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===Neutral===
 
===Neutral===
# {{neutral}} Not exactly a fan of the "all or nothing" implied in the "no" vote. "By voting no you are voting that deleting messages should be a right of all users"? What? Thinking that the ''existing policies don't need changed'' doesn't mean that deleting messages is a unilateral right. It just means maybe some of us don't think that we need to have an explicit rule for things that should be decided by mod discretion. There is a such thing as nuance - the context of a deleted message is up to interpretation from staff. [[User:NomadicNom|<nowiki>|\| () |\/| /\ |)</nowiki>]] | <small>[[User Talk:NomadicNom|Talk]] | <small>[https://discordapp.com/invite/NKCxn4J Discord] | <small>[https://fallout-dallas.wikia.com NMC]</small></small></small> 18:10, 4 February 2021 (UTC)
+
# {{neutral}} Not exactly a fan of the "all or nothing" implied in the "no" vote. "By voting no you are voting that deleting messages should be a right of all users"? What? Thinking that the ''previously existing policies didn't need changed'' doesn't mean that deleting messages is a unilateral right. It just means maybe some of us don't think that we need to have an explicit rule for things that should be decided by mod discretion. There is a such thing as nuance - the context of a deleted message is up to interpretation from staff. [[User:NomadicNom|<nowiki>|\| () |\/| /\ |)</nowiki>]] | <small>[[User Talk:NomadicNom|Talk]] | <small>[https://discordapp.com/invite/NKCxn4J Discord] | <small>[https://fallout-dallas.wikia.com NMC]</small></small></small> 18:10, 4 February 2021 (UTC)
   
 
==Comments==
 
==Comments==

Revision as of 18:10, 4 February 2021

Forums: Index > Wiki proposals and applications > New Discord rule vote - Deleting messages

- Continuing from the prior discussion forum pertaining the topic, I would now like to move this process over to a vote, where the community will now decide whether this rule clarification is needed or not. Before taking the time to vote, I would like to go over a few points of interest that should strongly be taken into consideration before making a decision:

  1. At behest of community input I have received, should this clarification go into effect, it will simply be an extension of rules that already exist: Rule 4, 5, and 8, respectively asking our chat-users not to troll, be accountable for their actions, and not to spam the Discord.
  2. As a clarification and not a new rule entirely, the purpose of the discussion and now this vote, is to tackle an issue with little to no precedent in regards to moderator enforcement. To avoid controversy and potential violations of the spirit of our rules, we seek community consensus on the issue before we move forward.
  3. Should the community succeed in voting against this rule clarification, the administrative decree currently in place will be rendered null, and deleting/editing messages in any context will be considered fully within the rights of our chat-users (messages will still be logged, however, by our moderation bot).

- To make things easy without having to bounce between this vote and the prior forum, I will go ahead and post the clarification parameters here as well to take into consideration:

  1. Personal messages can still be deleted/edited, so long as important context isn't removed that destabilizes a wider conversation/debate, or places other users in a potentially bad light. In all essentiality, regard this as an extension of Rule 5: Don't be a dick.
  2. Due to ambiguity, what constitutes important context will be left up to moderator/administrator discretion. If in doubt, please double-check with a moderator before proceeding.
  3. In most cases, this rule will never apply to any content that constitutes memes, personal information, or casual conversation. With that in mind, please remember not to abuse this right, as doing so excessively still counts as spamming/general disruption, even if it's done in good faith/fun. All things in moderation.
  4. Messages are not to be deleted, whatsoever, within the Vault-Tec Administration category, including, but not limited to the channels: overseers-desk, chatmod-desk, editing-staff, discussions-staff, security-desk, reddit-staff, individual-moderation, & check-user-queries. In the same vein, editing messages should only be done sparingly, and only whenever important context regarding staff decisions/discussions is not removed.
  5. To expand upon the prior rule parameter, messages are not to be deleted from monthly meetings unless they are objectively off-topic. All relevant messages must be able to be presented at the end of each meeting during its transcribing for transparency purposes.

Vote

Yes

By voting yes, you are in support of making a rule 4, 5, & 8 clarification, allowing moderator enforcement against disruptive message deletions/editing.

  1. I vote yes. However I am against non discord users from being able to vote on this rule as the actual circumstances that lead to the rule clarification being needed haven't been transmitted. I am also in the mind of the discord mods, admins, and crats should be able to take action on a user for breaking the rules without the need of clarification of those rules. I hope that this doesn't set a precedent of having to vote on everything not explicitly covered by the rules even if it falls under the purvue of multiple rules. -Eckserah User Eckserah Head Dataminer 02:12, 4 February 2021 (UTC)
  2. I also vote yes. However though I shall try to reiterate what I said on the previous forum; this will rise or fall depending on how it's written. I understand that each instance is going to be highly dependant and unique, but vagueries aren't helpful to anyone, even the staff. The fact the rules are worded to such a vague degree in a bid for wider applicability is why we are here to begin with; questioning if something falls under the purview of them due to the fact they're written wide to-a-fault. Again, I understand the thought process in making them that way, but it leaves the window open for potential exploitation or misinterpretation, and just loops right back to here. Eck's complaint highlights that some see these things as already covered, but the fact not all do is an inherent flaw in the writing of the rules as they stand. It's all well and good if Staff (or similar, like the dataminers) know the exact precedent or specificities of the rules, but if the userbase doesn't then they can't follow them effectively and it would be like enforcing unwritten rules. LovinglyGaslight (talk) 03:14, 4 February 2021 (UTC)
  3. Yes, though somewhat I agree with Ecks. The principal of the rule/clarification, that deleting a post(or editing a post to functionally delete the contents) to remove context or otherwise further smarmy ass behavior, is something that users should be held accountable for; however, it could have stayed an expression of moderator discretion under the existing rules. If an act or behavior is seen and immediately recognized as "being a dick" then we should not have to have a forum and vote to codify rules based on the exact way this user is being a dick. What separates this clarification, at least in my mind, is not that deleting messages was particularly creative, but a user editing and deleting their own comments has not been an issue in the past, so for better or worse, users were free to do as they saw fit. With that in mind, it's not a terrible idea to have a little pomp and circumstance if there's going to be a blanket roll out of a new practice, rather than a single instance of discretion. The Dyre Wolf (talk) 04:15, 4 February 2021 (UTC)
  4. Voting yes just to spite the boys club crap I just read above. The Discord is considered part of the overall wiki makeup and every user that meets requirements to vote gets one. Deal with it. Great Mara (talk) 12:27, 4 February 2021 (UTC)
  5. Yes, with reservations. As long as it's only enforced for the most egregious violations as it seems to be indicated. If someone posts something and then deletes it before anyone responds, that should be allowed. Everyone says things and then realizes it didn't come out right, or someone else had already answered the question, or whatever other harmless thing. But when posts are deleted to deliberately mislead, troll, or otherwise cast others in a bad light, that's where it crosses the line. However, for those of us used to editing the wiki and having every little detail and typo in the permanent history record of an article, this shouldn't come as a major culture shock regardless of enforcement. Gilpo1 (talk) 15:24, 4 February 2021 (UTC)

No

By voting no, you are in support of making any and all deletions/edits of personal messages a right of our chat-users, making the current administrative decree null and invalid.

Neutral

  1. Neutral Not exactly a fan of the "all or nothing" implied in the "no" vote. "By voting no you are voting that deleting messages should be a right of all users"? What? Thinking that the previously existing policies didn't need changed doesn't mean that deleting messages is a unilateral right. It just means maybe some of us don't think that we need to have an explicit rule for things that should be decided by mod discretion. There is a such thing as nuance - the context of a deleted message is up to interpretation from staff. |\| () |\/| /\ |) | Talk | Discord | NMC 18:10, 4 February 2021 (UTC)

Comments

Rule enforcement and non discord user votes

Just to reiterate my comments in my vote above, while I think this vote is unnecessary due to the rules that it would be expanding on already covering the purvue of this new ruling, I don't think non-discord users should be able to vote on this. Non-discord users are not there and shouldn't get to decide things for those of us on the discord.

Another note I'd like to bring up is that the staff should be able to take action based upon the rules without having to make votes to expand them every time something isn't explicitly stated. This was a big step in the right direction in the sense of moderation on the discord and I'm very happy that it happened. Since this very little in the way of rule breaking has happened and that's a massive improvement. -Eckserah User Eckserah Head Dataminer 02:17, 4 February 2021 (UTC)

I appreciate where you're coming from, and to a degree, I even agree with your rationales. But to tackle your points as best as I can in a concise manner:
  • "I don't think non-discord users should be able to vote on this." - On one hand, each facet of the wiki, from the wiki, to discussions, to the Discord, all have aspects of them that only regulars are going to properly understand enough to have valid opinions over. But on the other hand, those same regulars can frequently lose perspective, and it can be just as important for outside perspectives to look in, evaluate the logic, and do their part in making an informed opinion. I welcome you to open a wider discussion about this, but for the time being, the administration simply cannot take away our users' rights to vote as they see fit.
  • "...the staff should be able to take action based upon the rules without having to make votes..." - A good number of our more ambiguous rules are only able to operate based off of established precedents over time since our creation almost two decades ago. This is an issue with practically 0 precedent, and an argument made in our legal system is that of overeaching: "Conduct that exceeds established limits (as of authority or due process)." As administrators, it is our ethical duty to follow the spirit of our community, so in cases of little to no precedent, community consensus should be sought over potential rule overreach.
I hope what I said makes sense, and I of course am always open to further discussion on these topics. 寧靜 Fox 02:41, 4 February 2021 (UTC)
I don't know if it would be "right" to chime in on this, but I shall. For a little while there's been a bit of a divide between certain parts of the wiki, Editors and /d users being notable, with certain sides seeing themselves as unrepresented or in-the-eyes-of-staff unimportant. I think those coals could easily be stoked in other ways by disregarding the opinions of others in the same way I once saw a proposal for /d users not being allowed to vote on moderator requests. Granted, non-discord users might not know the underlying factors; but their insight on consistency, or on wording, or on fairness is going to be universally applicable. And besides, if users consider themselves too uninformed, even some Discord users may consider themselves so depending on how active they are, they're unlikely to chime in. LovinglyGaslight (talk) 03:14, 4 February 2021 (UTC)
It would be one thing if those users were around or participated in the server, but the community on discord is an entirely seperate beast from the wiki and the discussion forums. That fact has been established many times already and what they may think is fair won't translate the same. A message board and wiki articles don't translate to a real time chat session. No user is unimportant but the amount of people in certain areas wildly out numbers the amount in others which can cause issues with that group if they wanted deciding rules for areas they do not participate in at all. If people only hang around the discussions area and aren't in the discord why would they care about or even want to chime in about what's going on in the discord? Some people also don't understand how discord even works since not everyone uses it. This causes a disconnect as in other places deletions are much easier to see if not outright restricted to certain rights users. As someone who doesn't go to the discussion forum I would never vote on something about there specifically unless it actually impacted me.
In response to your comment in your vote about the rules being vague. It's up to the staff to determine whether something falls under a rule or not. Since this evidently falls under 3 different rules there's no doubt that the actions taken by the staff were justified. It's actually part of the job of the staff to interpret the rules and enforce them. If they are enforced mistakenly then it's also on the staff to handle that and rectify it. Things have been less hectic since things started actually getting enforced. As soon as the staff tried to enforce the rules people started getting up in arms about it because they had been allowed to do so for so long and so they violated more rules in doing so. Lack of enforcement leads to more people flaunting the rules and makes the server much less enjoyable. -Eckserah User Eckserah Head Dataminer 04:46, 4 February 2021 (UTC)
This seems to pertain to a lot of what I've already said, but I'll go over it. "What they think is fair" is universal. Their opinions would be the same whether or not they were part of the Discord. People tend to have a very defined metric as to what is "Fair" by their own judgement. As for "The amount of users in certain areas wildly outnumbers the amount in others", that dances a fine fine line of turning the wiki into as "Us-vs-Them" debate which is absolutely not something we want and not something I personally like to stand. As differing as /d, the Discord, and The Wiki itself are; we are *one*. The effects in any one of them can have, and have had, knock-on effects to the other two. The fact they're not a part of The Discord doesn't exclude them from the discussion, hell, I cant even count on one hand the number of Chat Moderators that aren't even on the Discord, do we exclude them? You for some reason then go on to prove that your argument is moot, "Why would they care about or even want to chime in about what's going on in the discord?"; Of course, I'm aware of the rippling actions in the Discord can have on the Wiki at large so I disagree, but if that's your belief then you're wasting a paragraph on something that's not going to happen. If people consider themselves too uninformed then they will abstain, if they feel like it pertains to them or could affect them or the wiki, they will vote. As for the vagueries, yes it is up-to staff on if something falls under a rule or not but that shouldn't mean the coverage should be so wide that people, even staff themselves, cant even tell when something is caught under the rules, something that this very forum is about. I get that it's staff's job to interpret the rules, but the userbase also have to be able to interpret them in order to follow them, and asking staff to decide on an interpretation for some of these can be like trying to read braille on a flat sheet of paper. As for rule flaunting, I cant say, but from my experience of being in the discord through thick-and-thin since very early 2018, rules are no more enforced now as then; and the largest breaches of the rules since have been staff action, mainly moderation chat leaks. All in all, you seem to show some kind of contempt for certain types of users by wanting to omit them from vote or discussion on topics that you don't really need to think through too hard to see how could affect the wiki at large. Like Mara said, none of this "Boys Club" bollocks, if you disagree with those users meeting voting standards, there's a perfectly nice forum here for you to formally table your grievances on. LovinglyGaslight (talk) 13:10, 4 February 2021 (UTC)