The Xenforo "Discourage" Feature

question: would the temp ban be an ip ban or an account ban if this ever happens? because I'm concerned for spiral socks.

edit: i know there's way to get around ip bans as well, but it'd take even more work/effort and if it happened it'd be an even bigger sign something wouldn't work. so big difference.

 

IP banning wouldn't work, but just banning this account would probably work well enough since my subaccounts don't have passwords. Spiral socks aren't as much of a concern because AFAIK accounts still have to be manually accepted and that generally tends to be paused when drama happens.

BTW, I'd like if you permabanned my alt, the owner of the subaccount I posted the Witness Me thing in, as I don't plan to use it for anything anymore because I said some extremely personal stuff on it (in part precisely to force myself not to meltdown on it). If deleting or moving said alt's vent thread somewhere it can't be seen is also an option, that would be nice too, if that's not too much trouble. I'm sorry if this is too generally inconvenient.

 

I really do think that temp bans are the only real option in this case, since it's quite clear that Palin noticed that something was up via subaccounts and that's going to be a possibility for a lot of other people. Unless you can do things to entire ips then trying to be secretive about it isn't robust at all, and then when someone files a "bug report" everyone else is going to panic because that's what we do best around here.
Since Xenforo is apparently bad at sneak, you're going to have to be upfront about it. Otherwise you get accused of playing mindgames. An accusation that would be true, to be clear, but one with bad PR, at least in this place.
Unfortunately, being upfront about it sounds like sending a message of "It is official Mod opinion that you should take some time off" and then hoping that works rather than reinforcing whatever the issue is. There is no Good way to make someone leave if they don't want to unless you're willing to devote much more time and energy than I think the mod team has to offer, and so we must look into the dark abyss of Expediency.

So, questions about the ability to ban people:
What kind of resolution, time-wise, do the temp bans have? Can you ban someone for half an hour? Half a day? Do they affect the entire subaccount tree or just the individual account? How difficult would it be to ban someone from everything but the Mad Science section of the forums?

 

Yeah, I think the real problem here is that the subaccount feature makes it really difficult to effectively shut someone down in the middle of a spiral if they don't want to be shut down. Does the mod team have a list of all of @palindromordnilap 's subaccounts/alternates and are Slow Down actions going to be applied to all of them unilaterally in the future?

 

I mean, yeah. Might as well try the thing and see if it works. If it does work, wonderful! If it doesn't, idk if the mod team is really in a worse place.

 

Does the moderation team currently have a list of all subaccounts/alt accounts associated with Palin, or is there going to be one, going forward, so moderation action can be applied to all of them equally so as to prevent further spiralling? Alix has said that she has used the subaccounts to check that only the main account was targeted by the Discourage feature previously, and this possibility remaining open seems like it would defeat the whole point of a Temp Ban

 

Back when dinosaurs ruled the earth, the forum software ran on a Commodore Amiga, and I was a lot more active, I spoke in favor of the "no-bans" rule because it would force Staff to think creatively about other ways to manage the forum. Bans are a very attractive solution to lots of problems. And having an attractive solution to lots of problems tends to make one pass up other possible solutions.

In this instance, a possible non-ban solution was tried and it was a shitty solution. That does not necessarily mean all other non-ban solutions are shitty solutions. I encourage Staff to continue to explore other non-ban solutions.

 

I feel like you made two mistakes here, not one. The first in believing that the bad behavior was happening here on the forum, and the second in picking a particularly bad response. Had you been correct in believing that the bad stuff was happening on the forum, would the current toolkit have been sufficient? History, and your first post in this thread, suggests that maybe not.
So research continues. Maybe the true solution is one of words and not software; I think generally we all hope that is the case.
I would just like to note that if you're sticking to principles, then you need more people who can do something. Maybe not mods, but at least users who are capable of intervening effectively and are willing and available to do so. The software tools you put aside need to be compensated for with human effort, and that's always been a problem for this forum.


[Edit] To clarify, since it seems the post as written doesn't quite say what I wanted it to:
I definitely think that the best short-term solution is technical intervention by a mod without the explicit consent of the user in question, due to effectiveness constraints.

 

or if they consider what others are saying, and still think the current course is necessary or otherwise disregard them. I'm fairly sure that Alix was listening when ppl told her to chill, but chilling was at the time considered less important than getting her point across any way she could.

that's the thing about meltdowns. when a person is in the middle of one, chilling tf out often seems like the least helpful thing to the person melting down. or they think they can't chill until the situation or problem that sparked the meltdown is fixed.

 

@thegrimsqueaker alix said in one of the transcripts that you were considering making her a mod. were you?

 

Grim isn't a mod and that was a joke, but they did say I was more qualified to support people than the currently available Discord mod team.

 

I joked about it, w/ the implication that it was a terrible idea

 

good. the way alix talked about it in the transcripts, it sounded like you were seriously considering it.

 

nope. but also, I don't have the authority to make her a mod anywhere besides the knitsugi server, and that's low traffic enough that we're good w/ the two mods we have