Forum:Revising the Forums policy

Hey,

So seeing as we've moved to basing community discussions here in the forums, as well as all the other stuff we revamped, I'd like to propose that we revise our Forums policy. Although it was deployed almost 2 years ago, things have changed since then and thus is now outdated.

Rather than just throw something complete on the table and asking whether or not you like it, I was thinking we could collaborate in actually revising the policy. This is basically what I was thinking we should do about it:
 * Remove the inappropriate words, advertisement, inappropriate sites, trolling and spamming sections of the policy altogether as they're technically already covered in the wiki-wide policy and the forums are part of the wiki.
 * State that only admins should archive discussion threads.
 * Incorporate the outcome of this thread in some way.
 * Emphasise that the content of the thread must be placed under the correct forum and not added to the wrong one. For example, this would state that an off-topic thread shouldn't be in the Community discussions forum.

Those are the ideas I have for now and I'm interested in what everyone else would like to add/change/whatever before (and if) we actually do formally revise this policy.

So what do we think about this? 15:30, December 19, 2012 (UTC)

Discussion
I think a change to the policy would be good. I don't know how forceful we want to make the language but I generally don't think it needs to be too strict in its wording. One thing I do have a question about however... why would archival be an administrators-only thing? This is simply for sake of argument, since it stands to reason we should explain why only administrators should be able to do something before we write it into the rules. --  LiR speak ~ read 15:55, December 19, 2012 (UTC)
 * Mainly to prevent a possible case of users archiving threads maliciously, which can easily happen if we let anybody archive anything despite TSW:AGF. I wouldn't be against allowing highly trusted users to take part in archivals but then that brings up the issue of what actually constitutes a user to be considered as highly trusted, hence why it's actually easier to just center it around the admins. 16:29, December 19, 2012 (UTC)
 * If you recall from this forum thread, I was thinking we should just archive by default after a certain time period (say, 30 days). I don't much prefer the idea of archiving the second a decision is reached or whenever an admin decides that a thread has concluded. I'd much prefer we try to emulate the informal system we used on the Community Portal Talk Page, where threads would sit for awhile after the conclusion of discussions before the thread is archived. Whether this is achieved through a mechanism similar to Community Central or whether we simply set a time period then manually tag the articles wouldn't matter much. Generally this gets down to the idea of who controls a discussion and, as per general wiki standards and such, I don't think admins should exert that control over community discussions (unless they violate policy). --  LiR speak ~ read 17:39, December 19, 2012 (UTC)
 * Archiving a thread a certain time post-drying up or archiving immediately post-consensus is probably our best bet; if a thread dies then it can merely be revisited in a new thread. Realistically, we should be encouraging activity so that most if not all threads reach an outcome though it's almost impossible to get that 100% of the time and that's aside from the lack of user input we've been getting lately (someone please enlighten me as into why this is happening). While I do agree that administratorship is not a big deal and shouldn't be used to build a user hierarchy, community discussions are almost always mediated by an admin and in fact they also carried out the archival job on the old CPTP so it seems fairly natural to let the admins do it here. 18:55, December 19, 2012 (UTC)
 * I don't think an admin needs to mediate conversations, short of enforcing policy. Any additional mediation would be simply to encourage a resolution. It's something we do because it's so difficult to get conversations to resolve otherwise. As for archival post-consensus, I think we should wait to archive those as well, as there might be additional after-points that need discussion, questions and concerns, and possibly re-evaluation. In other words, I don't see the need to archive immediately. --  LiR speak ~ read 19:16, December 19, 2012 (UTC)
 * Then how long post-consensus do you think we should wait before archiving? 12:17, December 21, 2012 (UTC)
 * A month. The risk in archival is always that of archiving too soon, and cutting off conversation that might have been made (however unlikely that may appear to be). There's little if any risk in letting a page stand un-archived. I'd argue for a month to be standard across-the-board, personally. --  LiR speak ~ read 17:12, December 21, 2012 (UTC)

Conclusion
Closing with no consensus - Given that this is just a discussion between two users that's been dead for almost a month, it's almost safe to say nobody else is going to comment meaning there's no consensus and thus there is little reason to keep this thread open. Please bring this up again in a new topic if need be. 17:18, January 13, 2013 (UTC)