Mod Permission Proposal: Approving BURs.

I've been noticing that more and more implications, aliases, and BURs are just being autorejected by the bot. I discussed this with nonamethanks and he proposed this.

nonamethanks said:

How about giving mods the right to approve BURs, even not directly (ie, if two mods approve a request then it works as if an admin approved it)? Because otherwise with autorejecting requests the situation has become unmanageable.

In the past one of the reasons to not do that was to not close the gap between mods and admins even further, but it's either that or not having BURs/Implications/Aliases approved anymore.

I'm thinking this could be a good idea, but I would change it from two mods having to approve the BUR to three.

+1 I agree that the current situation is untenable. For myself at least, three Moderator+ accounts would probably be the better route.

I would like @albert to give his opinion since he's the only one who can change permissions.

Obvious +1 from me. Not sure about the "three mods" thing though - keep in mind our mod team too is pretty much decimated at the moment, there's very few active mods.

I'm not sure if we even have two mods active enough to deal with this, let alone three. Only a handful of mods are active at all, and hardly any participate in the forum.

Frankly, the site has suffered from a serious lack of leadership ever since jxh2154 stepped down. It's a deeper problem than just BURs not being handled. Decision making in general has become extremely difficult. Even basic things like dealing with spammers, promoting users, and replacing posts aren't getting done in a timely manner.

evazion said:
Frankly, the site has suffered from a serious lack of leadership ever since jxh2154 stepped down. It's a deeper problem than just BURs not being handled. Decision making in general has become extremely difficult. Even basic things like dealing with spammers, promoting users, and replacing posts aren't getting done in a timely manner.

This is honestly a big problem. Replacements are currently being handled only by a single person.

Before @Shinjidude showed up out of nowhere we went for something like four months without unrestricted/builder promotions, too.

We can always ask for more staff. People come and go by all the time. We just need someone trustworthy and less likely to abuse their powers like rantuyetmai once did. But as always, the final decisions are left to albert.

evazion said:

Frankly, the site has suffered from a serious lack of leadership ever since jxh2154 stepped down. It's a deeper problem than just BURs not being handled. Decision making in general has become extremely difficult. Even basic things like dealing with spammers, promoting users, and replacing posts aren't getting done in a timely manner.

Yeah, I'm really sorry about that, guys. Real life has been hectic enough for the past year or so that I barely have any time to visit danbooru at all, let alone handle the admin responsibilities; and it will continue for at least 4 more months, until I switch jobs and cities, and maybe further as well. I'll try my best to allocate some time, but can't guarantee anything at all, so I'll accept demotion if necessary.

As for BURs, not to sound conceited, but splitting the responsibility between 2+ people might not be the best idea. Not because we don't have them, but because unilateral decision makes you actually think before approval, since incorrect implication request can cause some mayhem that will be a pain in the ass to revert.

Type-kun said:

As for BURs, not to sound conceited, but splitting the responsibility between 2+ people might not be the best idea. Not because we don't have them, but because unilateral decision makes you actually think before approval, since incorrect implication request can cause some mayhem that will be a pain in the ass to revert.

BURs decided unilaterally is currently something done by admins, all of which are not very active. The proposal is to add similar permissions to mods but watered down since we can have many more mods than admins.

Regarding my situation: My workplace has been perpetually understaffed since 2016, leaving me to juggle between 2-3 different jobs. I consider it a good day if I get to leave by 10 PM; nowadays I'm leaving closer to 11 or even midnight as my workload increases, especially with the Christmas crunch time. After eating, showering, and catching up on bills and housework, I have to get to bed or else I'll be falling asleep at work.

I apologize for my sporadic updates and prolonged absences. Fingers crossed, but tomorrow I should have some time to catch up on the backlog of unread forum topics and pending BURs.

I've got limited connectivity at the moment due to an ISP issue (so sorry for my inactivity over the last couple of weeks), but I figured I might weigh in on this. I agree that having one decision-maker Admin was the best approach when it was a possibility, it allowed for an unambiguous decision to be made presumably after weighing the discussion and carefully considering the implications for the site in general. Having one decision maker at a rank above all the others also sort of cuts down on dissent or squabbling since that decision is more or less final.

Giving unilateral decision-making ability to the Mods, while perhaps good as there's a better chance of decisions being made, is slightly problematic given that there are several of us, and no one really outranks anyone else (this is true of the Admins now too, but less of an issue). Furthermore, we don't always agree on the right path forward. That could lead to problems as Type-kun is suggesting. In years past everything was consensus based, but that requires someone or something to decide when that consensus is firm enough to be ruled on, traditionally that'd be the active Admin at the time.

This would be further development, so I'm not sure how reasonable it is, but what would happen if in the absence of an Admin decision with X days, a matter gets opened as a poll to the moderators who could then weigh in (or have their vote transferred from the parent post if it exists there), we'd then need say some threshold (maybe 2 or 3 mod votes to pass something)? It would still give the Admins unilateral rights initially to trump the Mods, and avoid one Mod (or whatever threshold -1 ) as having unilateral power in themselves for these decisions.

I can let moderators approve (with a minimum threshold of two approvals), but is this just pushing the problem back? Has the pool of moderators generally been active enough?

I suppose the alternative is recruiting new admins and mods. Given a lot of behind the scenes drama that's been going on, this is a proposition that makes me nervous.

I've also been wanting to make these topics more accessible to general users who browse the site by linking pertinent forum topics in tag searches. I think the database could easily handle this load now. But I'm not sure if people would appreciate a bunch of newcomers flooding a topic to pitch in their two cents.

There should also probably be post count thresholds. Something like:

• Total <100 posts affected: one mod approval needed
• 100...10k posts affected: two mod approvals needed
• 10k+...100k: three mod approvals needed
• 100k+: admin approval needed

albert said:

I can let moderators approve (with a minimum threshold of two approvals), but is this just pushing the problem back? Has the pool of moderators generally been active enough?

I suppose the alternative is recruiting new admins and mods. Given a lot of behind the scenes drama that's been going on, this is a proposition that makes me nervous.

Besides RaisingK I can't really name any mod I'd call "active". Actually every single one of them besides him (before Shinjidude got somehow active again last month) is pretty much either in the sidelines or retired now - a heavy hit was Wypa going missing, as he was the only one who actively promoted people for a long time. EB and OOZ662 are sometimes reachable for promotions and bans but it's a gamble with low chance of success most of the time.

I've also been wanting to make these topics more accessible to general users who browse the site by linking pertinent forum topics in tag searches. I think the database could easily handle this load now. But I'm not sure if people would appreciate a bunch of newcomers flooding a topic to pitch in their two cents.

I think it's a good idea to have requests be visible from the search - I doubt anyone will mind users chiming in with valid opinions, given how rare it is to see newcomers in the forums at all. In fact there's to consider the opposite risk - having an echo chamber effect if it's only the usual builders talking to each other.

I'd like to apologize for being mostly inactive as well. My schedule got progressively busier and I've typically just been zombied out during what spare time I've had. I've been meaning to improve my activity on the site of late, but it certainly wouldn't be an amount that would resolve this current problem.

Shinjidude said:

I agree that having one decision-maker Admin was the best approach when it was a possibility, it allowed for an unambiguous decision to be made presumably after weighing the discussion and carefully considering the implications for the site in general. Having one decision maker at a rank above all the others also sort of cuts down on dissent or squabbling since that decision is more or less final.

This sums up how I feel. Under jxh we basically had the benevolent dictator model. It's hard to make progress when we don't have some final authority to make a decision when consensus fails.

I think it's fine to have a way to fast track approval for simple requests, but it's still important to have higher ups who can make decisions when we don't have full consensus. It's also important to be able to deal with bigger picture issues that go beyond isolated alias/implication requests.

This would be further development, so I'm not sure how reasonable it is, but what would happen if in the absence of an Admin decision with X days, a matter gets opened as a poll to the moderators who could then weigh in (or have their vote transferred from the parent post if it exists there), we'd then need say some threshold (maybe 2 or 3 mod votes to pass something)? It would still give the Admins unilateral rights initially to trump the Mods, and avoid one Mod (or whatever threshold -1 ) as having unilateral power in themselves for these decisions.

The easiest thing to do would be, instead of autorejecting requests when they expire, autoapprove them if they meet certain requirements. So if a request hits X number of upvotes (and few if any downvotes), it would be immediately be put into a "this request will be approved in one week" mode. An admin could still veto it before it's autoapproved.

One issue though is that "no-brainer" requests (things like artist name changes, or <color>_item -> item implications) often don't get many votes from anyone. Usually because they're so obvious that people don't care or feel the need to vote. So I'm not sure how much this would help in practice.

albert said:

I've also been wanting to make these topics more accessible to general users who browse the site by linking pertinent forum topics in tag searches. I think the database could easily handle this load now. But I'm not sure if people would appreciate a bunch of newcomers flooding a topic to pitch in their two cents.

More participation wouldn't hurt, but I don't think a lack of participation among regular users is the problem. It's a lack of participation among admins. Frankly, I've mostly stop bothering to participate in the forum because it's become a waste of time. It's pointless to discuss things when you know the discussion will go nowhere.

I don't think I'm the only one who feels this way either. I've noticed other forum regulars becoming less active too. It starts from the top and trickles down. So while I think bringing in more users couldn't hurt, I don't think it will make the process faster either.

I appreciate that everyone has real life priorities outside Danbooru, and that dealing with Danbooru can be very time consuming, especially when it comes to longwinded arguments over minor tagging issues. I get it. But the reality is that whatever the reasons, things aren't being handled, and that's a problem.

evazion said:

The easiest thing to do would be, instead of autorejecting requests when they expire, autoapprove them if they meet certain requirements. So if a request hits X number of upvotes (and few if any downvotes), it would be immediately be put into a "this request will be approved in one week" mode. An admin could still veto it before it's autoapproved.

One issue though is that "no-brainer" requests (things like artist name changes, or <color>_item -> item implications) often don't get many votes from anyone. Usually because they're so obvious that people don't care or feel the need to vote. So I'm not sure how much this would help in practice.

I’d say once the users regularly browsing the forum know that democracy mode is on and voting not only does something but is actually required to get stuff done, we’ll see more votes on BURs and the no-brainer ones you mentioned will quickly have their quota fulfilled.

evazion said:

The easiest thing to do would be, instead of autorejecting requests when they expire, autoapprove them if they meet certain requirements. So if a request hits X number of upvotes (and few if any downvotes), it would be immediately be put into a "this request will be approved in one week" mode. An admin could still veto it before it's autoapproved.

One issue though is that "no-brainer" requests (things like artist name changes, or <color>_item -> item implications) often don't get many votes from anyone. Usually because they're so obvious that people don't care or feel the need to vote. So I'm not sure how much this would help in practice.

I don't think anything should be automatically approved if it has any downvotes at all, no matter how many upvotes it has. This includes downvotes received after reaching the upvote threshold. Quite often a suggestion that looks good on the surface can garner quite a few upvotes before anyone points out the flaw with it.

You would also then need some sort of system in place to stop people abusing it.

And of course the admins would still need to browse the site more - indeed if they have only a week to check things then they would need to be a lot more active than is required by the current system.

It's a nice idea in principle, but as I type I get less and less enthusiastic about it.