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Allow mods to move posts to other subs instead of deleting.

posted by [Deleted] on ideasforphuks

For example a political post in s/nopoliticshere can be moved to s/politics by the mod of s/nopoliticshere.

This accomplishes several crucial things:

1) Prevents censorship (and drama) by not removing the content. The same thread exists, just in a different sub and still shows in s/all.

2) Grows niche subs. Maybe nobody goes to s/politicalmemes but they will if they like the content that gets moved there from s/funny.

3) Keeps content relevant to the sub in two ways - subs get relevant content imported from other subs, irrelevant content gets removed from the other sub.

Discussing this in IRC the main concern was abuse. A mod can dump a bunch of posts into other subs. A potential safeguard would be for mods to disallow transferred content from other subs. When another mod tries to transfer content there they get an error and have to choose a different sub. And of course the receiving sub can just transfer the thread again if they wish if they allow transferred content.

There still has to be a full deletion option for illegal content, but I think those instances are few and can be handled through an admin reporting system.

For example a political post in s/nopoliticshere can be moved to s/politics by the mod of s/nopoliticshere. This accomplishes several crucial things: 1) Prevents censorship (and drama) by not removing the content. The same thread exists, just in a different sub and still shows in s/all. 2) Grows niche subs. Maybe nobody goes to s/politicalmemes but they will if they like the content that gets moved there from s/funny. 3) Keeps content relevant to the sub in two ways - subs get relevant content imported from other subs, irrelevant content gets removed from the other sub. Discussing this in IRC the main concern was abuse. A mod can dump a bunch of posts into other subs. A potential safeguard would be for mods to disallow transferred content from other subs. When another mod tries to transfer content there they get an error and have to choose a different sub. And of course the receiving sub can just transfer the thread again if they wish if they allow transferred content. There still has to be a full deletion option for illegal content, but I think those instances are few and can be handled through an admin reporting system.

9 comments

[–] PMYA 2 points (+2|-0)

A potential safeguard would be for mods to disallow transferred content from other subs.

I think this is a good feature, to just be able to turn it off, but perhaps accepting transfers would also be a helpful feature.

I do think this could cause problems though to be honest, ones that we can't even foresee. People are going to be pissed if one of their posts is moved from a default to a non default, because it will get less exposure, for example.

[–] [Deleted] 3 points (+3|-0)

They might be pissed, but less pissed than they would be if the thread was deleted.

You could also allow subs to block transfers from particular mods but that might require more time than this feature warrants during early stages of development. Then again, I still don't think abuse will be a problem until the userbase grows to at least Voat levels so maybe don't worry about disallowing transfers at this point. For this size, simply re-transferring content should be sufficient for a while.