User blog:Marphimon/Updates to Forums & Moderation on Community Central

Hello everyone!

This time, we'll talk about what's changed for forums and the moderation approach on Community Central.

A while back, we adjusted the categories on our forums to be more in line with the advice categories we intended to use after launching the advice section. But that's only part of what we have planned.

As part of Fandom's efforts to utilize AI to improve the user experience across our platform, we identified an excellent opportunity from a Trust & Safety perspective to explore automated moderation. We are glad to announce that our preliminary results indicate that using a moderation model is a success in aiding existing moderators with the moderation of the forums.

Many people have legitimate concerns over automated moderation. As a measure, we made sure that every automated action is seen by human moderators who can course correct any missteps easily.

One reason why we wanted to explore AI usage is for the aforementioned moderation updates we intended to roll out to Community Central. As part of our efforts to make the wiki more editor-focused, and esp forums more beginner friendly, we have decided to loosen the stricter moderation a little bit if posts are made in good faith but lower quality, to allow a better inclusion of good faith newbie editors.

With this change, however, we are also enforcing some stricter criteria on what message walls are intended to be used for on community central. Moving forward, we will not permit excessive non-wiki related conversations or complete offtopic discussions on Community Central. Community Central is intended to be a hub where editors can connect about wiki editing - for general chats, there are more suitable tools on the internet.

With that in mind, we hope to see you continue to enjoy your visits on Community Central moving forward!