Forum:SH:Discussions Moderators and blocking rights

I wanted to take some time to talk about blocking rights as they relate to Discussions. Currently, the only Discussions Moderator here with the ability to block people is ChristopherLeeGallant, which the wiki allowed in a vote last year. As you can see in that thread, it’s the view of the admin team that the Discussions community is a wholly separate and independent entity from the wiki. As a result, because blocks apply to the wiki and Discussions, the approach has been to ask, why should a moderator be able to block someone on the wiki too if they are from a separate community?

It’s not standard functionality for Discussions Moderators to have blocking rights. We’ve found that it’s largely not necessary. Other communities either have admins who are involved with Discussions and can take care of blocks, or have otherwise set up a system with the admins to be able to report problematic behavior and have it dealt with swiftly. Either way, there’s collaboration and coordination. This collaboration and coordination doesn’t exist here because of the feeling that Discussions is its own thing.

To that end, this thread is meant to open up a dialogue on how to move forward. The wiki and Discussions both fall under the starwars.wikia.com domain, hence why blocks apply on both because it’s a domain-level action, and the status quo as it exists today is not an option given that there are 5 moderators who don’t have the ability to handle blocks.

Here are the options we can see for moving forward:


 * 1) Option 1: FANDOM gives the Discussions Moderators the ability to block users, so they can handle those issues without admins needing to be involved.
 * 2) Option 2: The admins become involved in the Discussions community and handle blocking proactively as members of that community.
 * 3) Option 3: A few admins are chosen from different time zones to be the point persons for the Discussions Moderators in reporting users needing to be blocked, such as by joining the Discord server that the Discussions Moderators and community use for quick communication. The door for collaboration was left a bit open from the CT where Christopher was given blocking rights.

I do need to be clear that we will be going with one of those options regardless of any editor or admin disinterest in Discussions, but we didn't want to mandate one over another. As we continue to build Discussions and as it becomes an even more prominent part of the FANDOM experience throughout this year, resolving this question is a must and it's something we'd like to do now rather than later. So this thread is for discussing these options and seeing what people prefer. - Brandon Rhea (talk) 22:29, July 5, 2018 (UTC)