Board Thread:Consensus Track/@comment--20160428211300

Hey all,

I first want to apologize about some user rights changes I already made. In off-wiki discussion with one of your admins, I misunderstood part of what they said and felt it would be okay to go ahead and make a change to remove a custom user group on the wiki - Moving the five Forum Operators to Discussions Moderator. I apologize for the confusion - it's totally on me.

However, I would still like to go ahead and keep these five users - Sarutobii2, Elveonora, Curse of Hatred, Asian Reaper, Rachin123 - in the Discussions Moderator group and keep the Forum Operator group removed.

There are two very simple reasons for this.

First and foremost, the expansion of the Discussions Moderator (and creation of the Content Moderator) usergroup was explicitly to solve the Moderator need we saw on a number of communities. The permissions the Forum Operator group had, in so far as I can tell, overlap with the Discussions Moderator group, especially on this particular wiki because of the specific set of social tools you all use. We can also tweak the permissions of the Discussions Moderator as needed.

Second, Wikia has been looking into our custom user group sustainability long-term. As Wikia becomes more of a SAAS (Software as a Service)-based architecture versus staying purely within the monolith of MediaWiki, user permissions services become more complex to build and maintain. Custom user groups, because they vary so much, add extreme levels of difficulty to creating a strong user permission service. As such, we've stopped offering new custom groups except in extreme circumstances and begun to explore the possibility of cutting as many custom groups as possible. Migrating Forum Operator to Discussions Moderator helps in its small way with helping us develop an effective, bug-free service.

Please let me know what your thoughts are. I am willing to move the users back into the old group, but I genuinely think this is the best way moving forward and I hope you will agree.  