[Topic of the Week] Tribe Management, Customization, and Moderation Tools
TOTW #1 — Monday, July 6, 2015
Hello Everyone!
This is the first of a series of threads which will be henceforth occurring every Monday, each time featuring a new, relevant topic for you tribe leaders and moderators to contemplate and discuss. The goal of these weekly topics is to generate a variety of thoughts and opinions on certain website matters, which may in turn enrich the community and perhaps even directly instigate change for the ultimate betterment of Snapzu as a social platform.
The Topic of the Week is of course not meant to replace Tribe Talk's regular content, as you are all still very much encouraged to make your own submissions and start your own discussions. It is merely a guided discussion provided every week for anyone interested in contributing to the conversation.
This week, we are discussing "Tribe Management, Customization, and Moderation Tools". Taking into account Snapzu's relative infancy, are you satisfied with the tools that are currently available to you for managing and moderating your tribe? Would you like to see tribes be more customizable, or are you pleased with the options currently available?
Thank you for keeping the discussion civil, and for only using the downvote button when the subject is not contributing to the conversation.
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I'm a little confused and maybe someone can help me out: is the only moderation tool available to chiefs/ moderators the ban from tribe page? I didn't see any way to remove comments or snaps in a tribe but I could be missing something.
Thank you for contributing. It seems that you you can remove snaps — at least as a tribe leader — by hovering over them on the tribe homepage and clicking "Remove". It does not currently look like you can remove comments. So it seems the only moderation tools currently available would be banning users and removing snaps. Which brings up the question: what tools would we like to see implemented? I would personally like to see an option to remove comments if that is not already available, as I would imagine they are the most frequent offenders of tribe rules.
Sent you a PM, but I tested the ban function by banning you. It's sort of lacking in features in my opinion. The option to notify user with a ban reason or specify a duration of a ban would be great. I think the admins of the site want us to use bans as sort of a "last resort" rather than a punishment for breaking the rules, but with no other mod tools (warning system?) at our disposal, I think people will eventually be forced to ban problematic users.
Thanks for pointing out the remove snap button. That's definitely a lot better than having no tools, and is probably the most important one for most tribes.
Like /u/picklefingers points out below, the inability to remove comments limits certain types of tribes more than others. I think if discussion posts (posted to only one tribe) were "comment-moddable" by the chief and mods, that would take care of most of my concerns.
Does anyone else think that the ability to "distinguish" yourself as a mod when posting comments or discussions would be helpful? I hate to compare all features to reddit, but I think it would be pretty useful to be able to differentiate "official" comments in a thread for your tribe.
I actually messaged /u/teamsnapzu a while back regarding mod flair, and it is in the works so they do plan on implementing that.
The problem with removing comments is that snaps can be in multiple tribes.
That's exactly the problem, and it's something the admins are working on. I think it is probably going to end up being a solution of a large amount of site-wide super moderators. It may make things like /r/askscience and /r/askhistorians where the comments are extremely well moderated impossible. I'm curious to see what the admins actually propose.
Text posts only exist in a single tribe right? Maybe the admins can allow moderators to remove comments on those.
The more I think about it, the more important I think this feature is. Removing comments from normal snaps isn't that important, but discussion-based posts in some tribes will be crippled if they can't be kept on-topic. This may not be much of a concern now, but as the userbase continues to grow, there will undoubtedly be issues that require chiefs/mods to step in in the comments section.
I would love to be able to send a PM to a tribe, which brings mods into a group discussion. Group PM's or even inter-tribe PM's would be really nice to have.
This would be an interesting feature indeed.