Moderation and defense of our Matrix community¶

Our Mission¶

The Ubuntu Matrix homeserver is meant to reflect the values of the Ubuntu Community. It should be an open, transparent and welcoming environment to everyone from across the globe.

We believe a welcoming and diverse community should look like a patchwork quilt of different ideas and beliefs across all kinds of people working toward a common purpose. The spirit of this mission is codified in the Ubuntu Code of Conduct and our Diversity policy, which applies to all official rooms on the Ubuntu Matrix homeserver and clarifies the underlying intention of all roles.

We have two types of people who help us achieve this goal:

Defenders, who operate across all public rooms and fight clear cases of spam and abuse by newly interacting accounts
Moderators, who take care of individual rooms, helping foster welcoming and collaborative environments while managing conflict resolution and handling poor conduct

The remainder of this document explains these roles in more detail.

“Defenders” fight abuse¶

Defenders fight clear abuse and spam. They operate across all public Ubuntu Matrix rooms.

Speed and coverage are important to this role as it deals with the vast majority of issues which are blatant abuses of the service by newly interacting accounts.

Room administrators¶

Room administrators manage a room on the Ubuntu Matrix homeserver and are responsible for day-to-day moderation. They ensure the room conforms to our guidelines, and appoint moderators for their room.

Anyone can become a room administrator by creating a room.

“Moderators” foster the community¶

Moderators are appointed by room owners to help achieve the aspirations of their room while keeping it a distinctly Ubuntu place.

Some rooms may have mechanical expectations such as strict Q&A where others may be open to varying types and degrees of banter.

Thoughtfulness, flexibility and humility are important to this role.

Are room owners also moderators?¶

Not necessarily. Although room owners are ultimately responsible for ensuring their room is well-moderated, they’re not required to do the moderation themselves. They can appoint other people to become moderators.

Are room moderators also defenders?¶

Moderators are a fallback if no defenders are available. However, moderators should only perform this duty when it doesn’t interfere or impede on the time required to perform their best moderator work.

Policies¶

Room descriptions¶

Room descriptions should contain a link to the Ubuntu Code of Conduct and a list of room moderators to contact in case of an issue.

Non-interaction policy¶

Newly interacting accounts that are abusing the service through methods like spam, advertisement and nefarious motives are strictly to be ignored.

Engagement is valuable to these accounts and interacting with them adds unnecessary load to the maintenance of the Ubuntu homeserver and its defenders.