Forum:Revising the Forums policy

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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 Although it was deployed almost 2 years ago, things have changed since then and thus is now outdated.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? Lost Labyrinth • (c) • (b) 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. Lost Labyrinth • (c) • (b) 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)