Tavern on the Meta

8:23 AM

→ 15 messages moved to Chimney

Q: Reword "and 18 or up" on election pages

8:34 AM

The blurb at the top of the nomination tab on each election page (example) now says: In the nomination phase, any community member in good standing with more than 300 reputation (and 18 or up) may nominate themselves to be a community moderator. The text "and 18 or up" does link to the official...

Or, hear me out... remove it entirely.

;)

lol

ironically, my view here is SE had a troublesome time growing up

and lawyers got involved ._.

Things always get tricky when lawyers are involved.

It's one of the things left unfixed post-everything that really annoys me, though.

snort

Yes

But oddly, most of those thing involve corporate machinary

And I know I've brought it up many times, and the CMs can't do anything about it and probably don't want to hear me nagging about it again, but...

I'm pretty sure that one of the current CMs served as a diamond moderator while under the age of 18.

@Mithical and there's no real incentive to change it to something like "getting parents of minors to agree" cause its too much work

(and heh, cough SE's hiring practices probably has the same issue. Hiring people outside the current areas is 'too much work')

(Also this is me throwing shade) :D

8:42 AM

@JourneymanGeek Yep, which is why I will remain to be annoyed about it.

You can't prove anybody's age on the internet anyway.

On the gripping hand - I wonder how many folk'll want to be mods 13-16 (depending on region) and not want to wait the 2-5 years

@Mithical on the other hand, would one trust a mod who lies to get into the position?

A: Questions about the new minimum age for diamond moderators

Of course not.

Jon had some good points on that:

When I was a community manager, I personally selected moderators I knew (or strongly suspected) were high school students. It invariably made me uncomfortable for a variety of reasons. But in the end, I felt it was my duty to select people who would best serve their communities as moderators. If ...

Its a kinda arbitrary rule (based on the law) its somewhat unfair

but anyone who's 'ready' will be grumpy but wait

They shouldn't have to.

hence the unfairness of it

Yanno, those old stories about some dude who goes to see some guru type figure and is made to wait out in the snow to see if he's worthy? :D

8:52 AM

Having the moderator community around me, being in that position of responsibility and trust, was one of the largest and most positive influences on me while I was 15 or so. Learning how to be accountable, to take responsibility for actions you've made, interacting with people all over the world who you might not agree with... those were all things that becoming a moderator helped me with enormously.

(What kinda monster would make someone wait out in the cold) ... ._.

@Mithical and (I'm devil's advocating here) - its possible to do that without formal authority

Sure, but it's not the same thing. We both know that. :)

@Mithical heh

Yes and no

I learnt a lot of the mod ropes as a regular user, and my MSE mod hiatus gave me a lot of freedom to do things I couldn't as a moderator

Sure. That background of learning the general ropes for moderation is kinda a requirement for anyone looking to mine a diamond. MSE is also a special case, and that was a particularly abnormal time period.

All I'm saying is that becoming a young moderator was extremely beneficial for me personally and I don't like that that opportunity is no longer available for others in the position I was in.

... also, if you became a mod at 15, when did you join, and what were the age limits then? >_>

8:59 AM

@JourneymanGeek Ssshhh.

(I was 14 when I became a mod.)

@Mithical I think that those age limits are arbitrary, and done in the most CYA way possible forgetting the intent of the rules

(In general)

@Mithical Aside from the fact that the change was clearly something the community was against.

(Wrong link, fixed.)

Sonic the Anonymous Hedgehog

@Mithical That assumes it was ever up to us :D

I guess that was an advantage of SE pretty much running as someone's hobby project early on, with a BDFL

9:20 AM

It's unfortunate that PII access (the main issue raised by lawyers) and mod privileges are indelibly tied here.

On Wikipedia, they made an early effort to ensure those remain separated. Normal administrators don't have any such access, which is restricted to a subset known as CheckUsers. Those with CheckUser rights are required to not share any raw data they obtained with anyone other than other CheckUsers.

So there's no age requirement to become an admin, but there is one to become a CheckUser (originally this required ID verification, then was changed to honor system).

It's also because of the PII issue that the moderator agreement has to have proper legal force; if this separation had been maintained initially, it could just remain an unofficial agreement with a separate legal one for the subset.

@Glorfindel Suggestion for future iterations of your script for updating ToC tables in feedback posts: indicate the row underneath each new row should be inserted, as per the given order.

Sonic the Anonymous Hedgehog

@SonictheAnonymousHedgehog I suspect that their moderation issues are somewhat different from ours

To clarify on them being indelibly tied: because they weren't separated initially and remained that way since, this PII can lie in various places in moderator space (the TL, other private chat rooms, the Team, etc.). If they had been separated from the get-go, and access restricted to a subset of mods with honor-verified age and clear policies to not share with anyone other than the subset, we wouldn't have run into this limit today.

Even if these actions were taken today, it would mean nothing for the treasure trove of PII in these other spaces.

@JourneymanGeek Well, mostly the same. They also have a sockpuppet problem (much larger than ours), and the way most of these are investigated is through behavioral analysis by an admin, and, if that's positive, then escalate to a CheckUser for a technical check.

9:46 AM

I have discovered that 98% of my socks have holes.

Just putting that out there. As more context.

Glorfindel

@SonictheAnonymousHedgehog yeah, that would be a good idea, though it's still a mess to look it up in the editor. I really should've used an external text editor without word wrap ... Also, have we decided on a final order yet?

@M.A.R. if it doesn't have a hole, you can't put it around your foot, no?

10:02 AM

@Glorfindel wait, you're not supposed to wear them on your head?

Why on Earth are they shaped like a deformed head then.

@M.A.R. The other 2% are unholey

@JourneymanGeek Not if he has 25 pairs of socks

>_>

Or he is being imprecise

98% of 50 = 49

@JourneymanGeek your pun socks

10:10 AM

Sometimes my socks pun

That's a blatant abuse of moderator privileges. Reported

@DavidPostill your joke was too dirty to pass by our conscientious censors.

2 hours later…

11:53 AM

uh, yeah, that one's actually a false positive

1 hour later…

1:21 PM

→ 8 messages moved to Chimney

@DavidPostill What is that? The garden gnome hat of shame?

oh wait, it's orange... The Dutch garden gnome hat of shame? :P

@curious It's an orange "Smurf" hat.

I'm just catching up with the transcript but I think Sonic points to the right issue here... I don't see a problem with mods being under 18 in general, but if there was ever a problem involving misuse of PII by a minor, that could probably get very ugly for the company.

Also known as a sock you can wear on your head.

@DavidPostill oh I seem to recall some episode or album where they were orange

@DavidPostill Hmm my feet aren't shaped like that :)

2:28 PM

@curious If there's ever a misuse of PII by anyone it could get ugly.

@Mithical Definitely. I'm just saying I think it would probably be worse if it involved a minor, whether legally or PR-wise

It seems to me like the choice made by Wikipedia would scale a lot better too