Support Forums: Allow global forum moderators to block users

[Clorith]

Currently, only keymasters and administrators can block users on the global forums (the non-rosetta one), while on the old bbPress 1.x setup, this capability was also extended to moderators, but also didn't have the same concept of differentiating user roles that we now have.

The downside to this is that action against spammers are currently delayed pending activity by one such user, while moderators are more often likely to encounter behavior warranting the block action in the first place.

Accountability was the number one reason to maintain this separation, but with the introduction of [10580], that is now automatically handled. Users granted moderator privileges on the global forums are already considered to be trustworthy, as they have the ability to impact in areas like plugin and theme support and review sections, on top of the normal support forums them selves.

After some ​discussion on Slack, this seems like it should be a good path forward, but matched with a private firehose-like Slack channel where actions taken to user profiles by a moderator or above, gets logged. This likely shouldn't include all the data that was put in, but showing what fields were modified does seem reasonable.

The support team should also have some written guidelines on when to block users in place before these powers are extended to all moderators. Such a document should outline the effects of blocking a user, both on rosetta, and the global forums, so that it can be a unified document used by the whole community. It should also set expectations, and probably be a bit strong worded explanation around consequences of misusing this trust.

[dd32]

Bumping the priority of this. This would provide a significant benefit to the Support team, based on my watching of the forum channel and the number of accounts blocked per day.

This is however, dependant upon there being more logging for actions taken by moderators, such as to a private forum-firehose channel of actions taken by WordPress.org users on another user profile (Which would primarily be Moderators blocking users, but may also be other Super Admins on the WordPress.org network too).

[mrfoxtalbot]

This is however, dependant upon there being more logging for actions taken by moderators, such as to a private forum-firehose channel

Are there any blockers to creating this channel (or an alternative logging method), @dd32? Or perhaps some implications that aren't immediately obvious and would need to be discussed beforehand?

It would save moderators a lot of time if we could have this enhancement added.

Thank you!

[dd32]

Are there any blockers to creating this channel (or an alternative logging method), dd32? Or perhaps some implications that aren't immediately obvious

The main stumbling issue was IIRC that there wasn't exactly a good way to hook into the role change and any notes being added at the time. It's not just as simple as creating the channel.

It's probably worthwhile reviewing who actually has access to what tools, as I suspect there's assumptions made as to who has access to what.

[dd32]

In 12740:

Support Forums: Log note (and as a result, role changes) to Slack.

See #5707.

[dd32]

In 12743:

Support Forums: Audit Log: Link to the global forums instead of login.wordpress.org for user edit.

See [12740].
See #5707.

[dd32]

In 12745:

Support Forums: Slack logging: Include the account age in the logged data.

See #5707.

[dd32]

In 12746:

Support Forums: Remove misplaced , in [12745].

See #5707.

[dd32]

In 12747:

Support Forums: Moderators: Allow moderators on the English forums to block users.

Fixes #5707.

[dd32]

In 12749:

Support Forums: Improve the user notes for role changes to include the previous non-participant role, capture moderator/spectator role sets, and generally have cleaner code.

See #5707.