What RapPad is meant to do:
- Provide a place for artists to get feedback and genuine thoughts for their music.
- Increase exposure by featuring the work that our artists create.
- Create great products, and tutorials that can assist in the things that artists care about; lyricism, producing, mixing, etc.
- Create a fun engaging place for hip hop heads through battles, and cyphers.
Admins are like neighborhood watches for online communities. Ruby was the first admin after she reported that a user was spamming the forums while I was at work. Spam has become a lot easier to deal with, but admins can help in a lot of other ways
- Songs or beats that are incorrectly marked as recordings.
- On RapPad all media is "stored" in the same way and it has a flag of whether or not it's a recording or a beat
- If users mark their beats as recordings, they won't show up in the beats section and get treated differently; it's important to make sure these flags are always set properly.
- If a user marks their recording as a beat, then it'll show up in the beats section and may be suggested on other parts of the site as a beat which is a really bad experience (say you're in the Freestyle section, and the next beat is some 10 year old rapping).
- Creating new cyphers (please don't create these without Amir's discretion!)
- Helping users finding the right resources
- Many users sign up looking for feedback or help, and the blog or various posts help them with that.
- Preventing hate in the Chat section.
- This is the trickiest one and requires a certain amount of maturity and good judgment.
- The general rule of thumb I use is if you're being a dick then you gotta go.
- Minimize the "how many feelings are getting hurt right now?" i.e if someone is shit talking another user, but they're just going at it then it's fine; a little bit of beef on a hip hop website is not a terrible thing. Someone being attacked on the other hand is a problem.
- No tolerance for hate speech, gore, porn.
- Feedback loop
- Since I'm not around all the time, please keep me in the loop on what's going on.
- Facebook is the #1 place to reach me as I check it throughout the day.
- If you're unsure about something, ask me on FB.
- General ban structure: 1 day for something minor, 3 days if repeated, 7 days if repeated again.
- Banning a user from RapPad blocks their IP, and more or less closes their accounts - removes their profile picture, prevents them from voting, propping, creating new raps, and hides all their raps permanently.
- To block a user from messaging, you have to create an account on Muut. The nice thing about Muut is that it allows temporary bans. Visit Muut Dashboard to prevent them from posting comments or messages on the site. You should use this for most offenses.
- If performing step 2, post on the user's wall this message:
Account Action Notice
You have been banned from posting on RapPad for [X] day(s).
Below are screenshots of the kind of actions that are against our [Community Guidelines](http://www.rappad.co/blog/community-guidelines).
Warning: Creating a new account to circumvent a ban may result in your account being removed and all future accounts being automatically banned.
A user is spamming / doing something bad. I want to ban him.
- Go to the user's profile, click Ban User under Admin Options.
- Post on their wall why they were banned.
- Post in the Admin section of RapPad with title, "Banned {username}". You can also provide the reason in this post, but it's not necessary (since it was already posted on their wall).
Someone is an idiot.
You can do whatever you want. If you're an admin it means I trust you. It's better to ask for forgiveness than for permission. As long as you can back up what you're doing if someone questions you, then you're probably doing the right thing.