The LessWrong admins are often evaluating whether users (particularly new users) are going to be productive members of the site vs are just really bad and need strong action taken.

A question we're currently disagreeing on is which pieces of evidence it's okay to look at in forming judgments. Obviously anything posted publicly. But what about:

- Drafts (admins often have good reason to look at drafts, so they're there)
- Content the user deleted
- The referring site that sent someone to LessWrong

I'm curious how people feel about moderators looking at those.

Alternatively, we're not in complete agreement about:

• Should deleted stuff even be that private? It was already public, could already have been copied, archived, etc. So there isn't that much expectation of privacy so admins should look at it.
• Is it the case that we basically shouldn't extend the same rights, e.g. privacy, to new users because they haven't earned them as much, and we need to look at more activity/behavior to assess the new user?
  • There's some quantitative here where we might sometimes doing this depending on our degree of suspicion. Generally respecting privacy but looking at more things, e.g. drafts, that if we're on the edge about banning someone.
• We are generally very hesitant to look at votes, but start to do this if we suspect bad voting behavior (e.g. someone possibly indiscriminately downvoting another person). Rate limiting being tied to downvotes perhaps makes this more likely and more of an issue. Just how ready to investigate (including deanonymization) should be if we suspect abuse?