and organizations. Of course, this relies on WebISO working.

[AveshCSingh]

I agree that a "My Events" page should come along some time in the future. For the initial launch, the event recreation and approval method seems to work.

On Mon, Apr 2, 2012 at 8:23 PM, MasterPie < reply@reply.github.com

wrote:

Actually, that was part of our original process too. Because of the way approval works, you can't just accept a modified event as being approved...it would have to be sent back into the approval "queue." But it would probably be easier and simpler to just recreate the event.

There isn't a time limit for hitting the submit button - people shouldn't really make mistakes on a simple form like that. Though, we did figure that there would be sort of a "My Events" page for users and organizations. Of course, this relies on WebISO working.

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Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub: https://github.com/ACMCMU/BoredPrototype/issues/24#issuecomment-4891933

[vivek-pai]

Events are now approved by default.