The Xenforo "Discourage" Feature

A reading from the Book of Kintsugi

1. It came to pass that Microcosmic God looked upon the forum and saw that it was at peace.

2. But lo! A spirit of disruption entered into one of the Kintsugijin saying "Let us go forth and disrupt all of Kintsugi. Yea, even the forum and the discord and even the most secret parts of the forum let us disrupt."

3. And the spirit of disruption said many terrible things in the discord and on the forum and even in the innermost parts of the forum.

4. And Microcosmic God was troubled and cried out "This disruption is more than we can bear!"

5. So Microcosmic God stretched forth their hand and frustrated the spirit of disruption and its posts were frustrated. And the spirit of disruption saw it was frustrated and uttered many threats and rent its garments in rage at its frustration

6. And Microcosmic God called upon their servant the Rigs, saying, "Look upon what we have done and judge it."

7. And the Rigs returned from walking to and fro upon the face of the Internet and looked upon the forum and the discord and saw the disruption and the frustration and the threats.

8. And the Rigs called to mind the long ago time when the Rigs had been frustrated by the evil Gurdur in its Hangout.

9. And the Rigs said unto the Microcosmic God, "This was not done wisely. For surely the frustration will work upon the Kintsugijin possessed of the spirit of disruption great wrath and sadness. It were better to ban the spirit of disruption for a season then to frustrate it.

10. "For as Gurdur once did, so now have you."

11. And others of the Kintsugijin looked upon the frustration and saw that it was not good.

12. And Microcosmic God heard the voice of the Rigs and of the Kintsugijin, and their heart was hardened. For Microcosmic God was much wroth with the spirit of disruption.

13. And Microcosmic God stretched forth their hand and posted a wall of text upon the forum. And written upon the wall of text were these words:

14. "We are the Microcosmic God. We giveth and we taketh away. For the sake of the moaning of the Kintsugijin, we will refrain from frustrating for now. But we will not repent of it. We are Microcosmic God who brought you up out of the Land of Tumblr. We have spoken."

 

rigs is wonderful when he isn't terrible

 

I really, strongly think temp bans are a better idea than this feature. Bans, you know what's happened. With discourage, you don't know, and that easily leads to paranoia and gaslighting.
I know banning, even temporary, isn't a thing people are super enthusiastic about, but better an explicit ban than something that you can't attribute for sure to your own behavior.

 

My objection to discourage is similar, it has a gaslighting effect and splash damage in the form of anxiety prone oeople worryong it might be being used on them even if they're not involved because anxiety is a dick.

 

I do think temp bans are better than discourage without being a break in your stance against permabans. It's up to you, of course, just throwing my two cents in.

 

Like I can see how discourage is helpful in a very narrow set of situations that this was not, but even if the goal is to make posting inconvenient to a spammer even just letting them know upfront might not make it less effective, and in other cases set lengths of temp bans can be super helpful. We are definitely run much different than, say, Something Awful, whose permabans and long probations basically hinge on the fact that accounts are paid to act as a deterrent to just making alts, but I do think in certain cases giving someone, say, a six-hour cooldown and making it transparent that's what is happening lets people cool their heels.

 

Spoiler: thoughts about moderation and bans

My own stance on mod policies (for a places where I’m a primary policymaker, not here ofc) might align pretty well with policy here, though maybe a bit less nice. It’s been informed far more by immediate pragmatism than larger concerns such as community planning and ethics. I don’t think that’s how it should be, just how it has been to date.

I’ve found banning to be extremely ineffective. The people most likely to get banned are the people who tend to transgress against community rules. (Please note that transgressive != bad.) It’s quite a lot to hope that an angry, transgressive user will just accept a ban. What tends to happen, ime, is that the user comes right back, maybe with a new IP, or with a botnet, or worst case with a friend.

You have just signed yourself and all the other moderators up for a million years of toil and paranoia. The other users may get dragged in. The banned user now has a reason to obscure their identity, so every new or less known user becomes an object of suspicion. Is that them? You don’t know! You better be at or near your computer constantly in case you need to drop a new ban. Oh and you now have literally no recourse left if it doesn’t work. You are the parent fruitlessly saying, “okay now it’s two more minutes” to the kid in time out.

The instant you cut someone off from a community, you have burned your own influence. A person who is shut out of the community has no stake in abiding by its rules. If the stakes were insufficiently influential before, banning is not likely to improve the situation. Temp bans don’t fix this. I have not met many angry people on the internet who seem to think “it’s only for an hour” is a convincing statement.

I probably would be using discourage. Not here, just in a general sense if that were a tool and I owned a forum. Doubt and delay tend to make users unhappy, but they’re not the same kind of “road closed, use alternate route” sign. Talking is by far the most effective thing, but I won’t always be able or willing, and I don’t owe anyone uninterrupted access to myself or my service.

I think that once you’ve held that kind of power for a while, you start forgetting what it’s like for people who don’t have it. Not because you’ve succumbed to corruption (hopefully) but because your point of view is not the same. Sometimes it helps to be reminded that people want bans because they want justice, and they probably aren’t thinking about effectiveness or difficulty of enforcement any more than you’re brainstorming alternate methods for providing a sense of justice. Maybe I’m just speaking for myself there, but that didn’t occur to me at all until very recently.

If I were to found a forum, which I am definitely not planning to, but hypothetically, I would have to rethink the use of discourage-like features in light of this incident. I have new information now about how much it might frighten the general userbase. Fear of mods is poison to a community. It makes rules unenforceable and users vulnerable.

So I’m not sure how to conclude this... TED talk joke?

 

I don't really see how discouragement is significantly different from banning or shunning except perhaps with more passive-aggression and plausible deniability, neither of which I find particularly palatable in a governing body.
Any action that cannot survive being revealed even to those it involves is not an action a supposedly transparent government should be taking, and I would be quite surprised to find out that Kintsugi is besieged enough to warrant playing dirty.

 

You could actually try it out for a bit, it's more annoying than the description makes it sound like. Especially when you've got lots of watched threads, because opening multiple tabs is a guarantee that one of them will redirect you to the home page.

What else did you do, seebs.
Also, still not a huge fan of "We're not trying this thing Alix told us might work, because it won't, which we already know despite not having tried it because [train noises]".
I don't get mad at "attempts to make me chill", I get mad when I consider them unfair. "Hey, you're making a bunch of people upset so I'm muting you for a while" works every time. Ask the Nickscord mods!

 

Yeah, I'm kinda paranoid. I should also note, however, that this is a thing some mods have done before, that is, wiggling some posts because they thought it was too confrontative/not appropriate/whatever.
But yeah, you know what, I'll just switch to doing that on a more private chat.

 

Ah, yeah. I actually notice it, but this-- Oh, shit, I think I never mentioned it to you, only to I think Grim.
But essentially, a usually pretty great way to make me stop a meltdown is presenting me with another thing that catches my attention, like an interesting problem to figure out. So, yeah, this works, but is not really related to the "without Alix realizing this is happening" component.

Yeah, the predictive ability thing is pretty much why I'm asking you to consider it as a possibility. You can't really know what's gonna happen, and I've behaved in unexpected ways before. I genuinely consider using it as an opportunity for a way out would help me calm down and defuse the situation with the other people. You don't have to believe this, I'm just asking you to consider it.

 

It seems people are now automatically assuming bad faith about any statement I make, so I'm now going to back out of this thread.

 

Friend, I’m afraid you’re missing the entire point. The problem here IS NOT THE DISCOURAGE FEATURE here. That has been addressed. The problem is your absolute disrespect to the safety of others, your highly abusive behavior, and your complete disregard towards taking responsibility. If you want forgiveness and trust from others, you earn it by taking responsibility and taking visible steps to correct your behavior.

That absolutely does not mean shifting blame by saying “I did this horrible thing, but my behavior can’t possibly be that actual problem, and you know you’re at true fault for upsetting me and I’m only escalating because you did a mean thing to me”.

This is in no way a personal attack. This is coming from personal experience with this type of behavior (though thankfully never to your level of escalation). This is me telling you that no one else —and I mean no one else— is responsible for your choices. And they are choices, whether you want to believe that or not.

My suggestion, Alix, is that you drop the obfuscation over a feature someone used (no matter whether it’s ethical or not) in response to your harrowing behavior. Drop it, stop making yourself the victim in all this, apologize genuinely, and work to make it right. And I won’t lie: it’s going to take a lot of emotional labor, because you’ve absolutely destroyed any trust people may have had for you, myself included, over all of this. But at this point, you’ve brought this on yourself.

I also suggest you look into at least online Dialectical Behavioral Therapy (DBT). There are a lot of resources online, and whether you have BPD or not, I think you could benefit from it and the mindfulness it can teach you.

Edited to include that I’m more than willing to help, provided you hold yourself accountable.