Tuesday Topics #9: New Moderation Staff and Forum Integrity Changes

Published by Loren

Learn about our new moderation staff and integrity changes to the forum.

Introduction

Hey everyone, this is Loren from Donut Team and welcome to another Tuesday Topics blog post!

This week, I'd like to announce our new moderation staff and discuss integrity changes to the forum.

New Moderation Staff

We received a lot of applications and, while we had to leave some people out, we appreciate almost everyone who applied (some of you are jokesters...)

Today, after a lot of deliberation, we'd like to give a warm welcome to our new moderation staff members:

You can check out all of their staff profiles on our team page linked below.

Visit the Team Page

Forum Integrity Changes

For a long while now, our forum has had a voting system that allows you to upvote and downvote posts.

The intention behind this system is to promote high-quality posts and demote low-quality ones.

This, however, is often not the case. Instead we've often seen legitimate, but controversial, contributions to conversations be downvoted because people simply disagree which is not how these are intended to be used.

Furthermore, we have also observed a number of posts by certain users being targetted by other users in various instances simply because of bad blood within the community.

Essentially, the ability to downvote posts, while built upon good intentions, largely serves to enable toxicity within the community.

For these reasons, we will soon be removing the ability to downvote posts altogether.

When this change is rolled out, the following will happen:

  • The upvote button will be renamed to "Like".
  • The downvote button will be removed.
  • All requests to our servers to add post votes will be treated as positive votes.
  • All existing downvotes will be kept but ignored by all parts of the website.
  • All post vote totals and user vote totals will be recalculated to only account for positive votes (now "Likes").

Conclusion

Thanks for reading another one of our Tuesday Topics posts! See you again next week.

- Loren from Donut Team

P.S.: Borb was at work so they deputized Soleil to pick this week's song instead.