Make moderator messages anonymous

There is another reason to change this: the single name below the message sometimes gives the impression that the suspension was a lone decision by that moderator. While many suspensions are decided by a single moderator, those are usually the completely obvious cases. In any of the more complicated cases multiple moderators are often involved, and sometimes a few SE employees as well.

In a few moderator messages I've explicitly added all the other moderators to the signature as well, because we all decided it together and we knew that the users would complain about the suspension.

Signing the messages with "moderation team" could help to avoid the impression some suspended users have that a single moderator is "harassing" them.

I think there's something pretty important to say about the opinions that folks have expressed here, none of them are wrong.

I also want to let everyone know that we're giving this very careful consideration, and should have a decision by the end of this week. The way that our sites are moderated by the communities that they serve has always been an amazing and rather rare balance; we're determined to keep that balance while adapting to the way that the world, particularly people that use the Internet, behave.

I want to take a moment and distill out what I see to be the roots of the concerns here on both sides. When you boil it down, essentially, well, people want to feel safe, and they should feel safe. That amazing balance of moderation that I spoke of earlier is precisely what makes our sites some of the safest places for civilized discourse on the Internet.

Moderators shouldn't be abused for doing the strictly volunteer work that they do, and the incidents of this happening is on an alarming and sharp incline. It's going to get worse, and we need to do something about that. We can't fix the fact that people behave like jerks online, but for the people that give us so much of their time and take so much flack for it, we will not leave any stone unturned in order to support them.

On the other hand, as I mentioned, everyone needs to feel safe. Knowing that should you have an unpleasant or unprofessional encounter with a moderator that you're able to take the situation into your own hands makes you feel safe. It gives you some degree of control over how much authority you'll take. Just like you could really let those bozos at Buy Lots know you mean business with 20,000 shares on Facebook after they bait-and-switched you.

But that's the thing. The people that have caused this to come to a head never attacked us as a company, they attacked the people that volunteer their time to make sure our sites stay great. So there is quite a bit of merit into seeing what we can do in order to steer abusive outbursts back on us by default - and this might be the best way to do that.

We don't know yet, but the minute we do, we'll let everyone know. This is a tough spot for all of us to be in, none of us asked for it and it's super damn unfortunate that this is now a 'thing'. But we're going to take everyone's interests to heart, and quite seriously, and see what we can do.

I'm unlocking this now, please be good to one another, especially right now.

I agree with this and I specifically disagree with Telkitty's view that this removes "taking responsibility with your actions".

Our community moderators don't run for re-election. They're volunteers and we have placed trust in them. In cases of genuine mistakes, they generally come forward on meta. In cases where it really is necessary, the SE staff can see what they're doing. We're not talking about people who on any regular or consistent basis would maliciously abuse power.

By any reasonable metric, the kind of person who becomes a moderator is someone who is very responsible and has no issue with accepting mistakes if they make them.

There is no information that is lost by removing the name. For the vast, vast majority of people, the moderators are seen as a whole anyways. To have them face harassment over other channels or force them into hiding as much information of themselfes as possible is in my opinion highly unnecessary.

This isn't about accountability, every moderator decision is subject to public scrutiny at all times, and the team always knows which moderators did it.

I agree with this notion; you're doing your duty and you shouldn't be subject to harassment of any kind in the process of that.

However, I wonder if it's fair to take it a few steps further.

I'm no lawyer, but I would imagine if someone were to go to the level of harassing one's social media account(s) and ultimately be beholden to the level of cyberstalking, that should come with a bit more legal bite to it as well. (Note: this is already an option.) I would say that the user doing that sort of thing isn't the kind of person that we want in this community at all, so I would hope for their permanent removal as well.

I've never had to receive a moderator message (that I can recall anyway), and I personally would not wish to lash out against a moderator individually anyhow, but it makes sense to anonymize these messages. No sense in introducing the risk of abuse.

One thing to keep in mind is that sometimes it is useful to have the moderator message come from an SE employee. This has come in handy for us on Workplace several times.

I agree with the sentiment here, however, so my recommendation is to make the message come from "The moderation team" when sent by a non-employee site moderator but allow SE employees/CMs to send this message as themselves should they choose.

Also, it would be useful for other moderators to be able to see who sent messages.

Yes, agree with your points. Moderators becomes open and soft target for such users and specifically suspended users. Moderation is not an easy task, they have to take strict decision against some wrong actions. Their words may sound strict at first but what they are conveying is not pointless at all. So, this is what brings all moderators in a risk where they can be directly or indirectly abused in one or more ways,

• From social media profiles
• Their website or blogs
• By editing any stackoverflow post
• By downvoting post (specifically questions)
• ...

In moderator private message it should be common name like Stack Overflow Moderator and even more not keeping it only up to name we can have common moderator profile like Community where all the stuff can be described.

I think this only makes sense as an opt-in from the moderator that wishes to write the message. The thing is, this veil of anonymity is probably not going to work very well.

I've seen this in action with Impraise, where all of the feedback you receive is free-text, but you do not "know" who wrote what. In reality, it's usually pretty trivial to tell. There is science behind that: this talk claims that even with something as dry as source code, even when you ignore the variable names and only look at the structure of the code of the program you write, even when you make it obfuscated, a computer is able to attribute who wrote what between a pool of 20 authors or so with 80% accuracy in the worst case scenario.

In other words, unless you pick a template and don't touch it, you're not going to be "anonymous."

I would suggest that if you feel uncomfortable at all contacting a user — that's what other moderators and community managers are off. A veil of anonymity is probably only going to give you a sense of false security and the receiving user a burning urge to discover who wrote what rather than focus on the message that has been received.