Moderation policy clarification around hiding comments

[Trott]

Our moderation policy says this:

Moderate means to modify, lock, or delete one or more Posts to correct or address Code of Conduct violations.

Note that it includes modify, lock, and delete, but not hiding. That was (IIRC) intentional. We want people to be able to hide off-topic comments without needing to engage in the overhead of opening an issue in the moderation repo or leaving a comment in the issue that they are hiding the comment in (as that defeats the purpose of hiding the comment in a lot of cases).

The policy also says:

Collaborators may use the Hide feature in the GitHub interface for off-topic posts by non-Collaborators.

We don't (as far as I see right now, at least) say that hiding off-topic posts by non-Collaborators is not considered a moderation action and therefore does not require the overhead of opening an issue in the moderation repo or otherwise announcing that you've moderated a comment.

If there's agreement that I have this right, then we should update the policy to amke that point clear.

@nodejs/moderation

[Trott]

There's also some confusing stuff going on in the moderating-non-collaborators segment. It starts with this:

Posts authored by non-Collaborators are always subject to immediate Moderation by any Collaborator if the content is intentionally disruptive or in violation of the Code of Conduct.

It then lays out the procedure for moderating something, including the documenting-the-action part. However, it then says this:

One may immediately bypass the above procedures if it is clear that there is no intention to collaborate in good faith.

So for intentionally disruptive content by non-collaborators, can I bypass the documenting-the-action step? If not, what is the part of the procedure that I'm able to bypass?

[Trott]

Another oddity (and I know I'm probably the one who did the editing that resulted in this, so I'm sorry about that):

Second bullet point says:

When Moderating non-Collaborator Posts, the moderating Collaborator must:

• Explain the justification for Moderating the post,

But the third bullet point says this:

If an explanation of a Moderation action for a non-Collaborator Post is provided...

So in the second bullet point, an explanation "must" be provided, but in the third bullet point, it indicates that explanations are not always necessary.

[benjamingr]

Yes I agree I assumed all actions must be reported because of that:

When Moderating non-Collaborator Posts, the moderating Collaborator must: Explain the justification for Moderating the post,

I think it's better for clarity to ask people to always document moderation actions but it's unfortunate they have to go through the overhead of the log.

It would be ideal if collaborators could leave a comment when they hide comments and that would automatically show up in the audit log.

[benjamingr]

Opened a PR to iterate on https://github.com/nodejs/admin/pull/663/files

[Trott]

It would be ideal if collaborators could leave a comment when they hide comments and that would automatically show up in the audit log.

Hiding a comment is non-destructive and reversible. If we ask people to document it, we basically make hiding worthless. No one will ever do it.

It might be excessive, but if we want to be notified every time a comment is hidden, maybe the thing to do is automate it. Have a GitHub Action that runs every 5 minutes or every hour or whatever and reports all the comments hidden since the last time it ran.

Although to be honest, I'm comfortable with hidden comments not being reported to anyone.

[aduh95]

The policy also says:

Collaborators may use the Hide feature in the GitHub interface for off-topic posts by non-Collaborators.

On this topic, it might be interesting to clarify if it's also OK to hide comments made by collaborators in response to a previous off topic comment made by a non-collaborator. Maybe it's clearer with an example:

Non-collaborator:
  Off topic comment
Collaborator: 
  > Off topic comment
  @Non-collaborator please keep this issue focused.

Let's assume a third party collaborator comes to the issue thread and decide to hide the off topic comment, is it OK to hide both? I would think so, but the policy is not clear on that point.

[mmarchini]

I think it would be reasonable to automate an audit report of sorts, probably not opening an issue here but maybe sending to TSC and Moderation team emails.