Thanks a lot for your efforts and your work. Happy to add some (hopefully) constructive feedback:
Overall: I find the guidelines too long and too non-binding. However, I don’t want this to be the focus of my post, therefore happy to give examples and continue this topic via PM.
My focus should be on a few specific points:
Thanks for adding the ‘Moderation escalation process’. However, it is my impression that you are focusing on a less relevant part. From my understanding in the past months, the emotions were never about the process of banning (or not banning) a member. No one was asking to make the banning process more explicit. Instead, some people (including myself) were complaining about the lack of transparency when removing threads or posts.
My suggestion therefore is to add something like the following sentence: “In order to maintain our community, moderators reserve the right to remove any content and any user account for any reason at any time. *Unless deemed inappropriate by the moderators, the moderators will publicly inform about such removal in way that the moderators deem appropriate.”
As for the ‘flag’ feature: I personally have a hard time using this feature. On the one hand, the guidelines seems to emphasize the responsibility and contribution of each of us to contribute to the forum (“Let’s try to leave our park better than we found it.”). Using the flag features seems to hand of this responsibility to the moderators. Also, when I see a post that I deem less appropriate, I hope that no one will react to the post which would solve the problem. A less appropriate post in many cases only becomes bad if it is followed up. And once there is a whole chain of posts, it’s hard to identify the one post that would be worth flagging. This is just a thought, I don’t have any specific suggestion for a change in the guidelines.
Lastly, the copy of the guidelines at Welcome to the Swiss FIRE Forum + Guidelines probably will need to be updated as well.