Moderator Guidelines

Congratulations! You are a Tŵt Moderator. Thank you for volunteering and for investing your time and energy into making Tŵt a community-driven resource.

If you click on Preferences you’ll see a new section called Moderation. Let's look at four of the options: Mod Audit, Accounts, Reports, and Invites.

Mod Audit

Mod Audit shows you every action any moderator has taken from newest to oldest.

Invites

This section lists community members who have used the Invite feature. Members who are abusing this invitation link (i.e. spamming) can have their invitation link removed here.

Accounts

The Accounts page is where you can find information on specific accounts.

On each account’s page you can see how many reports they’ve filed and how many have been filed against them.

On an individual account page, you can take several actions:

Remove Avatar

Use this if a person’s avatar breaks the rules.

Change Email

This changes the email address associated with an account. You should only do this at the explicit request of the user, and only when you can verify that you’re talking to the person who actually owns the account. If you cannot verify the user, escalate the request to @jaz

Disable Login

Logs the user out and prevents them from logging in again. Use this as a temporary ban.

Silence

Prevent a user’s posts from reaching the local timeline. Please get input from the mod team before silencing any individual.

Suspend

Never use this! Only suspend a user as a very last resort, with approval from an Admin, and always do it from a report, never from the account page.

Reset Password

Sends the user a password reset email. Use this if you believe an account has been compromised or if the user has requested it.

Leave Note

This lets you leave a note on the account directly, not associated with a given report. This is handy for allowing future moderators to see your note.

Reports

The Reports queue is where you’ll spend most of your time. It’s a list of reports made to or from your instance. By default you’ll only see unresolved reports.

You can see reports from two sources: local and remote. Local reports are from users on our instance, and can be about anybody on the fediverse.

Remote reports are from users on other instances, and are only about users on our instance. Reports that come from other instances are anonymized. They do not have the username of the reporting user attached to them.

When you see a report from another instance, you will only see the name of the instance from which the report was issued. If you need more information ask an Admin to contact that remote instance’s Admin.

When you view an individual report, you can see who filed the report and whom the report is about. If the report is from a remote instance, you’ll just see the instance’s name; if the report is about a remote user, you’ll see everything – but your options will be limited. You can also see the text of the report (if the reporting user filled that out) as well as any toots associated with the report.

An individual report gives you the following potential actions:

Resolve report

This will just mark the report resolved, with no note left or action taken against the reported user. Typically, instead of this, you want to use…

Resolve with note

This resolves the report, but lets you leave a note saying why you resolved it. This is the most common action for many moderators.

Add note

Use this if you want to leave a note but don’t want to resolve the report outright. If you want to leave the report open because you want a second opinion, here’s where to leave your notes.

The behavior of the next set of tools varies depending on whether the user is local or remote.

Local Users

Add sensitive-content overlay to toot

Select one or more toots using the checkboxes to the left, then click Mark as sensitive at the top of the list of toots. This will add the “Sensitive Content” overlay to any images attached to the toot. It will not add a content warning to the toot.

Delete individual toot

Select one or more toots using the checkboxes to the left, then click Delete at the top of the list of toots. This will remove the toot from the database.

Silence user

Prevents the user from posting to the local timeline and from appearing in the notifications of local users who aren’t following the user. Silencing someone doesn’t prevent them from posting – but only the people who follow them will see their content. However, their posts will still federate out normally.

Suspend user

Don’t use this unless you mean it. This will delete all the data from the user’s account. All their followers, all the people they’re following, all their posts, all their media. Reserve this for spammers and for people who are flagrantly breaking the rules.

Remote Users

Add sensitive-content overlay to toot

Select one or more toots using the checkboxes to the left, then click Mark as sensitive at the top of the list of toots. This will add the “Sensitive Content” overlay to any images attached to the toot. This only affects this particular copy of the toot. Copies on other instances are unaffected.

Delete individual toot

Select one or more toots using the checkboxes to the left, then click Delete at the top of the list of toots. This will remove the toot from our database, but it will not affect other instances’ copies of the toot, and it can be re-added to the local instance if someone else on your instance boosts it or interacts with it.

Silence user

This will prevent the user’s posts from appearing on our federated timeline and in the notifications of people on your instance who don’t follow them. Anyone who follows the user can still see their posts and interact with them.

Suspend user

This will forcibly remove the user from all of your timelines. It will force anyone on your instance who is following that user to unfollow them, and prevent them from ever showing up to anyone on your instance. Use this only when necessary, but you can be a little freer with it than with a local suspension, because other than unfollowing it’s non-destructive.

If you’re tempted to suspend a local user, instead consider: go to their account page. Under their email status you’ll see a Login Status line, and at the far right you’ll see “Disable”. Click “disable”, and then add a note to the report and leave it open. This will prevent them from logging in and posting any further, but won’t destroy their account like a suspension does. This lets you consider the issue, or confer with other moderators, and decide what to do about it.

If you can’t figure out why someone was reported, if what was reported doesn’t break your rules, or if the situation is better dealt with by one user blocking or muting the other, use Resolve With Note.

Spam

A common position in the fediverse is that you should be a person, not a brand.

However, we specifically allow Welsh brands that are promoting Welsh content, Wales, the Welsh language, or the Welsh diaspora. If an account is engaging with the user base and it’s obvious there’s a human being who is engaged with the community, it might be best to leave them alone. Examples are S4C, Parallel.cymru, WRU, Halen Môn – all these companies would be welcome on our community -unless- they spam the timeline with promotional content. In this context, spam means more than one promotional toot per hour.

Two notes to companies/brands:

  1. If cross-posting from your other social media accounts please only cross-post original content, do not cross-post your retweets etc.
  2. Feel free to make a personal account and a separate bot account, and use the bot account for cross-posting.

Adapted from “So You’re A Mastodon Moderator” by CMNoelle@mastodon.social, September 2018_