Allyson is me.

Dammit! I had a whole procedure for the warn-suspend-ban thing that was eloquent, well-thought-out, and that allowed for a nice balance of warm, fuzzy discussion, and cold, hard procedure.

Then my computer ate my post. I feel like poor Fenchurch at the beginning of HHGttG.

Anyway, here's a summary of what I said in the missing post.

1. If a person is being trollish, that person should probably be corrected/Doblerized right then-and-there by the offended party. If the troll then continues to be trollish (either by continuing the offending behavior, or ripping into the person who corrected him/her), the offended party would then say, "We need to discuss this. Please meet us in Bureaucracy." The offended party would then go immediately to Bureaucracy and Nilly the offending post(s) and say that they'd invited the person to discuss. That way, we could discuss the behavior, along with what--if anything--was wrong with it.

With any luck, one or two such occurrences would clue in people who were well-meaning, but not familiar with our culture.

2. Assume the person is just a mean-spirited twit, and keeps on offending. At this point, we should probably model the process on the whole "second the motion four times, then vote." Four subsequent referrals to Bureaucracy by four different individuals would automatically generate the dreaded "official warning." By having it automatic and form-letter like, I think it would seem less like a personal attack. The O.W. would be posted in the thread(s) that generated the offending posts, Bureauracy, maybe Press or Beep Me, and would also be sent to the person's profile address.

3. After the O.W., the next referral to Bureaucracy would mean a suspension. By this point, if the person has been Doblerized several times, invited to formally discuss his/her behavior several times, etc., it's clear that he/she has little or no interest in changing his/her behavior.

4. Banning would occur if the person comes back during the two month suspension. After the two month suspension, the person would come back with a semi-clean slate. If they started acting up again, the whole procedure would start from the beginning, except this time, suspension would be replaced with banishment.

I'd like to toss this idea out there for discussion. There may be problems with it that I'm not seeing, but I think that it allows for things to be handled in a reasonably friendly, casual manner while still allowing us reassurance that we do have recourse if a person is making us feel unsafe in our own cyber-home.

but the fact is we can't (or won't) block offenders, because we're afraid of blocking non-offenders.

Cindy, I think the bigger problem is that since most IP addresses are dynamic, blocking them doesn't do much good. Most dial-up (and even most DSL) accounts assign you a new IP address every time you sign on.

late to the party, but can I get an explanation of Doblerize?

What behavior do we consider deserving of a warning?

Let's use our real life example. Being personally insulting, being unresponsive to community members asking to adjust tone, or continuing to use a purposefully abrasive tone that sets off more than one person. What happened with mieskie is that a number of people complained about it her in Bureaucracy, enough (whatever that number was - I remember about 8 or 9 people chiming in) that a Stompy posted a warning in the thread identified as an official stompy warning.

What constitutes a warning?

How do we notify party of said warning?

I think a official notice from a Stompy both in the thread where it happened (we talked about making it formatted differently so it would stand out) and through email.

How much time do we give a warned poster before moving onto the suspension phase?

We didn't handle this very well with mieskie. Also as a newcomer he didn't really know/understand Bureaucracy at first. We should allow some recourse to defend or appeal. This was not a popular notion at first because folks had encountered Trolls who derailed admin threads by using this door.

How do we handle a poster that has been warned but feels it unfair or unjustified? Is there an appeals procedure?

We had discussed (in lieu of letting the warned person make their case in Bureaucracy) letting them make a direct email appeal to the Stompys which could be posted here, and allow people to discuss it without letting a troll dominate the board with debate about their behavior.

late to the party, but can I get an explanation of Doblerize?

Lloyd Dobler - John Cusack's character in Say Anything. "You must CHILL!"

Anne, that's a reasonable proposal. I think it will need kink-work-out, but what doesn't.

The one thing that worries me about it is that I know there are Buffistas so conflict-avoidant that they will disappear from the thread rather than confront a person who is being offensive. I don't want to judge these people, but we might want to take their behaviors into account. Because if the onus is on an avoidant person to do a duty she dislikes, she may just split rather than deal. Or maybe appeal off-board to a friend of hers who is less avoidant, which would be kind of a burden on the friend, I think.

I don't know how to deal with this, or even, given the vast volume of "Hey!" people there are here, whether it will really be a problem. But it's a concern of mine.

Lloyd Dobler - John Cusack's character in Say Anything. "You must CHILL!"

I like the word.

I like it much.

I am so happy to see people use it.

Nutty makes swell points. I really think MARCIE will help a lot.

t cough

We still need a thread name and an actual thread.

Allyson + Bitterchick -- All I'm interested in is the technical aspect of how they got around Cindy's problem. My guess is that they put in coding like "IF the IP address is bla-bla AND the user is CINDY, THEN DON'T BLOCK. ELSE IF the IP address is bla-bla, then BLOCK." If that's what they did, then I definitely wouldn't want to do that here. It would require hardcoded intervention everytime the situation arose, and it would mean that a harmless new user could potentially be blocked until they "proved" they weren't the troll. If they solved the problem in a more elegant way, then it's at least worth looking into, even if we ultimately decide not to go that route.