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Damage Control.

  
 
Evil Scientist
10:41 / 23.08.06
I was going to bump the Post-Banning Discussion thread for this but reading it this morning I feel that, whilst there are some nuggets of goodness in there, there is a fair amount of threadrot. Plus I don't really want to be responsible for re-igniting some of the conflicts in it.

Anyway...

As a lot of Policy regulars are aware there is currently a discussion in progress over in the "What exactly does get you banned on Barbelith?" thread regarding a member who has posted a variety of homophobic/racist/mysogynistic comments. It starts here if you haven't already seen it.

The subject I want to discuss in this thread is not intended to be about this case specifically. To be honest, it's unlikely that anything would be decided one way or the other before this member's case has been dealt with. But it is about how the site deals with cases similar to this that I would like to discuss here.

It's an unfortunate fact that we occasionally have people join who, for whatever reason, act in a manner that eventually gets them banned. For the most part that is the end of it. In my view our current process is slow, requires a lot of input from active posters, and can be frustrating to those who have had to plough through the same old arguments again and again. But it does work.

I do feel that the slowness of the banning procedure is more of a benefit than a hinderance. It allows all sides a chance to present their side of the story, to some extent, it allows the wider community of the site to view the proceedings and, in theory, discourages inappropriate moderation (something which the current distributed mod system makes very difficult anyway).

I know the example below is a bit "worst case scenario" and I haven't seen anyone act like this whilst I've been here. But I think it's a good idea to prepare for the worst whilst hoping for the best (ie we never have to ban anyone ever again, ever ever ever).

Example: Member K has been posting material deemed to be hatespeech on various threads and forums across the site. This matter is discussed in Policy and the general consensus is that Member K is probably going to be banned.

However, in the interim, Member K decides to make their exit as messy as possible and begins to doublepost hatespeech and insults in dozens of threads. Tearing up and down and generally derailing discussion left right and centre.

What happens next?

Okay, OTT example. But I do feel that, once a member is acting in such a way that general consensus (by active members) is that banning is a very real possibility they should be discouraged from interacting on threads other than the one in Policy discussing their behaviour. If they can't/won't behave even in the face of a threatend banning then they should be regulated in some way.

Trouble is, obviously, how would this be done? Moderators have certain powers at their disposal, but those require agreement before they can be deployed. Even if several moderators did agree to regulate a member they couldn't make a move without some sort of mandate from the general community.

I have suggested in the past that threads involving potential banees be temporarily locked whilst the banning discussion took place. But it was quite rightly pointed out that this would be unfair to everyone else involved with the thread. My suggestion in the linked thread above was that the offending member be forced to only post on the Policy thread and that any further posts outside of said thread be deleted.

But I could be just channelling my inner neo-con there. Would endorsing this level of aggressive control go against what some people would consider the spirit of the Barbelith site to be? Is it far too authoritarian? What else can we do aside from riding out the abuse until a ban comes into effect?

Help a monkey out here people.
 
 
Axolotl
12:14 / 23.08.06
I think the problem is that "forcing" an offender to only post in the policy thread can only be done currently by moderators following them around and deleting every other post that they make, which is exactly the same as what would currently be done in your worst case scenario.
It would also seem to me that a blanket response of doing so while an individual is under the threat of banning would remove any possibility (however slim) that they could turn their game around and actually "reform".
 
 
Evil Scientist
12:23 / 23.08.06
I see your point, but surely once the member has engaged with others on the Policy thread and shown a willingness to behave the "post embargo" could be lifted?

I do accept that doing what I suggest above is going to put helluva lot more hassle on the shoulders of the moderators. It's all well and good for armchair commentators like myself to suggest this stuff, but I wouldn't be doing the work would I?
 
 
Tryphena Absent
11:03 / 24.08.06
I've been here for years and frankly I think our banning process sucks. It makes us stressed, it upsets the people being banned more than is necessary, which frankly is likely to make them more inclined to come back and cause trouble. It goes on and on and on for pages and pages and it's often repetitive. I hate our banning process, it's dirty.
 
 
Cat Chant
11:28 / 24.08.06
Evil Scientist said:

I do feel that the slowness of the banning procedure is more of a benefit than a hinderance.

and it made me think of Tryphena Sparks's post (here):

the kindest way to ban is to do it quietly, without humiliating and with little anger and it generally involves one or two people making the decision privately and maintaining the "fact" that their decision is where it stops. We don't have that here in any sense... The system that we use at the moment is democratic but it equates to a wide discussion and analysis of the actions of a poster and with so many people chipping in we can't avoid a character assassination even if every contribution was significantly kinder.

From my recent interaction with the 33 banning discussion (which starts around... woah, here in the 'What exactly...?' thread, and has, I see, now been going on for sixteen pages), I think that the problem Tryphena nails there is something to do with the way that discussions about banning in general, what grounds there should be for banning, what qualifies as hatespeech/harassment, are going on between and among posters in a way which intertwines them inextricably with the actual discussion of the specific case. To go to the 'court' metaphor, it's as if the solicitors' negotiations with Counsel and the jury's deliberations were all happening at the same time/space as the trial, so that it's impossible for the 'accused' to figure out when ze's being addressed directly and when the lawyers have gone off into an abstruse discussion of a point of law, using hir case as an example.

I like the way that Barbelith is self-reflective, and I like the way that discussions about banning, its grounds, its justifications, the definitions it relies on, go on in public and at length. I also, in principle, like the way that those discussions are always grounded in real cases, and are not strictly differentiated from the process of discussing banning itself. But, like Tryphena Sparks, I don't like the consequences that those (good, democratic, open/accountable, self-reflective) practices have for the actual banning procedure/discussions, which are lengthy, dirty, hard on everyone and, because of the stress they put on the person up for a ban, likely to provoke defensiveness and bad behaviour rather than self-examination and increased engagement with Barbelith and its values.

I think we might need to move towards a more formal procedure for banning, in which not all members are able to participate in an open thread, and towards a very strict separation of the 'democratic' discussion of 'how/why/when we ban' from the formal procedure of warning/banning.

(I don't know if this was the right thread to post this in now. If not, someone let me know and I'll repost it elsewhere and put this one up for deletion.)
 
 
Our Lady Has Left the Building
11:28 / 24.08.06
Tryphena Sparks I've been here for years and frankly I think our banning process sucks. It makes us stressed, it upsets the people being banned more than is necessary, which frankly is likely to make them more inclined to come back and cause trouble. It goes on and on and on for pages and pages and it's often repetitive.


I have to agree, it annoys me immensely that by last Friday Tom was still insisting that we needed a trial thread, oh and it ideally should be finished with by Sunday evening because he was going away.

However, is there any way to avoid the situation you describe except by taking away most Barbeloid's vote in the matter and make it a Moderator-vote issue? Even then it's still more fluffy than a lot of the other boards (Ellis's various boards and the Byrne boards I believe have a single moderator being able to kick someone off and they have no right to appeal).
 
 
Ganesh
11:35 / 24.08.06
I think there should be a banning process and I agree that, in ShadowSax's case, the arbitrary one-week deadline seemed long and drawn-out. I'm cautiously in favour of formalising things (partly because I felt a whole lot of pointless side-arguments were generated, which themselves swallowed time and pixels) but I'm wary of restricting the decision to a select few.

I'm not completely closed to the idea. I'd need some convincing, though, I think.
 
 
Cat Chant
13:30 / 24.08.06
I'm wary of restricting the decision to a select few.

Just in practical terms, I think it's impossible to have a quicker, slimmed-down, more-formal procedure for banning which in principle involves everyone. One solution might be the discussion being restricted to a select few (maybe on the model of structured mediation run by a small group of mods suggested by xk here on the 'difficult posters/mental illness' thread), but the decision being open to voting by the whole board?
 
 
Ganesh
13:37 / 24.08.06
Maybe - on the understanding that those mods attempted to represent the views of others? I'm not sure. On the one hand, I can see the sense of having a slimmed-down, speeded-up discussion while still attempting to cover all the angles; on the other, it places a fair amount of responsibility on the mods concerned. Presumably there'd be some sort of wider vote at the end of the process?
 
 
Evil Scientist
13:44 / 24.08.06
However, is there any way to avoid the situation you describe except by taking away most Barbeloid's vote in the matter and make it a Moderator-vote issue?

Presumably though it would still come down to Tom to actually enact the ban.

I don't necessarily have a problem with someone calling for a ban and then leaving it to the mods to actually decide whether asking Tom for ban is desired. But we'd still be in a similar position regarding a lengthy discussion process, there are mods on both the "Hawk" and "Dove" sides of the debate.

As far as I am aware (and please correct me if I'm wrong) it is currently theoretically possible for a group of mods to delete any posts as long as no other mod disagrees isn't it? The posts themselves still exist don't they, they're just removed from public view? So arguably there is a way for mods to regulate someone deemed ban-worthy until a decision has been reached.

Obviously, a quicker system than the current one is going to be open to accusations of abuse, and most likely have a tougher time defending itself from them. Assuming such a thing came into play we would have to decide on a way of dealing with such claims.
 
 
grant
15:27 / 24.08.06
As far as I am aware (and please correct me if I'm wrong) it is currently theoretically possible for a group of mods to delete any posts as long as no other mod disagrees isn't it?

Yes.

The posts themselves still exist don't they, they're just removed from public view?

Yyyes, I think so. In order to view a deleted post, I *think* you'd have to know the specific URL of that post (gotten by clicking on the time/date link), have it saved somewhere and be able to click on it.

I'm not positive this is true -- I can't remember testing it. But I know Tom's previously said nothing is ever truly deleted for legal reasons -- it's just unlinked and taken off display. And I know a similar process happens with whole threads.

So arguably there is a way for mods to regulate someone deemed ban-worthy until a decision has been reached.

This "regulate" you speak of appears to be a de facto ban in and of itself.
 
 
Alex's Grandma
15:59 / 24.08.06
One solution might be the discussion being restricted to a select few (maybe on the model of structured mediation run by a small group of mods suggested by xk here on the 'difficult posters/mental illness' thread), but the decision being open to voting by the whole board?

That sounds like a lot of work for those involved though, especially if they were expected to adequately represent the views of other board members - I imagine the PMs they'd have to wade through would pretty quickly start to seem fairly daunting.

I suppose one way round this might be a kind of 'three strikes and you're out' system, whereby posters displaying racist, homophobic or misogynist tendencies would be informed via PM that this sort of thing wasn't acceptable on Barbelith, and that two further such episodes would automatically result in a ban.

It would probably require an enhanced level of moderator consensus - how that would work I don't know, but I'm something broadly acceptable could be put together.

Personally, this seems a bit draconian to me, but once the 'trial' process was started it seemed to be all over for Shadowsax in any case (I suspect the same would be true for anyone else in his position,) and it would at least speed things up a bit.
 
 
Ganesh
20:28 / 24.08.06
I imagine the PMs they'd have to wade through would pretty quickly start to seem fairly daunting.

And how might we establish that they had received vast numbers of PMs? The "loads of people who're afraid to post (and/or have left the board) agree with me" gambit is well-documented but difficult/impossible to ratify.
 
 
Evil Scientist
07:23 / 25.08.06
This "regulate" you speak of appears to be a de facto ban in and of itself.

Well, my thought was that once someone's behaviour is considered bad enough that discussion of banning needs to take place they be forced to engage on a Policy thread.

Here's a rough sketch of how it could work:

The offending member is sent a message telling them that their behaviour is being discussed in Policy and are provided with a link. They are asked to refrain from posting in any other threads until the matter has been resolved (doing that would probably go a long way towards helping them avoid banning). If they refuse and continue to post then their posts are deleted as soon as possible. Other posters are asked not to reply to the offender outside of the relevant Policy thread(s).

In my view it's not quite as extreme as a ban because the accused member still has a voice on the site. But they are being encouraged to engage with the site because their privilege of posting freely has been revoked until the problem has been resolved.
 
 
grant
13:13 / 25.08.06
I'm not saying I'm endorsing that idea 100%, but I do think it's interesting, and I also think it would be less hassle than it might at first appear. I have no proof for that second think, other than the fact that I've been involved with some large-scale moderation tasks that were accomplished with greater speed than I would have suspected.
 
 
gridley
19:40 / 25.08.06
While I respect the notion of PMs, it does seem a bit too slow and a bit too invisible (both to other users and other mods). I think we all hate watching a good thread get derailed by the chastising, but obviously we just can't just let someone go off without doing something.

So, I was wondering about a process like this:

1--Mods see (or are informed of) an offending post

2--Mods move to have the text of the post removed and then pasted into a pre-made "Offending Posts" thread, where the problems and defense of the post can be discussed without derailing in the original thread

3--Replacing the text in the thread, the mod who proposed the action, could state very briefly why it was removed and link to that thread, instructing the offending poster that they are welcome to discuss the post in the "Offending Posts" thread

I know it's a bit more work, but I think it has a few advantages. (1) Casual readers will be less likely to accidentally stumble across an awful racist/sexist/homophobic/etc post. (2) All offending posts can still be openly discussed, but (3) fewer threads will be de-railed (hopefully). (4) All offending posts will be assembled in one place, without putting that burden on any one user, should a discussion need to take place about banning or otherwise penalizing the offending user.

Just an idea.
 
  
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