So I looked into this for you. There are a few things here. I'll start with the our-fault stuff:
- That was definitely too blunt of a dismissal: if you're pulled into a pullroom, you should at least get a reason for why you are being removed. I'm going to inquire about that.
- You did receive a message from a moderator that included a punishment but said it wasn't one. That's a copy/paste error on our end, ultimately, but I think we should respect the message we send.
- You did apparently receive a heads up that the punishment would be reduced, but it was not. I'm going to try to find out why, 'cause that's a big miss and I don't want that to occur again.
That said, you're slightly misrepresenting the situation here. I'm not finding any record of threats aside from a request to stop pinging the board-violation-inquiries channel repeatedly. (Addendum: I was mistaken here). Doing so can indeed be grounds for removal from Discord, whereas waiting will let someone get around to you when they are able (we're a volunteer team, and this is why it can take a while to get through to someone -- we all have other jobs or responsibilities). You can also always specifically request escalation to a Herald -- this punishment was overturned with our input once we were aware of the entire situation, and almost certainly would have been sooner had we been made aware of it here or on Discord. My Discord messages, for example, are always open. Specifically requesting one of us lets us know there may be some complicating factors and we should handle it personally.
But yeah -- ultimately, this was a miss on our end due to a few mistakes that all slipped through in one case. My apologies for that. That said:
Less moderator "power". Can't abuse powers you don't have.
We couldn't do our job with less available powers, and the Herald team and Riot both serve as oversight to monitor potential issues. I have not yet see an "abuse of power" that we haven't handled though -- often things that someone considers an abuse of power is just an honest mistake, a miscommunication, or, frankly, them disagreeing with a rule.
More diverse moderator "culture". Get some "non-band wagon" opinions.
We have a lot of that, actually. Internal debates on a number of topics are fairly lively and opinionated. Simply because we tend to try to enforce rules the same way doesn't mean there isn't a diverse culture, or disagreement about some of those rules. This is true at all levels of the team, from the moderators to the Herald team.
Some sort of public accountability for moderator actions.
The problem here is that people normally want to see punishment (which we can't really do, as we're a volunteer team) or for people to be kicked off the team (which we don't do for minor mistakes). Public announcements of internal discussion/conversations/warnings aren't productive either, as they just create a naming & shaming situation and make every action that moderator takes suddenly be contested, even when perfectly acceptable. There is internal accountability and sometimes accountability on the boards (people can make threads here, for example).
Reporting misbehavior to the one misbehaving is not going to work.
Again, feel free to tag in @Herald specifically. We do investigate everything brought to our attention, and we don't have a uniform opinion, so we discuss anything that looks controversial. It's our job to provide oversight for the rest of the moderation team, and we have frequently overturned punishments we have deemed incorrectly applied, and have had conversations with moderators about any problematic patterns we see in their actions. If the issue is with a Herald in particular, we defer to the rest of the Herald team and pull in our Riot contacts.
They will just delete the evidence while the public is left completely clueless.
We don't actually delete evidence, save when cleaning up #board-violation-inquiries as is normal for that channel. All other Discord content is preserved, and all deleted threads remain visible to the entire moderation team and Riot, and we're not okay with legitimate concerns presented in appropriate manners being removed.
In short, we acknowledge that moderation is not (and never will be) perfect or 100% consistent. A team of humans never will be, and a team of volunteers makes it even harder to reach perfection. We're happy to take critique and feedback, but I do think the accusations of deleting evidence and abusing power you lay out here are misplaced.
