report confidentiality (split from another thread)

MOD NOTE: independent post copied and edited to start the thread

my city now

Or, more tactfully, I'm inserting this post to stand as OP to decrease distress and give the conversation a slightly, slightly more neutral/less personal home.

 

How's using the report feature to berate me in secret for clicking the "like" button on a Jewish person defending themself from incoherent anti-Semitism?

You wouldn't know that the phrase "you should be ashamed of yourself" is triggering as hell, but then I doubt you'd care either.

I'm out, just like you wanted. Good job hero.

 

Rigs, when you were a mod and I wasn't, you were wiggled from my caring void thread for being a dismissive ass about my sincere emotional distress. I don't really want to go into context or backstory, or whether your post was justified, and I don't care at all about apologies. It would have been really easy for you just to ignore the post, or even ignore my whole thread, but you absolutely had to directly communicate how much you didn't care.

My main point is that it's really weird to see you wagging your finger so hard over how shameful it is that mods aren't extending infinite patience to a forum user.

 

My god, rigs. This has been established. People can talk about their own void threads, mods aren't supposed to disclose from *other people's* void threads. This has come up before, and i got a sanity check that I wasn't doing something inappropriate before I posted that.

 

I saw your post in my thread, and it then disappeared from my thread, which is absolutely not a move you would have made, given the circumstances. It's not that complicated.

 

You sanctimonious tool, things are only bought up here after they're mentioned by the non-mod participants.

 

I'm thinking to split the confidentiality-of-reports thing out to a separate thread because it's actually a substantive question. I have a number of nice easy heuristics about confidentiality/privacy/etc in this situation, which are in conflict.

 

initial evaluation: we don't have all that clear or consistent a policy about this.

in general, i have treated "things which are posted or submitted as posts to the open forums, but which mods decide should be wiggled" as not especially confidential, because if you intended a thing to be publically posted, it seems silly to complain that it's being talked about.

the identities of reporters, and specifics of reports, are in general moderately-confidential, but it's less obvious how that applies in the case where a report is specifically made against a mod, who will have access to reports; in that case, i don't think there's much of an expectation that the person whose post was reported won't be aware of the report. and honestly, i don't think we've had many if any previous cases where a question about disclosing the identity of a reporter did not involve the person whose post was reported wanting to know, so i've never even *thought* about that.

we also have an overrarching rule that we tend to have low regard for things which look like "playing silly buggers", such as using subaccounts or alternate accounts to get around no-contact requests; in general, if treating a thing with the usual level of confidentiality would enable abusive behavior, we are likely to say "well, okay, but in this case...". (less so with "things posted in caring void", which gets an additional layer of confidentiality because that's its specific purpose.)

I am not in a good place to be trying to figure out how to untangle this right now, this is just notes for future consideration if I someday have time.