The Role of Moderators on Snowdrift.coop

Moderators assigned per project

All projects must appoint at least one moderator. A single user may be moderator for multiple projects. All moderators must understand the issues in the Snowdrift.coop honor system.

To encourage impartiality, users not connected to specific projects may join a pool of volunteer moderators who may be assigned to different projects. Projects are also encouraged to select moderators from outside their project. Team members from one project may be moderators for another project.

Facilitate effective collaboration

Moderators encourage others to stay on topic, be effective and productive, and follow the honor system and Code of Conduct. Moderators should refrain from expressing their own views of the substance of a discussion. However, moderators are encouraged to post helpful general comments and suggestions to facilitate the best productive discourse. Moderators will also have the ability to re-thread discussions that go off-topic.

Discussion moderation

Approving posts from unestablished users

When users first sign up, their comments and edits are moderated until they’ve made a number of accepted postings (or have funded their account or been assigned a special project role).

Note: Projects may opt to have selected pages be directly editable by only team-members or editors of the project. Edits to those pages by general established users not on the project team will be “moderated” but it is not the duty of moderators to handle those. Such edits will be handled by the project team members. Unestablished users will not be allowed to submit any edits to those pages.

Move discussion comments

Sometimes a comment is out of place (whether by mistake in posting or otherwise). Moderators can organize comment threads by moving comments from one place to another. While avoiding disrupting conversation too much, it helps to keep discussion on topic.

Moderate unresolved disputes

Moderators also handle issues that arise with alleged violations. Most should be addressed by the community directly via our flagging system, but moderators may have to step in to handle unresolved disputes.

For disputes about a project’s alleged violation, a moderator with no connection to the project will be assigned.