[Long Term] New Channel Types

I appreciate you taking the time to understand my position and my reasoning better and I'm glad to be talking to a fellow visionary, so hi! As you probably might've read from that conversation, I am intending on owning large community servers and not those small 10-20 member friend servers where you can trust everyone. Part of moderation of larger servers involves keeping around evidence to support kicks, mutes or bans that are given to users. This is especially useful when the user attempts to appeal and claims they did nothing wrong. They could appeal immediately, or maybe even years later. If the evidence is deleted because the moderator who logged the evidence has deleted ALL their messages via the Privacy Dashboard, then there's no longer a valid record to keep the punishment in place. As a result, I'd realistically have 2 options: unban the user, or keep them banned "just because". How do you think it looks if you can't back up your accusation (the 'accusation' being the reason you banned the user in the first place)? I err on the side of bureaucracy when it comes to moderation. No evidence = no punishment, even if that evidence used to exist and was deleted later. It creates accountability on the part of the offending user, the moderator who issues the punishment and leadership as a whole if that punishment is challenged in the future by the offending user or even moderators internally.

I think the moderation approach is a little flawed here. There are many cases where you want to delete content to avoid people from being exposed to it. Say somebody posts some not-so-wholesome content in your wholesome community - you probably want to remove that as quickly as possible especially to avoid any younger users seeing it. In fact, in cases like these it's the most important that the user stays banned... and that does mean the evidence is gone... there is no longer concrete proof they did anything. There might be some solutions to this - but this is not addressed here! The most obvious to me would be a separate log view (like https://feedback.fluxer.com/p/1062/c/3020) that can perhaps be restricted based on roles. Bots on Discord also already support logging channels which work pretty nicely in my experience - though I'll admit they aren't very privacy friendly as the messages generally stay there forever unless you delete the channel and recreate it again (and most bots don't have a feature which automates this). This doesn't address a user appealing years after the fact either, but with your suggestion I feel that a moderator could just use the excuse that they deleted the content because it was very bad (which could also be perfectly reasonable) Something else not addressed is the problem of people sending and quickly deleting dubious messages before the moderators see them - which I have seen a lot on Discord - since you suggest that the messages should still be deletable

I think the moderation approach is a little flawed here. There are many cases where you want to delete content to avoid people from being exposed to it. Say somebody posts some not-so-wholesome content in your wholesome community - you probably want to remove that as quickly as possible especially to avoid any younger users seeing it. In fact, in cases like these it's the most important that the user stays banned... and that does mean the evidence is gone... there is no longer concrete proof they did anything. There might be some solutions to this - but this is not addressed here! The most obvious to me would be a separate log view (like https://feedback.fluxer.com/p/1062/c/3020) that can perhaps be restricted based on roles. Bots on Discord also already support logging channels which work pretty nicely in my experience - though I'll admit they aren't very privacy friendly as the messages generally stay there forever unless you delete the channel and recreate it again (and most bots don't have a feature which automates this). This doesn't address a user appealing years after the fact either, but with your suggestion I feel that a moderator could just use the excuse that they deleted the content because it was very bad (which could also be perfectly reasonable) Something else not addressed is the problem of people sending and quickly deleting dubious messages before the moderators see them - which I have seen a lot on Discord - since you suggest that the messages should still be deletable

While I understand the privacy concern here, not logging evidence isn't really an option. I could do perfectly fine creating this functionality myself in the form a bot, but I'd prefer it to be a native feature with proper disclosure and consent beforehand (as my original post states). I fully understand that evidence / messages should be deleted after a while (especially upon user request), but your suggestion to just not log evidence is inappropriate for larger servers who value accountability on both sides (the user AND the moderator/moderation team). There could be some kind of compromise, but that compromise should not involve not logging evidence and retaining it for a short period of time.

I don't feel like you've addressed my main point here - often as moderators you need to delete stuff to protect your users and with your suggestion this would mean destroying the evidence in cases where you really do want to keep a user banned

your suggestion to just not log evidence

That wasn't my suggestion

I don't feel like you've addressed my main point here - often as moderators you need to delete stuff to protect your users and with your suggestion this would mean destroying the evidence in cases where you really do want to keep a user banned

Sorry? I don't understand. With my suggestion, this would mean preserving the evidence (at the very least for a longer amount of time). For example, one could argue that messages in a Logging channel ARE susceptible to being deleted via the Privacy Dashboard, but only after a slightly extended period of time (i.e: 1 month after the initial deletion request or immediately if the message in the Log channel is older than 1 year, whichever is sooner). You saying that it wasn't your suggestion to just not log evidence also confuses me, because you said:

This doesn't address a user appealing years after the fact either, but with your suggestion I feel that a moderator could just use the excuse that they deleted the content because it was very bad (which could also be perfectly reasonable)

And:

There are many cases where you want to delete content to avoid people from being exposed to it. Say somebody posts some not-so-wholesome content in your wholesome community - you probably want to remove that as quickly as possible especially to avoid any younger users seeing it. In fact, in cases like these it's the most important that the user stays banned... and that does mean the evidence is gone... there is no longer concrete proof they did anything.

Maybe I might have misunderstood but the general principle is to always log evidence if you're running a larger server. That being said, what is your "main point" if I keep missing/not addressing it?

Do I misunderstand your suggestion? It seems the idea is that the evidence is preserved by keeping the message publicly available - but in my experience usually you want to delete rule breaking messages This feature feels like it would just stop the user from deleting their remaining messages (which probably weren't the reason for their ban anyway) after they're banned?

Do I misunderstand your suggestion? It seems the idea is that the evidence is preserved by keeping the message publicly available - but in my experience usually you want to delete rule breaking messages This feature feels like it would just stop the user from deleting their remaining messages (which probably weren't the reason for their ban anyway) after they're banned?

Then you misunderstood my suggestion. A "logging" channel is exactly what it suggests - a channel to log things in such as moderation logs or proof. This channel type would not prevent a user from deleting their own messages manually. Rather, when the Privacy Dashboard is used, messages in a "logging" channel will not be deleted but the user will be disassociated from the message. The offending messages THEMSELVES (which you'd take a screenshot or video of) would be deleted by a moderator, then logged as it's own message in a "logging" channel with the screenshot or video proof attached to that message INSIDE the "logging" channel.

Ah, that makes a lot more sense! It sounded like you wanted to make it so the main channels users chat in can't have their messages removed through privacy dashboard (but can be removed manually, seemed quite strange to me)