BARBELITH underground
 

Subcultural engagement for the 21st Century...
Barbelith is a new kind of community (find out more)...
You can login or register.


Underground > Policy & Help >

Topics of Concern- Banning

  
  

Page: 1(2)34567

 
 
HCE
21:16 / 03.02.07
It's hard for me to know when I should talk about my personal perception of things (because that's all I have the right to talk about and I don't want to generalize from my own experience) and when I should try to abstract some sort of general principles so that I don't sound as though my only concern is my personal comfort. I'm going to try to err on the side of not assuming that anybody else shares my views in this case. Please read my comments here with the understanding that it is not my intention to presume to speak for others.

I wouldn't call the current procedures milk-weak. They've (eventually) dealt with problematic posters. The problem seems to be more to do with the amount of time it takes to boot someone off once the decision is made to ban them.

You make a good point, here. While there hasn't been anybody really awful we've not gotten rid of eventually, a lot of damage is done because of how long the process can sometimes take. It's not the same in every case, certainly. Sensitive Fuckwit had no defenders that I can recall, for example.

Not every case, however, is like that -- Shadowsax made a series of comments that, while offensive in themselves, did less to give the impression of an atmosphere colorfully described elsewhere as 'Planet Cuntfear' than did the imbalance between the delicacy with which he was treated and the dismissiveness with with which the arguments of his detractors were treated. I recall feeling at some point as though there simply wasn't anything he could say about women that would be bad enough to satisfy everyone, as though slurs against women were just not taken as seriously as those against other groups.

I don't think that the people arguing that his behavior be carefully examined and no hasty decisions reached actually hate or fear women in general or the women on this board in particular. I do not think that such a view of Barbelith is supported by the behavior seen in that case. I do think, however, that the sexist attitudes that can be found in the various cultures we come from have not been shaken off as successfully as have classist, racist, antisemitic, or homophobic attitudes, and that case is one reason I have for thinking that.

What I would like to see: not only greater speed in reaching a decision (a week seems reasonable to me), but also some care taken to acknowledge the toll that the process takes on people who are not up for banning. I wish I could propose something less nebulous, but this is the best I can come up with at the moment.
 
 
Ganesh
21:36 / 03.02.07
I don't think that the people arguing that his behavior be carefully examined and no hasty decisions reached actually hate or fear women in general or the women on this board in particular.

I'm glad.

Banning Shadowsax was something of a test case and I'd agree that it was exhausting for all concerned, both the process itself and the subsequent debriefing. The post-banning thread's worth reading alongside this one, I think.
 
 
Evil Scientist
08:04 / 05.02.07
What I would like to see: not only greater speed in reaching a decision (a week seems reasonable to me), but also some care taken to acknowledge the toll that the process takes on people who are not up for banning. I wish I could propose something less nebulous, but this is the best I can come up with at the moment.

A week doesn't seem like a bad idea. However I don't think it would be appropriate for every potential banning situation. Out-and-out trolling where someone is basically flinging hatespeech and abuse around a thread should really be dealt with a lot quicker (and normally is). It would be handy to have the tools available to get rid of a proper troll as soon as they rear up (with any possible "inquiry" done after the fact).

At the moment the minimum time between decision to ban and it taking effect varies depending on when Tom is available to review the situation and take whatever steps he feels are necessary. As I say, obvious trolls are normally dropped out the airlock pretty quickly simply because Tom only needs to be alerted to the troll-posts.

I think a week's worth of discussion is appropriate if the offending poster is willing to discuss the situation in a rational manner. If they're only going to use that week to make sure their bridges are well and truly burnt then the response switches to that used for trolls.

If they ignore the Policy thread, plus any alerts from Moderators/concerned non-Mods, then that should be again treated the same as trolling and a rapid-response ban could be enacted.

One possible allowance here would be if they posted that they can't spend any time in discussion due to real-world responsibilites (work, etc). But that would require them to not post on any other thread in the interim and ensure that, on their return, they go straight to the Ban Discussion thread.

Failure to do so = ban.
 
 
electric monk
14:36 / 07.02.07
What I would like to see: not only greater speed in reaching a decision (a week seems reasonable to me), but also some care taken to acknowledge the toll that the process takes on people who are not up for banning.

I agree with both parts of that statement. As far as acknowledging the toll of the process goes, I assume you're positioning this as part of the wind-down/clean-up of a ban. Might this be handled by letting those involved in the ban use the remnants of that ban thread to express anger and just generally unwind from the emotional roller-coaster? Perhaps it's a peer-to-peer issue, where the community gathers around those involved and thanks them for their efforts (via the thread and PMs)? A combination of those and more?

I'm just tossing out ideas, trying to solidify this a little. It's an important consideration, IMHO, as I think the banning process is one of many contributors to Barbe-burnout.
 
 
Quantum
18:51 / 02.03.07
Can we have a yellow card warning system of some kind, like a virtual ASBO?
 
 
Tsuga
20:59 / 02.03.07
Man, that shit annoyed me. But is it "yellow card" worthy? More a foul. How do we do a virtual free kick?
 
 
jentacular dreams
08:11 / 03.03.07
A yellow card system might not be a bad idea. Though for minor offences how would a 'mod-warning' message do? Something like

"[user] the moderators feel that your comment was inappropriate and we ask you to refrain from such behaviour in the future, or face the possibility of a formal warning (yellow card). If you feel this is unfair and would like to clarify your intention or viewpoint, please feel free to start a discussion of the post in Policy."

Sending it would need seconding by another mod, and any posts of a similarly offending/inappropriate nature (within reason) would be forgiven if they were posted before the warning was sent. And obviously the policy thread would have looser rules around that particular issue.

The only drawbacks (apart from time, effort and any effect on the board culture) I can see would be that warnings would have to be stored (and indeed archived) somewhere visible to all mods.

Opinions?
 
 
jentacular dreams
15:59 / 09.03.07
Following the Netaungrot thread an idea has occurred to me. Would it be possible to extent the 'hand of tom' password scramble approach to moderators, as long as they e-mailed/PM'd a copy of the suit name, old e-mail address, new password, and a link(s) to bannable behaviour. A suit could then be on ice until tom makes up his mind to re-instate the old data or delete the suit/PM?

of course one problem with this is that, were the gates of the 'lith ever opened wide once more, the number of iced-suits tom would have to deal with would rise quite quickly.
 
 
Ticker
18:29 / 19.07.07
I know I'm being the prophet of the obvious...

I'm wondering about this process of banning that happens so slowly as it requires each and every board member's good will be drained so they might determine such action is permissible.


Sadly it seems to sap enough energy to make the board a miserable tiring place. Especially when you have to drain the happy hearted compassionate helping sorts down to the cranky dregs of could-give-a-shit.

Can we at least get a bingo card of trolling?

I like this one square from the Christians vs. Atheists message group:

4. Meaningless, thoughtless non-sequitur or ad hominem responses to sincere, thoughtful, and intelligent posts intended to aggravate the author and ruin the flow of the thread. (In other words, if you have nothing intelligent to contribute to an intelligent discussion, then do not contribute).
 
 
jentacular dreams
19:11 / 19.07.07
Well there's this, which could be merged with some of the content from this thread to produce a quick and easy to use banhammer force scale?
 
 
Ticker
19:37 / 19.07.07
thanks mice. 41 pages yeesh.

The wiki sort of nails it in general terms and then the banning threads are supposed to function as the vehicle in which we determine if an offense has occured and if the poster is willing to stop the behavior?
 
 
Spatula Clarke
19:45 / 19.07.07
I think the best way of dealing with banning would be if a couple of people - my vote would go to TTS and Stoatie - were given the power to wipe suits by one of them intitiating the action, the other agreeing it.

The ultimate failure of Barbelith, I'm now thinking, has been the inability to foresee the consequences of its own inaction in these matters. Unless something like this is put in place, it's never going to get any better than it is right now.
 
 
Ticker
20:01 / 19.07.07
Would people abide by a voted in banmod's decision?

While I understand the point is to keep the number small enough to be useful and fast, I like the idea of at least 4 banmods in case some are unavail due to IRL stuffs. Bad enough to have the pipeline up to only one executioner.

With 4 voted in banmods, takes 2 to push the ban button?
 
 
jentacular dreams
20:04 / 19.07.07
Sorry XK - I was suggesting that maybe some major aspects of the banning thread could be summarised in a handful of bullet points or a couple of short paragraphs, with links to the thread(s) as to why these behaviours are deemed bannable/trolling/generally undesired?

I'll happily prepare some sort of draft over the next week or so if others think it might be useful. In fairness a large portion of the thread is pre-ban discussion [33, dedi, a smattering of PW], especially towards the end - and by that point a lot of the themes are echoes of previous ones.
 
 
jentacular dreams
20:06 / 19.07.07
Crosspost - hasn't Tom already nominated Haus and Randy? And wouldn't a banbutton ultimately just be a PM to Tom?
 
 
ONLY NICE THINGS
22:03 / 19.07.07
I think that certainly as soon as we start talking about moderators who can press buttons to ban people, we move into the realms of speculation about what would be good to have in the next version of Barbelith. Which is fine, but which I don't think belongs in this thread.

This is sort of the problem with having a bingo-card list of banning offenses - it doesn't do any harm, and if agreed to it would possibly save some time, but generally these things are used on boards where one or more people of a certain rank have the power to terminate logins, and often where complaining too long and too vociferously about a terminated suit will endanger the login of the protestor. Whereas here, since people's logins are not simply vanished by button press, if one said "you have violated this tenet, which leads to banning", they would probably reply "No, I haven't", and then it would have to be argued out...

It's tricky. There is some discussion about dealing with our broken banning system in the broken Barbelith thread, from here, which I think is how we are currently running, although it has not yet been tested.
 
 
Spatula Clarke
15:59 / 20.07.07
Crosspost - hasn't Tom already nominated Haus and Randy? And wouldn't a banbutton ultimately just be a PM to Tom?

The thing is, what's happening now isn't really any different to what we've been stuck with for years. I'm struggling to see any difference at all, to be honest, apart from maybe that if Tom sees that he's been contacted by me or Haus he'll be slightly quicker to read the PM/email.

It's all about the painful, embarrassing and damaging delay between us getting that message to him and him picking it up/acting on it.
 
 
Alex's Grandma
16:32 / 20.07.07
Isn't the idea that Tom Coates now doesn't have to take the time to read the thread or threads in question? If so, while I'm not saying it's ideal, won't that speed things up a bit?
 
 
ONLY NICE THINGS
07:30 / 23.07.07
That's my assumption - that the process of reading the thread would be outsourced to the trustees.
 
 
Spatula Clarke
16:11 / 23.07.07
Makes sense. I'll admit, I'd not thought about that.
 
 
ONLY NICE THINGS
09:03 / 30.08.07
OK. Tom has said, elsewhere:

At the moment banning people requires me going into the database, finding their user number and marking them as 'banned'. It doesn't take an enormous amount of time, but it is fiddly and it's not something as it stands that I could really open up more widely because it gives you access to the database, all the private messages etc. etc.

I have no issue with their being functionality to allow mods to ban people, except that I'm not capable of building it and I've had trouble convincing Cal to build it.

I should point out though that in the past, traditionally, the board has been highly resistant to people being banned at all, and most attempts to ban people have resulted in long long long drawn-out debates. On the few occasions that I've taken a position early on and banned people I've been taken to task for it fairly vociferously. I could say at this point, make your mind up!

As it stands, I believe we said that if I got an e-mail from Haus (and maybe one other person? Paleface?) saying someone should be banned, that I'd work on the principle that you guys had all agreed to it and I'd ban them immediately. I haven't received a single e-mail.

The reason for this being that we have not had open admissions, and we have not needed to ban anyone. However, if we are going to open admissions, we need to be able to ban people more quickly. The proposal as it stands would go like this:

1) Banning is mooted in a bannning thread.
2) Discussion takes place.
3) When, in the opinion of myself, Olmos or Randy consensus on banning has been achieved, an email is sent to Tom and copied to the other two of myself, Olmos and Randy.
4) If one of the other two feels that consensus has not been reached, they reply to the email asking for an extension - say 24 hours or so.
5) If no such extension is requested within 24 hours of the initial email being sent, the suit is banned.
6) In extreme cases - active and malicious trolling, cross-board abuse or similar - a faster ban may be required. This is communicated in the original email.
 
 
Tryphena Absent
09:05 / 30.08.07
That's time consuming, have you checked with the other's that they have time to do the required reading?
 
 
Regrettable Juvenilia
09:09 / 30.08.07
I think open registration, whilst for the best, may mean that 6 is needed more than 1-5...
 
 
Regrettable Juvenilia
09:09 / 30.08.07
Assuming we care anymore, that is.
 
 
ONLY NICE THINGS
09:22 / 30.08.07
Well, the aim is to remove the block of Tom having to read the banning threads and come to his own conclusions about whether an appropriate time has come to ban somebody. It's outsourcing Tom's attention, in effect. If Randy or Olmos would not normally read banning discussions and would prefer not to be involved in this process, we can remove them from the process described above.

I think (6) is probably the big one and the one which will be used most frequently. In the past we have had an informal system where I have emailed Tom to identify user IDs who are clearly people who have been previously banned using new suits. I imagine that this structure would be maintained in the case of people who obviously need to be banned as quickly as possible, for this reason or because they are indiscriminately trolling, flaming or abusing people in a manner damaging to the board or its members.
 
 
Tryphena Absent
09:31 / 30.08.07
Cross posted on Haus' request from Is that it, then?

If you think there's going to be serious trolling right away then I'm less concerned about the system of banning then I am that Tom is going to read his email everyday in case we need someone to be banned promptly and then have the flexibility to go into the back end and sort it out as soon as the email has been read. Haus is the only person who reads consistently enough/remembers enough to make very quick decisions on who to ban so he is the right person to make those decisions, it's whether the response to his emails is quick enough to avoid a storm that is the issue for me.

Tom if you open registration are you going to have time/be available to commit yourself to banning within 24 hours of an email being sent to you? If not then this could create more problems than it solves.

I would like registration to be opened whether it creates problems or not but losing barbelith isn't a life changing issue for me. If it collapses I lose some things I've written these days but you're assigning yourself a level of responsibility to barbelith that you've consistently said you can't maintain over the last few years.
 
 
Tsuga
09:43 / 30.08.07
I guess I'd like to know how you feel about it Haus, Randy, and Olmos—or whoever else may be enlisted— that is, about the responsibility of it.
When you had open registration before, how bad of a problem was it of people perpetually re-registering to troll? I suppose things like that could suck if Tom was slow on the turnaround.
 
 
Tryphena Absent
09:58 / 30.08.07
In a sense trolls are less of a problem than how upset people actually get when they've asked for someone to be banned and there's no indication for 7 days of anything happening. Half of the problem is the tension caused among regular board-goers who need the staus-quo rather than the simple behaviour/presence of the troll. Communities need consistency, society needs police, janitors and administrators.
 
 
Spatula Clarke
15:56 / 30.08.07
I'm fine with it. It's nothing that I've not been involved with here before, really - for a period of time back there it felt as though the constant emails Ganesh and I were sending to Tom were just about the only thing stopping this place from getting swamped (and eventually led to that moment where Tom decided he was gooing to flush the board down the shitter, unfortunately, although at least he was talked out of it).

I'm not *quite* as thorough as Haus when it comes to keeping track, but I do have a fairly decent grip of username history and current problems across the board, I think.
 
 
Spatula Clarke
15:59 / 30.08.07
But, before registration is thrown wide open again, I just want to point out that there's potentially a much larger issue here than trolls, and that's spam. As I'm sure grant can tell everybody from his experience with the wiki. And we can't sort the board out in the same way that grant can sort the wiki out, should it become covered in the stuff.
 
 
ONLY NICE THINGS
16:10 / 30.08.07
Well, yes, this is something we shouldn't rush into. Tom, let's hold fire on opening the board until we have worked this one through. Our current state is sustainable in the short term, at least.
 
 
Ticker
17:43 / 30.08.07
we would still have the same lengthy ban thread process but with three active members particpating in the decision to ban the suit with their hands on the lever?

If we open the board and get multiple problem posters is that really a sustainable way to do it or am I missing something?

Can Tom give Haus or other Ban Patrol members direct database access?
how would we prevent booted folks from signing backup?
 
 
Spatula Clarke
17:45 / 30.08.07
He won't - it's not even worth asking.

We wouldn't - it'd be unpossible.

Yeah, it's not the most convincingly brilliant idea ever, I agree.
 
 
jentacular dreams
17:49 / 30.08.07
What if the board was taken off google first?
 
 
Spatula Clarke
17:58 / 30.08.07
Oh, that's a point,a ctually - I'd not thought about people simply registering again straight after being banned.

No, then. I wouldn't be prepared to have to email Tom every single time another suit needed banning. Quite frankly, it's a fucking insane idea.

Open membership absolutely requires a fast, simple, non-frustrating banning system. Without it, it's idiotic.
 
  

Page: 1(2)34567

 
  
Add Your Reply