Member Notes

Moderator Notes

Members, under data protection legislation, have a right to see all the information we keep about them. As part of that includes the notes we might write as part of moderating our communities, it is sensible to:

• Make sure notes are fair, factual and polite
• Don't write anything that you wouldn't want the member to read
• Check the notes regularly to see if they are still relevant and appropriate - delete those that are not (see below for review reminders)

You can find a list of members with notes on Modtools - Members > Approved > Select Community you want>With Notes (the default is All members).

Member Note Review (soon to be implemented)

• Once a month a notice is posted on Modtools of notes older than three years which will be deleted within the next month unless someone in the community marks them as still relevant. This will appear on a separate page in Modtools.
• There is a maximum limit (c.50) on the number of notes included in that mail so that it isn’t overwhelming.
• A community can choose to opt out of this reminder and/or auto-delete function - a popup at that stage will mention GDPR. This is to confirm that the community knows they are responsible for tidying up old notes. We can’t force communities to tidy notes, but it means they are aware of their responsibilities.
• Any volunteer in the same community (or Support) can delete or edit a member note.
• A clickable link is included to the community that has posted the note, so that they can be contacted easily by another community the member belongs to.
• An important note (eg. safeguarding issues) can be retained by editing it, so that it only comes back up for review in a further three years.

• Note: If a community has opted their community out, then their notes would stay, because that’s what they want.

System Notes

There are some notes made automatically. An example might be “Last active: 4 years ago - won’t send mails“

We stop sending emails to people after they have been inactive (haven’t visited the site, haven’t done anything by email) for six months. If they come back to the site then we’ll start again.

There are a lot of mailbox providers (Google, Microsoft, Yahoo etc) who take old inactive mailboxes and turn them into spam honeytraps - if you’re sending email to them, you’re probably a spammer who’s using an email list they got in a security breach. So sending mails to inactive mailboxes damages your spam reputation and makes it more likely that your mails to active users will go to spam.

Links:

• Housekeeping
• Data Protection Guidelines
• ModTools