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 info@lemmy.world, 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.

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 💓
  • uservoid1@lemmy.worldEnglish
    902·
    2 months ago

    When I started reading your post I thought you are going to say “please don’t bother us, use the report button”. I was pleased to see that not only you did not discourage users to contact the admin team, you opened more channels to do so. Kudos!

    • Rooki@lemmy.world
      211·
      2 months ago

      We saw that people got confused whom to notify with our rather large admin team, and because of it we created those two new communication channels.

  • Donjuanme@lemmy.world
    9·
    2 months ago

    I try to not add work to anyone, unless there’s something truly dangerous to a person or community.

    • Flying Squid@lemmy.world
      172·
      2 months ago

      I can’t speak as an admin, but as a mod of multiple communities, please let me know if there’s an issue even if it isn’t on that level. I wouldn’t agree to be a mod if I wasn’t willing to look into people’s concerns. I’m sure many other mods feel the same way.

      You’re really not adding work when it’s something I’m doing voluntarily and aren’t even required to act on no matter what’s going on, but you’re really not adding work if what you have to say will make the communities I moderate a better place.

      • MarciaLynnDorsett@lemmy.world
        72·
        2 months ago

        as the mod of two worldnews communities, can you try to squash the shill/bot accusations. it’s dehumanizing, and it acts as a thought terminating cliche, stopping discussion of the topic. it’s toxic af and it should be grounds for immediate short bans, and long bans with repeated use.

        • Flying Squid@lemmy.world
          52·
          2 months ago

          I’ll do what I can. The best thing to do would be to flag those as uncivil. I would certainly delete something like that in the communities I moderate. It’s not only uncivil, it’s just unhelpful to the discussion.

          • TheFonz@lemmy.world
            3·
            2 months ago

            How do we manage trolls? I know I was banned from worldnews (I’m not mad) for calling someone out

            • Flying Squid@lemmy.world
              51·
              2 months ago

              Again, you just have to flag. People are not flagging enough. In the case you are talking about that I can see, it was after your ban and it was deleted for incivility, which is what you were banned for to begin with.

              You were getting flagged for your own rule violations (incivility), which will get mods to take a look at them, but if you see someone trolling and flag them, we can check it out.

              It also might take a while sometimes. I seem to be the only active mod in any of my communities when I get up in the morning and for a while afterward.

              • TheFonz@lemmy.world
                2·
                2 months ago

                No worries. I’ll keep that in mind on my alt. I love you Flyingsquid. 😘 Keep up the good work

    • ericjmorey@lemmy.worldEnglish
      4·
      2 months ago

      Not all work is unwanted. I want the communities I moderate to thrive and reports can help with that.

    • Serinus@lemmy.worldM
      2·
      2 months ago

      We do want our individual communities to thrive as well. While it may not be urgent, if you have ideas to improve a community, please do reach out.

  • credo@lemmy.world
    24·
    2 months ago

    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!

    • Rooki@lemmy.world
      21·
      2 months ago

      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