It has been a principle in most jurisdictions that the law and its application should be public.
What does this mean in practical terms and how would that translate into forum moderation?
What I mean is, All of our laws (rules) and the way that they're applied are made public here:
RF MISSION STATEMENT As a community of diverse cultural and religious backgrounds, our aim is to provide a civil environment, informative, respectful and welcoming where people of diverse beliefs can discuss, compare and debate religion while engaging in fellowship with one another. POLICIES...
www.religiousforums.com
The only part of the process that isn't public is in the reports forum where staff decides whether or not some thing is a violation and what to do about it.
Granting public access to that would be the equivalent of making jury deliberations public, which would run counter to your claim above as these are usually held in private in most civilized countries in the modern world.
Or let's do this:
Here are the steps involved in moderating someone's post:
The post is reported. This part is
private in that no one except the staff knows who made the report.
The staff and decides whether or not the reported post is a rule violation. This is done in
private.
Action is then decided upon in accordance with the progression
publicly outlined here:
RF Rules , although staff may decide to depart from protocol in favor of leniency considering some circumstances, or in favor of taking harsher measures If the situation warrants it: for instance If someone is on a troll rampage in the forums we may skip protocol and restrict their account immediately for damage
control. Those decisions are also made in
private.
The warning or notification is then issued to the member
privately.
If the member chooses to contest warnings or needs clarity about the action they can start a thread in Site Feedback where staff will explain how and why the decision to take the action was arrived at. This goes on in
private between the staff and the member.
So the rules are made
public (in fact one of the boxes people have to check when they register is and acknowledgment that they've read and understand the rules) and the usual protocol for applying the rules is made
public.
All other aspects are kept private. This is as much or more for the sake of the member's privacy.
Now if you would, for the sake of clarity could you go back through all that and tell me which parts in red you think should be made blue.
Personally, it wouldn't bother me if we had the option to make a lot of this public in some cases. For instance: there were several times in my early days on staff where I suggested that anytime a member goes out in the open forums and discusses moderation actions taken against them, we could consider that a declaration that they've waived their right to privacy in this instance and make the deliberations in that particular case public.
What I mean is: hypothetically, If someone goes out into the open forums and says something like, "The staff deleted my post and threatened to ban me because they found out that I'm an Eskimo and the staff is Eskimophonic", we should be able to make the site feedback thread they're referring to public and show everyone that, "No, we deleted your post and threatened to ban you because you were suggesting that people should try and have sex with polar bears (under-aged polar bears at that)."
This idea was always shot down. Instead we have Rule 2. Rule 2 is basically to keep people from lying about us in the open forums. If there were some way to insure that people always told the truth about moderation actions taken against them we wouldn't need that rule.
As far as the rest of what you said: before we can get into a discussion about the benefits of transparency versus obscurity you're going to have to be a little more specific about which obscurities you would like to make transparent.
