Hey everyone,
We wanted to address a common situation we’ve seen over the years with some large online forums, reaching out to moderators for questions and concerns.
Typically a good first line of contact is to use the Report button for any posts that need moderator attention. This will open a report for both the community moderators and the site admins. This is normally enough for most larger communities with active mod staff. You may also reach out to your community mods, they’re here to help. 💖
We do encourage our communities to take care of their own and want them to always feel empowered to run themselves as they see fit (provided they are following the global site rules). Issues can arise for some smaller communities with only one moderator or situations where the local mod staff is inactive for one reason or another for an extended time.
In these situations, we’ve seen folks email our ticket system, and while we will try and get back to them, this ticket system tends to get end-user support cases mixed in (as well as a low stream of spammers trying to buy ads 🙄).
What we do want, is to provide a more direct line of contact to the site-admin team, so when ANYONE needs to reach out to us when something is amiss, they can get a timely response. While the team all are on a few different platforms, this tends to create a fragmented approach of not just the WHO, but the HOW to contact us.
While we as a team use our internal chat platform, we want to find a happy middle ground between @'ing us each directly in random chats, and issues sitting for too long in our ticket system.
This new system would be for PRIVATE Messages as a supplement to our Lemmy.world Support community, which we do monitor very closely, and our ticket email [email protected], both for more technical issues. Think of it like the bat signal 🦇🎆!
To this end, we’ve created two methods for reaching the site-mod team directly.
- A Lemmy Bot User that will relay DMs: https://lemmy.world/u/lwreport
- A dedicated email account: [email protected]
- We’ve also provided a Keyoxide profile https://keyoxide.org/hkp/[email protected] for PGP / authenticity
We hope that between both an anonymous platform approach AND a secure email-based approach, we can keep everyone happy 💝
In closing, please, always try and reach out to your community mods FIRST, they usually will know best how to handle a difficult or tricky situation, and use this only when you feel you need to reach out now.
- The FHF/Lemmy.World Admin team 💓
I know you guys were looking for a few good site admins recently, and I trust you’ve found them. If it gets bad, I would also recommend a pipeline of frontline volunteers to help field these types of issues as well. At least as the primary mechanism. E.g., a team who could help filter out the chaff and escalate relevant tickets.
FWIW, I wouldn’t mind the occasional non-intrusive ad to help pay for professional services. Or some other monetization mechanism. Think of it as “volunteering” with the wallet. Perhaps something for a future community discussion.
Cheers!
Hi,
we have that already in place, its in our case the “Community Team”. The monetization with ads would anger many people as the fediverse is buildt up to be “unmonetizationable” because if we or any other instance would somehow have ads, it would lead users to move away and we would really not do that.
Thanks
Relying on unpaid labor means your volunteers will skew towards the most privileged.
source; experience in the nonprofit world.
Yeah for sure that will happen in an non profit. Additionally on large ones where they get “!compensated” for their efforts with donation money. But here we dont do that.
It’s no different here, the dynamics are the same. Volunteer labor will skew towards the most privileged or retired bc they have more free time , not the most capable.