Sorry to throw this on everyone in the group, but there has been another mod shakeup and it feels fair to address it publicly.
MightBe has been removed as mod from both World News and Politics.
I also unpinned and removed their rule change posts.
The too long; didn’t read is they were pretty hostile in messages to both myself and little cow, and when asked to join back channel discussions in chat, refused, and instead made unilateral decisions without group discussion.
Moderating a group like this needs to be a collaborative experience, no single voice should be establishing rules without some form of common agreement.
They not only refused to engage in that collaboration, but did so in a manner not fitting for being the new person on the team.
And it is a team. I tend to make more public posts than others, because I value the transparency over privacy, but when I do so, it’s a result of a nice private chat among the group.
For now, their rule changes have been removed from both Politics and World News. Back to the stated way of doing business:
World News is for all News OUTSIDE the United States, that’s what the normal “News” is for.
Politics is for US Politics - Somehow I doubt that’s going to be an issue in 2024.
There ARE things the mod team is discussing, and any rule changes will be made as a group effort, and (hopefully!) for the better health of the group and ALL of our participants!
Happy New Year!
When I was still developing Tesseract UI (RIP), I incorporated MBFC lookups directly in the client and put credibility badges on posts. I didn’t see that MFBC had a public or private API, but they do export a MIT licensed subset of their data in JSON format in their official browser extension. I was able to bundle that dataset into Tesseract to perform lookups locally.
If the admins want any help with the bot tool and working with the MBFC data, I’m happy to assist.