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The private messaging thing was designed as a way for me to get people's opinions without them feeling that they'd be entering into a larger debate or argument in which they might get burned. I wanted to make sure that the opinions expressed in the thread were in fact representative of general board policy, and to check against the allegation that it was a small number of users arguing the same arguments. I've read the thread pretty thoroughly and I've had about thirty or so private messages, mostly from people who haven't posted to the thread or have only posted once or twice.
As I suspected, the messages I've been receiving have broadly reflected the board's mood that ShadowSax should be ejected, although I was interested to note that there was a slightly higher than expected resistance to banning in the private messages than in the thread, which suggest to me at least there is a proportion of people who don't agree with a ban but who aren't prepared to say so publically. I think that's a shame, although I understand it. Can I ask the people in the thread to bear this in mind when posting?
Those people who are resistant tend to be of the opinion that although they find ShadowSax's opinions personally reprehensible, that the way he's been treated on the board has not been entirely fair. Many of them, I think, were more convinced that he should be banned before some of the arguments on that thread got out of hand. Among this group - probably around eight or so people - there was a sense that ShadowSax was making a legitimate effort, but that rather than being encouraged in that effort and lead further in a positive direction, he was criticised for not going far enough immediately. I have mixed feelings about whether or not this is a fair accusation or not, but I don't doubt that it's the reaction of a proportion of the board.
As I said earlier, I thought it was important to get opinions from some of the less vocal members of the community to see if they reflected the stated opinions, and I think it's important to report that - fundamentally - they basically did. As a consequence, after reviewing all of this stuff, I'm prepared to go ahead with a banning. That is, of course, if people don't feel there needs to be a formal voting process or whatsoever. Either way, ShadowSax will have access to the board for another twenty-four hours or so to respond. I've also written to him saying that this is my current conclusion and explaining my reasons - actually in a bit more depth than I've done here.
The major thing that I've said to him is that although I think he should probably be leaving the board, I've not been entirely comfortable with the way we've handled this situation. Ganesh's proposal to take this to a thread and have a week to debate it was - I think - completely right. But what I want us to consider now is how things got to this state in the first place. If we're prepared to spend a week and a half debating whether a problematic new user should be ejected, then perhaps we should be prepared to spend more time helping problematic new users acclimatise themselves to the environment, get their head around the politics and appropriate behaviour on the board, and to actually spend a bit more time persuading people and supporting them so they don't make the mistakes that might get them into this situation.
I'm going to propose that we go straight into another thread now about how to avoid situations like this one in future, how we can improve the ability of people to get acclimatised and to understand the culture and the limits, and also to look at how we might change or focus our own behaviour to stop it reaching these states.
I'd also like us to look at users at the moment who are reacting badly to the culture that exists here and actually ask ourselves as a group why they're feeling that way, why they're having problems and be prepared to adapt a little to respond to them - not necessarily to meet them halfway but at the very least to figure out where the problems are and be critical enough to explore whether some of them lie with us.
I think this might be the best way to move past this situation and some of the disagreements on the board, while accepting that at this stage ShadowSax's continued presence is clearly going to be unsustainable.
I'm going to post this on the thread in the policy as well and ask people to respond to it there rather than here. A new thread on how we move on and look to ourselves will be started shortly over in the Policy as well. |
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