admins: title edit, topic delete

[decentral1se]

Hello from the PMC hacking session!

We are opening up a cerca as a semi-public forum for PMC discussions/projects/etc., with an out-of-band application process for sign-ups. This means we hope to attach a public which we might not know so well in the beginning.

People raised the issue that it would be good if we can delete a topic of another user as an admin in the case of e.g. offensive content.

Additionally, we'd like to give the admins power to edit the titles of other peoples posts, e.g for helping correct categories for filtering.

This could be accompanied by a moderation log entry to stay in line with the transparency principle.

[cblgh]

understandable! let me state the context the current featureset lives within as i've seen forums be misused by admins just a few months ago (to squelch dissent on forum management without others noticing) and why i'm wary of the implications of this ask. from how cerca is today, the way to accomplish what you all are requesting is by communication:

• ask someone to delete their thread if it sucks, and if they still don't comply then delete their account & all posts (possible today)
• ask someone to edit their thread title and fix their mistake

this is a less hierarchical approach with a fail-safe (remove account) in the event of needing to expel a misbehaving user.

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the ask is not technically hard, but it does further reinforce a hierarchy between different user roles that i've been trying to stay away from. agree that any non-author title editing or thread deletion should be modlogged

at the risk of additional complexity, i also wonder if there should not be a distinction in the threads index (for logged-in users only?) when an admin has deleted a thread: perhaps it's still visible in the index, but the thread title has been changed to "thread deleted by " and the post body only contains "thread was initially created by at -- deleted because of reason: " + no more posts can be made to that thread?

[cblgh]

in any event, even if a deleted thread is not persisted in any way in the threads index i think the reason field is useful and introduces additional accountability / rationale. it's a pattern that is well established and used for good in SSB

[decentral1se]

It's an extreme situation to go from "please remove this topic" to "we're deleting everything". We had more in mind some topics which are just off-topic and maybe the user is just ghosting the forum and we're trying to curate the listing more carefully.

Maybe we could show the modlog of specific thread edits / deletes from specific admins + reason on the /account following #99? This could also be a place to "appeal" and discuss. Admins could also "undelete" also? 🤔

I'd be up for the "soft delete" + reason and removing from the listing. I'm not sure about leaving it in the listing, sometimes removal is about reducing noise for others. The creator of the topic might miss that something got deleted tho 🤔

It'd be nice if we could a simple implementation for the round on this one.

[cblgh]

It's an extreme situation to go from "please remove this topic" to "we're deleting everything". We had more in mind some topics which are just off-topic and maybe the user is just ghosting the forum and we're trying to curate the listing more carefully.

yeah this makes sense!

i'll mull the soft-delete bit; i think what works more in-grain of the forum atm is for thread deletions being a 2-quroum admin action. so: first admin proposes the deletion, a second admin vetos or accepts that in /admin proposal. might need some bug fixing on the proposal side of things, i noticed yesterday i could only do one proposal of a particular type at a time and i forget if that was intentional or not X)

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orthogonal to the above, a limit i would like to impose on admins for editing thread titles or deleting entire threads is to only allow those actions for a certain time after a thread was created. e.g. threads can be renamed by an admin within CURRENT_TIME < (THREAD_CREATION_TIME + ADMIN_EDIT_PERIOD). ADMIN_EDIT_PERIOD could be set in Cerca to something that should cover the vast majority of cases for all deployments of Cerca while preventing stable / old threads from being impacted, 4 weeks for example. if a thread has been created and the 4 weeks have yet to pass, then an admin can still edit the thread title. ibid for ADMIN_THREAD_DELETION_PERIOD. wdyt?

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also, instead of serving a 404, we could perhaps tombstone threads that are deleted through admin actions such that the thread id is kept in the database (but not the contents, author, or title). then when a deleted thread is revisited, we can know it has been deleted and display that in a view for users as "this thread has been deleted because: <reason>".

i'm okay with dropping the "keep it around in the index" bit fwiw, it was just as stray thought :)