Moderating Religious Discussion

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It is my opinion that MG should be a place free of judgement. it should be a place where muslim gamers can hang out without fear. For this reason, after talking with @ashes999 earlier today… we have a choice before us

Psuedonymous Plugin

I am going to make a custom discourse plugin that will anonymize posts in the religious section. I haven’t figured out exactly (technically) how I will go about that, but the theory is to just replace the username and avatar with anonimized versions. The idea is that while arguments may erupt, they can never spill over to other topics or categories because of the anonymity. However, if you get warned and banned, its not JUST from the religious section. The best way to get outed is by getting banned.

Ashes’s Idea

Leave everything as is. Anonymity is a gateway to trolling and general bad behavior, because people will hid behind it.

  • Psuedonymous
  • normal

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@abrarsyed I think you should update the poll, because you did not do justice to the length and breadth of options we discussed.

For everyone else: the goal of MG as far as Islam is to provide two things:

  1. A place to just hang out with other Muslims who happen to like games
  2. A place where you can say stuff, ask, answer, etc. without being judged.

As far as #2, we discussed an array of options. The ones I remember now include:

  • Total Openness. You post everything as yourself, and it’s up to the community not to say bad/mean things to you or judge you.
  • Partial Anonymity: Someone (I volunteered) can be that person you email to post anonymously on your behalf. My wife claims this worked really well with a large sisters-only FB group that dealt with very sensitive topics (including marriage and intra-marital abuse).
  • Total Anonymity: We somehow obscure the avatars and names of people in that specific forum.

Personally, I’ve only ever seen anonymity increase people in how vulgar they can be (nobody knows who they are) – there’s lots of research to back this, but just read any comment section on a pro-Islam article at a major news site.

Also, the level of anonymity will be pretty thin. IMO, that opens up a lot of cans of worms, but doesn’t provide much benefit.

Ultimately, Abrar agreed to experiment and see what works best. This poll is for the initial consultation + implementation.

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Partial anonymity, while seemingly promising, will become a logistical challange in an environment which depends on part-time, unpaid volunteers. We would need a scalable strategy for dealing with such a load should we pursue this.

In all cases I do not recommend total anonymity, even with punitive measures. Like Ashes, I have only seen anonymity encourage vular, troll-like behavior. As much as I’d like to believe that Muslims are different (we should be) I would only set my self up for disappointment.

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Secondary poll, after peoples arguments above:

  • Psuedonymous
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I think my opinion falls in line with ashes’ arguments. We’ve discussed this and I agree that anonymity is a gateway to trolling. Especially if an unwanted member joins and finds that forum. They would be able to post and troll and no one would know who it was until moderated (I assume). I like partial anonymity but like Wulf said, it would be a logistical challenge. I think we could use the plugin some other way (so install it and keep it for another time) but people are more careful about sensitive subjects when they know they are being watched.

Also, as a side question, when we gonna start gettin mo people up in herr? No one responds to my posts lol.

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@rocketfiq Abrar wants to launch MG around Eid time (not on this side of Eid). That’s the latest I heard (as of yesterday).

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I didn’t say anything regarding volunteers :stuck_out_tongue:
That was Rec.

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yeah public upon eid… doesnt mean you cant invite people though

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Oh lol. How do I invite again? I need to find a small bunch of good brothers to bring into the fold.

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its somewhere in your profile page I think

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Yea I found it. Its in preferences.

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oh I forgot to mention, there is another thing I was planning to do regarding religious discussion…

You guys know how Trust Levels work in discourse? it has to do with community activity. The more posts and loves and stuff you get, at some point you get promoted up to the next trust level. The idea is that you are actually gaining the trust of the community the more you interact. AT some point, you actually start getting limited moderation abilities to aid the site admins with moderating the community. The ability to move posts between categories I think is one of those powers.

I propose to lock of the religious discussion to a specific category, that is only accessible to a certain trust level (2?) and above. I hope that this, in conjunction with the anonymity thing will ensure civil discussion. There is always the flagging and standard moderation system to fall back on. This also furthers a my idea that this is a gaming forum first, that just happens to be populated with Muslims. It would require that people talk a certain amount about games (or just not pure religion) for a while before being able to engage in purely religious topics.

I would also like to make it clear that the religious section is for matters of pure religion, fiqh, questions, etc. stuff like the halalness of games is fine to be discussed in other categories…

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Wait are we still thinking about using the anonymity plugin for the religion forum? I thought we were going to keep things open? Also I like the proposal to lock the religion discussion forum to trust level 2 or above.

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I dont think we have made a stone decision yet.
It is my opinion that the combination of the trust-level lock, and the anonymity thing will be perfect. It will ensure that only people that have been vetted by the community can do purely religious talk, and also that there is no chance for embarrassment when talking about religious topics.
I think its very important that people be able to anonymously ask religious questions.

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Based on the second poll, it seems like almost everyone is against pseudo-anonymous.

I don’t think it’s a stretch to say: most people won’t be embarrassed to ask. And if they are, we can put a sticky mentioning “well email us and tell us so we know we need to build this functionality in” and/or go with someone hand-posting anonymously on their behalf.

I think it’s better to start with what’s easier and to change your mind later, than to try and guess and end up locking yourself into something for a long time.

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Id recommend people with questions to create another account.

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then they will have to amass trust again for the new account.
I am a big proponent of building an online reputation. I have put a lot of work into mine, and I dont want it to be potentially ruined by some question I ask in the religious section.

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I understand your concern @AbrarSyed. I dont think new accounts are worth it and I dont think we want that clutter on the database either. Maybe we should break the argument down a little. Do we want anonymity? And do we want to use trust levels a means of kind of “Age Gating” the forum? I think Id answer yes to both but also believe that anonymity would depend on the topic. We want two things, to be able to trust those posting (possibly by just knowing who they are) and to accept answers on topics through the providing of evidence.

We might talk about topics that arent that sensitive but then we might get onto topics that are too sensitive. Stuff like sins committed by someone or abuse that may have occurred. In those cases Id vote anonymity to protect those who post. It all depends.

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Some reading about the discourse trust level system: https://meta.discourse.org/t/what-do-user-trust-levels-do/4924

Discourse actually has a built-in system for anonymity (which I have disabled). The users would be able to click “go anonymous” at any time, which would essentially log them into an anonymous user generated for them. After they have done their anonymous work, they logout, and have to re-log in as themselves. I would like to use this system, except that its all-or-nothing right now. I want to restrict usage of this feature to only the religion section. This can only (if at all) be done with a custom plugin.

My Idea for anonymity is simply to assign every user a random anonymous username and a randomly chosen avatar. Any posts done in the religion section will display this anonymous username instead. The idea is not to provide full technical anonymity, but just to make it non-obvious about who is posting what.

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I have purposely avoided sticking my neck out and talking about stuff in details to avoid being crucified, but here goes. I suppose this may be my last post before my third lifetime ban …

We might talk about topics that arent that sensitive but then we might get onto topics that are too sensitive. Stuff like sins committed by someone or abuse that may have occurred. In those cases Id vote anonymity to protect those who post. It all depends.

About Fatwas

I think we’re overthinking this. MG is, in Abrar’s words, just a place for Muslim gamers to hang out and chillax. It’s not a place to get fatwas. It’s not a place to post about spousal/family abuse, alcohol abuse, etc. and ask for help. I think people know that. So why are we worrying about this?

If someone posts something asking for help, that’s different from incidentally mentioning that something happened and that’s why they missed their round in the checkers tournament or whatever. Maybe the best solution is to just say, sorry, this is not the right place for that. At best, you’ll get advice from someone who was in the same situation as you.

About Sins

Sins is another complex and prickly issue. Let’s say we go with an example that already came up: music (see: Bastion thread).

I could say something like “most scholars say music is haram,” but then @Wulf and the Haram Police will come thundering in asking for proof. I could provide proof, actually good proof, but maybe other people won’t understand it or couldn’t do it if they were asked. Someone else could bring one or more pieces of counter-proof, and it could degenerate into a proof-war. And those of us implicated now get painted with the brush of “hey you’re preaching,” even if that wasn’t the intent to begin with.

I’ve seen this happen to the Islam Stack Exchange site (I was a mod there for a while). Sometimes, the popular opinion wins (here comes the ban hammer on my way out). Sometimes, the strongest opinion wins. Most of the time, people actually don’t care and all these rules and discussions just leave a bad taste in our collective mouths.

In Conclusion (TLDR)

I don’t have the solution. I’ve seen lots of things tried and failed (and also succeeded to various degrees). I think we’re over-thinking and over-complicating this.

If we can’t be civil, and if we can’t respect each other’s beliefs/opinions/views/etc., no amount of anonymity or plugins or rules or processes will fix what’s essentially a human problem.

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