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 [email protected], 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.
- A Lemmy Bot User that will relay DMs: https://lemmy.world/u/lwreport
- A dedicated email account: [email protected]
- We’ve also provided a Keyoxide profile https://keyoxide.org/hkp/[email protected] for PGP / authenticity
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 💓
Yep, mods can quickly turn into “small town local cops” that think they can do anything they want. It’s quite ridiculous when you bring up an issue/question a ban you got (I haven’t had any issues here yet, I’m referring to Reddit in this case) and the mod essentially says “fuck off” and blocks you.
I literally said on Reddit “as a guy, I appreciate the change” on a comment about a woman saying she switched from jeans to yoga pants as her daily wear, but since it was a woman centric sub, they all jumped in my shit and massively downvoted me, then I got a 1 day ban on top of that. When I questioned the mod about the ban and said it was a “tongue-in-cheek joke and didn’t think anyone would take it so seriously” she (presumably) responded “Not it wasn’t a joke! You were being a creep in a woman centric sub! Bye!” and muted me for a month, which meant I couldn’t respond to her. I could see if I was being a red-pill misogynistic asshole, but instead I got banned for saying I like how a woman looks in yoga pants. Imagine being a woman and getting banned for saying you like looking at a muscly dude’s arms in a tank top vs long sleeves. It’s pretty damn ridiculous.