I can understand deleting entire threads where discussion of illegal activity or violations of user right to be forgotten is occurring, however using deleting whole threads (not just singular posts) in places where the violations are more minor can lead to confusion amongst users, and uncertainty regarding moderator action.
For the “right to be forgotten” This phrase is from the GDPR and the GDPR has a pretty clear definition what falls under personal information and what not.
And all posts where I was lurking or active and got deleted were not violating the GDPR.
Besides the fact that the talking about deleted users in this post didn’t fall under personal information, it should be also mentioned that the right to be forgotten doesn’t apply if right of freedom of expression and information is suppressed.
So this whole “violations of user right to be forgotten” is merely a complete nonsense.
This was why I contacted the mods. We did not get to any point of agreeing - no, which is even some of the worst things, a mod itself was objectively violating their own rules - and so the whole thing got locked after overall six messages.
I am completely OK with deleting the all-known deleted topic IF there is a rule about it. But there isn‘t and I can‘t live with that objectively false GDPR excuse.
I read the thread you shared as a PDF when it was on the forum and was pretty shocked by this reply from Jonah. “Just create a blog” really downplays the amount of work that goes into all aspects of blogging, and I agree it contradicts the whole point of a forum, so I found that quite dismissive coming from the person at the head of the forum.
It’s like calling a public town meeting and then telling a vocal participant to just go home and make a podcast if they have something to say that maybe doesn’t quite fit, is too lengthy or something that you don’t agree with.
I don’t think stuff should be deleted unless it is graphic or illegal/unethical. Even if someone is spreading FUD or being disruptive, I’d rather see their account locked with maybe a message implying what happened. It is more transparent and allows other users to decide their own opinions, with all the knowledge of the conversation. There can definitely be exceptions to this, just a general feeling I have.
I, frankly, still do not follow how someone can post:
title: Do you guys use whonix?
raw: Let’s have a good conversation about it and see how poor it became in recent years. I feel pity for those whose it for their anonymous activity.
…and then other people are upset with me for telling them to take it to their own venue. If you or one of the 10 people who reacted to your post can elaborate further, that’d be great, but this hardly tops the charts of things I’d do differently.
This place is the sanest online privacy community I have ever been into where people actually know how to communicate, answer questions, and engage in healthy discussions. I have learned a lot since I started participating, and I hope this discussion will resolve in the best way possible.
Hey there, I would simply suggest to communicate more on your intentions.
Meaning, if you unlist a topic, state which rule it violated.
Same with deleting. Sending a pm can help.
This has been going for some weeks now (or maybe more I don’t know) and when we’ve asked questions, we weren’t provided with answers. We were provided with unlisted and deleted topics.
Also, kindness goes a long way in these communication messages.
However, I do understand that moderating can be heavy and it’s not fun to receive criticism when you do that for free and just to help a community you want to see thrive.
Please note that this criticism also comes from a place of love with a desire to protect that same community. I think people have good intentions, they’re not here to bring it all down We all want it to see it thrive.
Thank you for that.
Would PG have engaged in that discussion if some of us didn’t push for it? Hopefully, yes.
If yes, then I believe it should have been mentioned in my post (which is now deleted and I’m still not sure why) or other people’s post simply asking questions.
It isn’t nonsense if it’s a policy of PG though. Not saying it is, but they could decide to implement such policy.
It’s dismissive. It’s like saying “go back to your own country if you don’t like it here.”
hTahaCi was clearly in good faith throughout all that “Is Constructive Feedback on Whonix/KickSecure Being Censored” topic. Disclaimer: I have not seen the content of the first topic and I’m not saying the moderation action was the wrong one. I don’t even know what whonix is, and it honestly doesn’t really matter to this topic.
hTahaCi also explained it themselves:
I’m really sad — you gys have full control to remove posts, and my threads are automatically marked as “solved” without my input. I don’t feel I have any control over my own contributions here in this privacy community. I’ve always used a covert account during my vacation days to quietly share knowledge and help others. But the way I’m being treated is deeply hurtful. I’m genuinely trying to help, and it’s painful when that effort is dismissed. I think I need to step away.
The fact is that they opened a new topic to understand why they thought they were being censored. You can objectively say they were in good faith.
Then that topic got unlisted and deleted. Again. At least a reason was provided in that one. But it shouldn’t have been deleted.
It was simply a third party tool supported by the platform. It allows automatic “announcement" of moderation actions done via that tool to a dedicated channel. Be it automatic triggers or manual actions. IIRC the format was something like:
{ACTIONTYPE}
DATE: {YYYY-MM-DD}
TIME: {HH:mm:ss}
MODERATOR: {MODERATOR_USERNAME}
AFFECTED USER: {USER_USERNAME}
MESSAGE LINK: {URL}
REASON: {REASONS}
I was not using Discourse, and I am not sure if discourse offers similar features.
I second this. The bar for permanently wiping the public records should be very, very high. Lock bad threads, ban disruptive posters. Only delete harmful comments (to do: define “harmful”)
Mods should also be required to disclose one piece of PII per each moderation action (pause for laugh)
This wouldn’t have moved the needle if it came from some normal dude. Odd to see the forum admin publicly tell a poster to kick rocks. I briefly thought I was on the GOS forum (pause for laughs)
I don’t believe I replied to the off topic comments but my account was also silenced for two weeks. It was not obvious to me how to appeal the silencing either, so I reached out to you about it for an explanation since I remembered that statement you made about how people should flag posts more often and avoid engaging. I never received a reply. I attempted to reach out to the moderator team, which the site did not let me do. So rather than trying to guess who I should message, I just decided to wait out my sentence.
All this to say another issue is the appeal process and knowing who to reach out to. You receive a message from the automated system with an incredibly vague explanation but that’s pretty much it. The format @TinFoilHat describes sounds like a major improvement.
Needless to say I rarely flag posts now. Why should I go out of my way to help the mods in good faith if I risk being punished for doing so?
I do appreciate the (eventual) explanation from Jonah though that it is not necessary to flag more than one off topic comment in a given thread. I agree this should be in writing somewhere.
Well, I for one see what your problem was with that post, it was worded and framed not at all productively, but at its core there was a reasonable discussion to be had there of any issues others have had with Whonix recently. I think the most productive thing to do moderation-wise would have been to tell the OP to edit their post to be more conducive to a beneficial conversation and leave it up if they did so. I don’t think it’s good for the community to tell people to basically just go somewhere else because they swung and missed on one attempt at writing an OP.
In fairness, I think it becomes a lot more reasonable to tell the OP that if they had a history of doing such things without correcting it, and I don’t know if that’s the case here, but still maybe not in public because of how it comes across to others without that context.
Just my two cents.
This was also something I took away from the experience.
Fully second this. Had I known this created extra burden on the mods I obviously would not have done so. I thought I was being helpful by basically pointing them to each specific post I thought needed review. I have never moderated a forum like this so I recognize I was making an assumption that it seems turned out to be wrong though.
This seems like the most plausible solution. However, if the goal is to have PG forum be curated for well meaning discussion, then I can see the angle of unlisting as to keep keep the search and info digging of quality on the forum. But this should be an explicit well communicated intention of the forum.
Otherwise, locking is a pretty standard. (Public) deletion is frowned upon.
If anything, utilizing locking as a means to socialize why you are locking. Close a thread, say it violates XYZ and why, and now we can all learn. Or, utilize it as a teaching opportunity to guide biases towards a more open discussion. Unlisting hides this knowledge from users, and so there are hidden implicit edge cases we don’t know about. If something is funky with a decision, we can reach out and ask why. Can’t ask why if it’s not there, I have no reference to the thread in mind.
I’ll always say, forum rules are more like guidelines, and admin can always do whatever they want. But it’s generally a trust thing to enforce explicit rules and minimize handwaving (some amount will always exist, and doesn’t need to be a law book), and when enforcement happens it’s transparent. This is also speaking as a mod of previous forums, occasionally receiving flak for some decisions.
I personally do rarely interact with the moderation team.
And the few times I was in the wrong, it didn’t bother me a lot: I just accepted and moved along.
Overall, no awful experience so far.
I think that maybe the broader issue here are the inconsistencies between the various moderators and how each one of them might deal with the issue in their own way?
You might find Jonah’s takes good but maybe ModA is quite much more unfair in their way of dealing with the issue? ModB is amazing and you love them! But which one will it be today? Roulette.
Inconsistency[1] and unfairness in the 1:1 DM exchanges is probably where things escalate?
And yes sorry but
This doesn’t sound like a responsible and half-decent behavior coming from a moderator.
People cannot improve if they do not have any kind of feedback.
Might be obvious why someone is in the wrong to you, yet the actual person might not get it.
I can also look down at someone and think how stupid they are without providing any kind of constructive feedback. Then once they come back to me and ask how they did, I’ll tell them how awful and rubbish pieces of human being they are.
They won’t be happy + will not even understand what wrong they did.
Both sides lose there just because one was too lazy to even context-ify the wrongdoings.
Deletion concerns
This also fuels the loop of anger when it comes down to moderators needing to delete something again and again. No feedback → another wave of deletion/ban/person leaving/mean interaction.
I mean, let’s not start deleting specific messages either[2], that sounds even more awful of a behavior if we’re honest (even more shadow-y).
It is also next level that on a public forum like this, some people developed this behavior of
Damn, let me quickly backup this thread before it’s deleted so that I do not lose some precious info.
How did we ended up here again?
Assuming that a DM is sent to everybody that wrote in the thread yes.
If only to 1 single person, not that great because all the others will still be confused as of why it disappeared.
As suggested by an active member here, maybe we should take the Qubes approach?
And stop deleting if not critically needed?
“Create a blog” concerns
Let me quickly self-host a Discourse, post a comment there and link it here so that I could reply to you.
I could almost do that to prove a point[3].
Yet quite a lot to ask to your non-developer regular forum visitor indeed.
Overall, the forum doesn’t always need to be starting with an extensive wall of well-researched piece of text.
It can be a discussion starter and ramp up slowly instead.
Some would argue it’s actually even better[4].
Simple example, this one, should I just tell OP how awful, lazy and unprofessional they are posting a quick short question without making a DEEP and thorough research for hours before posting[5]?
Hm, I could yes.
Instead, I am trying to take a more relaxed and patient stance on the topic and link other topics first.
Empathy is important to newcomers.
We should allow people to potentially suggest threads title edits besides OP. Some threads are indeed super nice but hard to find because of their approximate title that got sidetracked[7].
Hence sometimes, having it reflect what’s inside of the topic could be nice[8].
Moreover, we’re not talking about the Do you guys use whonix?-specific thread specifically here, but as a general mood. Since your statement was written from a generic stance, I quote
If you want to make a very long detailed post to share your opinions with people, perhaps consider starting a blog?
And that’s the red flag people are concerned about here[9].
Moderator burnout
I am not sure on how to solve those kind of threads from a moderation/healthy discussion POV myself
Hence I do not really engage in those lengthy text-written discussions, so no huge opinions on that one.
Meanwhile, I do know that burnout is a real thing, especially when dealing with humans and the need to keep things in line over an extended period of time.
I had a few people reply to me privately[10] and saying along the lines of:
“I don’t think we’ll ever get the good old days back…”
“I find a lot of users recently do make this place less chill than, say, a year or two ago”
they feel like this forum is not as nice place to interact with people on anymore
I’m not active (as in non-lurking, actively interacting) with people on this forum for long enough and maybe cannot grasp all of the reasons as of how/why all of this ended up in this situation.
Yet I do think that:
if you spend enough time doing something you do not enjoy fully[11] then you’ll become bitter, more abrasive and less kind
then, why not simply stepping down? PG’s forum is not an open-source project (as in code) where you really need someone that aligns deeply with an overall vision + specific skillset
being somewhat in line with the core values of the team and willing to volunteer for such task might be good enough to maybe help with the moderation?
one simple rule: don't be a di*k and ask us if not sure on how to handle a particular situation would be a great start
fresh blood might be a nice positive to everybody
I think that a few people that recently left would have been fine assisting with the moderation task by offloading some of the load from the few people involved into the current moderation
having more people should be beneficial assuming they’re “upgraded” from their regular user rights based on their contributions on the forum
if the rules/guidelines as of what should be punishable are obvious and publicly understood, being a moderator is mostly a matter of [are you active enough here + being a decent patient person + following simple rules] → good enough outcome for the role
I personally do not have any beef with any moderator, yet I’ve heard a lot of complaints targeted at specific people.
And this feeds the vicious loop of:
people do not like the moderators
people do not want to volunteer or help anyone
bonus : people might divergent and just want to mess around with the team
people join/stick around less because the place is not as cozy[12], hence not injecting any positive behavior into the loop
moderators become more sour by the day (hence back step 1.)
If nothing breaks this loop, we will indeed have more stress + load + angry people and the forum will hence become emptier by the day.
Let’s maybe fix the situation before we end up there?
PS: posted a chonker reply but given that we do have a 4 hours cooldown now, I feel like it’s a decent way of replying down here. Hopefully it’s well structured enough for everybody.
just saw that it was already mentioned above actually ↩︎
…but since it’s a tiny bit passive-aggressive, I’ll just behave as a grown-up and behave properly without wasting my time doing childish things like that ↩︎
especially if you got your wings burnt once by having a chonky message deleted. Fine if it’s a platform/tool bug but hey, as someone keeping a lot of stuff in “drafts” here, I can attest that Discourse is actually very good at keeping things properly backed up here, it’s not as awful as Notion ↩︎
especially given all the similar questions posted a few days ago on the same topic. Or the recurring VPS provider one maybe? ↩︎
been there with such enabled rights on another platform, oh boy it creates a very toxic place that people do not like hanging around on if not forced to ↩︎
side tracking is an entirely different problem, I might be part of the problem myself sometimes with my ADHD-enabled rabbit holing behavior here, but hey you’re currently reading this in some details + footnotes so I guess it’s half-disruptive of the main flow, hence keep scrolling nothing to see here ↩︎
while at the same time, keeping the link intact by having some aliases/redirects to not break the SEO/references from other places. Again, the technical aspect here is probably not the issue given that Discourse has a good plugin ecosystem as a whole ↩︎
People will (sadly) realize that it’s actually the most sustainable and stable way to do things, but we’ll also lose quite a few voices down the road with that one unfortunately. ↩︎
and not really willing to voice their concerns publicly here, which is totally fine ↩︎
Having read this thread, there is one thing that should somewhat also be highlighted is that while I was a lurker for the past 2 years, there were many other people on here contributing well. A lot of great info and commentary on things.
But I too have noticed several people leaving and it can only seem indicative of moderation issues. Of course, we don’t know why they all left but the timing of it all reasonably implies some correlation but I can’t prove it. These are just powers of observation.
One thing I am sure of is that moderation is not consistent. It is an issue. Same rules are not always applied to all 100% of the time. Only having 4 paid staff is just not enough for PG. And there needs to be new additions to forum rules of having zero tolerance policy if a user uses certain words and denigrates others in their comment (no matter how regular of a member they are).
Again, considering the activity on this thread and support for and from many feeling the same way given the reactions, PG should take a step back and recalibrate how they want to keep functioning and operating an online discourse that’s far superior from many other places to keep it there.
I’ve only lurked for a few years prior to becoming a member just recently, and I haven’t run into any issues with the mods, so I can’t speak to the negative experiences with mods and deleted threads.
However, I want to add a viewpoint to this:
I’m not so sure that the moderation is the core source of it. If anything, I generally find them well-reflected and fair, especially considering how many of them are volunteers, and the other tasks I imagine are on the tables of the small paid team parallel to having this forum.
Rather, I resonate with this sentiment:
My experience as a whole is that in the past half a year in particular, there’s been an uptick in cluttered threads, personal antagonism, bad faith reading, and less good-will in general, even if I also see users actively trying to counteract it (which I truly commend). It can feel off-putting to participate, and I’ve seen a number of users deactivate their accounts after negative interactions with other (non mod) users.
I don’t think the request for more transparency from the mods is unreasonable, and I also recognise instances where mods can come off short. But I want to speak against pinning this solely on the mods and admins; that feels off-target for actually resolving the forum’s broader tensions.
On Jonah's ask
I just agreed with the point that it didn’t feel very constructive, in the spirit of the discussion of admin/mod influence of discourse; as others pointed out, it was merely an example. I’m genuinely sorry if my like came across as part of a mob mentality or a criticism of your character.
To be completely honest, it is very difficult to have a roughly aligned moderation practice, even with a one-foot thick prolicy and guideline, it is very difficult to align everyone’s
tolerance on languages (native speakers might have lower tolerance given their deeper understanding and higher sensitivity on their native language),
immediate judgement on subjects
understanding and interpretation of different values (esp. freedom of expressions) because of different culture and personal history
Also, moderators being human will have some natural bias, and enforcing zero tolerance without considering the context of the posts or the thread, would more likely causing more damage than improving the atmosphere, because of the difficulties I mentioned above.
TBH moderation is more like a customer service / PR job, not police nor judge.
I am against people asking for tighter controls, I am also against putting too much duties on moderators, esp. expect them to work on multiple levels at the same time. Different levels require slightly different mindset, mixing them up is problematic.
PS: I wanted to edit my previous message with some more context but apparently, edits on previous posts are also subject to the 4 hours cooldown, hence be careful when it comes down to making tyops.
Heads up for people posting down below (not sure if mistake or on purpose).
I know that some platforms do some actual elections every year to onboard some new people and have a vote, here is an example: https://stackoverflow.com/election/16
Not sure but maybe this could be a good idea in case of somebody willing to stand forward and become an extra volunteer moderator so that way we get the seal of approval from the community (democracy).
Some might join back to give some of the reasons. They’re still considering if its worth their time.
I do agree with you, yet you and me have not experienced any issues with any moderators so it’s hard for us to judge if we’re never been in that position.
Normal people do not complain about cops in their city, until the cops start bothering them. Now, the question would be: are the cops are bit too tight or were the citizens doing something not so great, that’s a totally different topic whatsoever.
But again yes, the difference here is that the moderators are not paid and do help the forum on their free time. Free (hard) manual labour is not always easy when it becomes draining + piles up.
Noooooo, this is when I joined here.
I guess I missed the golden age?
Still trying to bring positive vibes and some help best as I can nonetheless.
But in the end, the kind of community a place attracts is not something you can fully control I guess.
Moreover, I guess that topics like hacking, privacy and security are prone to attract a specific kind of people? I don’t know myself but we probably have quite a diverse age + culture range across the forum overall.
That’s always the issue with communities in the beginning, you can be met with someone very rude and label the entire community as toxic/lame/immature.
Exactly the same happened to me but I went over it. I can agree that not everybody would persevere to that point unfortunately.
Good thing is, you can always hand pick the users you resonate the most with and converse with them more than with the ones you disagree quite a bunch.
Even better, those disruptive people might just leave the place altogether (happened to me recently) meaning that you do not need go through those Discourse features because they happen to just naturally once bored being detractors on here.
This goes back to the unfortunate vicious loop I described above.
Not sure how much correlation there is between cool people leaving and the moderation situation, but definitely some.
I identify myself here as being in the middle of the pack.
Not blessed with native-english level yet still above the majority (if considering a worldwide community).
I’ve indeed interacted with some people in my life where I thought
Wow, you’re a real di*khead huh!
Then realized that their communication skills are just inferior to a minimal base and allowed for more leash.
On a forum with just a few possible lines, your tone can be greatly misunderstood and you’ll be punished for something you do not even understand.
Still, I guess it’s quite obvious when someone is just here to F around or is clumsy in their paragraph.
Yes. And I’ll add age + needs/boundaries/resources.
Hard to cover all of people’s needs without asking for personal things too.
Yes.
I indeed saw quite some ideas of having double-validations before deleting a post/etc etc, I’m not sure how realistically those are (probably not a lot) but there is definitely a middle ground.
I can meanwhile understand people being angry at unfair decisions/deletions.
Yet everybody here is trying their best to push this whole thing forward, it is mostly just a matter of soft-skill and taking 5 extra seconds before making a decision.
Goes a long way to have patience and take it slow but that again…can only be achieved if people do have more bandwidth, hence more volunteers hence more empathy/will to positively contribute.
A virtuous loop is probably achievable too.
Not sure how but listening/reading further users’ feedback here might help narrow something sustainable and healthy in the long run so that way we’re not having moderation being overwhelmed with gangsters doing parkour on each thread for endless chaos.
I have a couple of examples of bad moderation/illicit community behavior. I’m not sure whether the problem is in the autoflagging system since i believe i was told posts are being automatically hidden if enough people flag them, but regardless:
I think it’s safe to say this forum has a community moderation problem. In this example, the person in question got offended by the mere usage of a word “kek” and “woke“ and mass flagged my replies. Or simply because of the fact i was arguing with him, i’m honestly not sure.
People are obviously power tripping. My general point is that this policing attitude towards conversations alienates people from the forum. People are often hiding posts under the pretext of offensive language while silencing their critics. I’m obviously bad at politics and have decided to quit instead of trying to do something about it.
I remember being done with this forum after i asked some posters to stop recommending to an Iranian guy to try using Wireguard back in January, before the shutdown. People came in and started recommending silly things like trying to use known to be blocked protocols and censorship evasion strategies and i calmly replied to them explaining how they were wrong until one poster told a guy to try to connect using Wireguard, which would’ve provably lead to authoritarian attention towards an Iranian citizen.
I explained to him how his post was very harmful, and that he should rethink his attitude towards engaging in topics he doesn’t know much about since in this example it led to him giving an awful advice.
Mods removed my “heated“ reply and left the harmful post i was replying to. At this point, even if you avoid engaging in topics with people claiming to be offended by the usage of kek and lol, your post will get flagged because you told somebody to be mindful and not post for seemingly just social score points.
Mods aren’t capable of moderating technical conversations and shouldn’t be expected to. Mods shouldn’t police heated conversations. Heated conversation on technical topics are OK.
People should see the whole chains of thoughts. Problematic, controversial replies shouldn’t be hidden just because they rub some people the wrong way. I’m fine with disinformation staying as long as a thread has a qualified reply somewhere in it. Silencing speech is why posting here has become miserable. I can admit to logging in a few times a just to reply to egregious and ragebaiting stuff because of the fact no good conversation survived.
Move the politics and news to the activism category. Prohibit people from signaling their politics in threads with technical topics since it would inevitably lead to politics leaking into the main forum.
I really dislike the attitude of some people and their tendency to mass flag replies and i think that the moderation team should review the past usage of the community flags.
That’s what this thread is about? The mod team has long been on its high horse. I’ve mentioned this in multiple forum posts & DMs to you. You tersely replied to one of them with ‘all mod actions are final’.
I mean, I have been asking for a post that was incorrectly removed by Niek as offtopic for over a year now (on DM which you’re cc’d) without reply.
You’re turning the thread on its head. The case being made here is y’all, the team / the staff / the mods not engaging in good faith, not applying the same rules to your own posts & threads (recently, Jonah posted an ICE-related political thread; but when @maltfieldposted about AI use in the current iteration of the Gulf War resulting in 150+ dead children attending school, it was flagged & removed by @Valynor as “moderators will have a discussion about whether this kind of political post is appropriate for the PG forum”. These discussions, btw, seldom reach any meaningful public-facing conclusions ).
“No answer” is not “an answer”; it breeds ambiguity (“any answer”) and sows distrust.
I think the delayed response feature is great. I support the idea that deletion should only happen in extreme cases.
About ‘go blog somewhere else’:
@jonah - it’s the above: your position makes it a strange public reply.
About forum moderation:
On the PG forum, members labelled ‘Team’ get into the debates with all the regular users, also expressing opinions, mostly for the better, but not always.
In traditional face-to-face debates, a moderator is expected to be
knowledgeable
guides using questions and summary
models a constructive tone
is transparent about rules and consequences
steps in as a disciplinarian with reminders (tone, length, staying on topic)
acts and justifies where necessary (freeze, ban, lock)
In traditional in-person debates, moderators do not
express their own opinion
dismiss someone’s opinion
favour a side of the argument
The adjective ‘moderate’ means “avoiding extremes of behavior or expression” (Merriam-Webster). An online etymology site uses the word ‘restrained’. Moderators not only act to restrain the rabble, but have to be models of restraint, so we can have the best possible discourse.
I don’t know if adopting the traditional moderation model above (i.e. - not express opinion in discussions) would work in an online forum like PG or not. The Team members have a lot of knowledge and insight. I’ve benefited from the Team’s feedback and opinions, and occasionally felt put-off or burned.
Perhaps it could be an idea to focus on the sharing of knowledge, fulfilling traditional moderation roles of guiding by question asking and being transparent about the rules, and show restraint with personal opinion.
That would be a pity for moderators who also want to be users and engage in the debates on PG as users, (and there is no other forum but PG) but having this separation between what it means to be a moderator and a forum member could lead to an improved environment for discussion, and mitigate some of the concerns raised in this topic.
We all want it to see it thrive.
the red flag people are concerned about here
place that people do not like hanging around on if not forced to 
