All The Tropes talk:How We Do Bans Around Here

Especially the type of edit-warring that re-breaks something that a mod fixed, but the garden-variety "is not!" "is too!" "is not!" "is too!" "is not!" "is too!" type also uses up time and resources.

One question: tempban immediately, or warn then tempban if repeated?

@Agiletek @GentlemensDame883 @Haggishunter @HeneryVII @Ilikecomputers @Jlaw @Lequinni @RivetVermin @Umbire the Phantom @Utini501 @Labster @Looney Toons @GethN7 @Robkelk

For the avoidance of doubt, what exactly constitutes "edit warring"?

Undoing and re-doing of the same edit.

I vote aye, I've had a lot of trouble with such folks on other wiki sites

I would, in my opinion, prefer if it was not done immediately; I think doing any kind of punishment on a hurry is a dangerous idea.

I could've sworn we already had that, but no. Failing that, I thought it must be on another page somewhere, but again, no.

Yes, yes, a million times yes -- it should be there. I'm pretty sure we've cited it, at least as a threat to an unruly user, at least once in recent^[when?] months.

It's on our list of ban reasons in the tool, but it isn't in any of our guidelines or policies yet.

So far, the votes are to add, preferably under "after a warning". But the discussion is only four hours old.

Has anything happened recently?

Yes, which is what reminded me of the absence. A new troper, still under moderation, added back in the "how to use this template" comments that Looney Toons took out of a new Work page. Not bannable in and of itself, but part of a larger issue.

Ah okay. Hmmm

I vote for ot to be banneable, but in a three strikes level. One time can be a mistake, twice is a Kpop girl group, and thrice is fully on purpose, direct into tempban. Once more after that will garant full wiki ban to the offender.

We're already doing "three strikes" for minor issues. First strike gets a comment, second strike gets an "On Notice" warning, and third strike gets the tempban.

Thanks for the clarification.

I'd like to go with Lequinni's three strikes idea, the better to sort out the innocent or confused mistakes, sincere and with-reason disagreements, and malicious actors.

A few notes for consideration:

There are a few kinds of reverts, with different levels of intent. This isn’t exhaustive, but generally there are manual reverts, in which one adds the same or similar text back in by typing, and direct reverts, where someone literally reverts. The first can be (but is not always) an unintentional act (Such as thinking they forgot to add something earlier, when in fact they did and it was removed). The second is always deliberate.

The three strikes idea is kind of similar, yet quite different in practice, to an existing policy in use on The Other Wiki: The three-revert rule. It is important to note that Wikipedia’s policy is not a hard three strikes rule, but a line in the sand: If you do three reverts in a 24 hour period, you are edit warring without question. A mod can intervene and declare your actions edit warring before that point if it’s clear. It’s a "I'll know it when I see it" kind of deal.

The caveat is that edit wars here aren’t always going to happen within a span of 24 hours. People edit more slowly around here.

I do believe there should be some expiry period for strikes if we go that route, say a year or three, when considering a ban.

The obvious provisions should be considered for any edit warring clause (More so to reassure the innocent and provide guidance.)

• If all the involved parties consent to undo a change beforehand via public discussion, with agreement noted on wiki in a discussion (If not entirely hashed out in public view) and preferably linked in the changeset, it ain’t edit warring.
  • If a party is absent for some time (I ain’t sure how long) and a moderator (For small changes) and/or the community (For big or controversial ones) gives a go ahead, that ain’t edit warring either.
• If you accidentally revert somehow (It happens, if rarely), and realize it, the appropriate action is to revert your revert, and start a civil discussion about what to do. That ain’t edit warring.
• Once someone calls it edit warring, regardless of the actual number of reverts, it’s time to stop editing in mainspace (Continue in user space if you must) and hash it out with the mods if civil discussion fails. Lying about this by making frivolous reports ought to be considered a bannable offense itself.

I trust the mod team today enough that these provisions wouldn't truly be needed, but I don’t know about the mod team a few decades from now. Best to sort this out now.

The ATT moderation team, as with any other, has limited resources. I know that I’ve consumed more than my fair share of those resources, but it’s true. Moderator time spent on giving obvious edit warring second and third chances is wasted, but moderator time giving those chances to a genuinely mistaken user is not. The issue is of course, that a Troll with half a brain pretends to be the mistaken or innocent user.

Edit notice April 14, 2024: I added a break to ensure two separate ideas are clearly separated to remove ambiguity over what is meant.

Sorry for the Wall O’ Text, turned out longer then I thought.

No worries on the wall'o'text. I'd much rather see reasoned debate than rubber-stamping of a mod proposal.

This seems like a common-sense rule. Based on previous experiences with other wikis, I would suggest reinstating deleted content made without an accompanying summary be considered reasonable behaviour. I've seen a couple of instances of user with an axe to grind deleting things they don't like, without any backup whatsoever. If you can't argue for something's exclusion, I don't think you can be mad when it is reverted.

We have consensus on this, so I've added it to the "tempban after warning" list.

Thanks, everyone.

Because I just had to give somebody a ban for replacing an entire trope page with a single word, and the only thing I could find on the lists was "putting the entire wiki at risk".

Is such an act really only worth a tempban-on-first-offence, though, or should it be a permaban? It's very annoying to clean up after (even if the cleanup is a simple matter of hitting the "undo" button) and it shows a massive disrespect for other Tropers, but it isn't actually against the law the way the other permaban-on-sight offences are.

Opinions?

Pinging the Moderation Staff and long-standing active Tropers - please comment if you have an opinion. @Labster @GethN7 @Looney Toons @QuestionableSanity @Derivative @SelfCloak @Beta Log 86 @HeneryVII @Lequinni @TBeholder

I'm surprised none of us ever noticed it wasn't on the list of offenses, because I know we've had to deal with this before.

This is a permaban on first offense thing. Period. No argument.

Regarding this specific instance, the twerp in question should be permabanned. Immediately. It wasn't an honest mistake, it was a deliberate act of vandalism, and he even went out of his way to register just so he could do it. There's no reason to let him back. At all.

Remember that when you wrote this page, right at the top, you said that these were guidelines, not rules or policy. Guidelines do not lay down hard and fast every possibility, and are not to be adhered to with no exceptions like proper rules. It already mentions instances where admins can use their discretion -- this was a case of that, and no one would call it an abuse of power or the guidelines to have permabanned him.

In fact, in the interest of protecting the wiki from a a second strike from this bozo in two weeks' time, I'm exercising my discretion and upgrading him to the deluxe block with leather interiors, whitewall tires, 8-track stereo, and permanent duration.

I agree with LT. Obvious vandalizing is grounds of permaban almost elsewhere, and adding "vandalizing and blanking wiki pages" to the list of permabannable offenses is just and necessary (even if it was understood within the "putting the wiki on risk" category of offenses). Drop the banhammer in the little shit and the ones who come after them.

I agree too, Vandalizing a page can get a poster kicked out of any other Wiki I know of, so that should be the case here.

Concur wholeheartedly. While the damage is not irrevocable, someone mass deleting content from a page harms our overall mission to present said content to the public for the duration of said damage.

It appears we have consensus. Updating the page... EDIT: And done. Thank you for your advice, everyone.

"Tempban, then case by case" makes the most sense in general, in that it's not even always intentional. From previous experience we know there's a whole herbarium of bugs, retarded censorware (remember that guy with a edit-box-wide word substitute?) and probably malware… a short term first ban with stated reason doubles as "time out to fix your crap". If someone has pants on the head obsession or is a jackass, will either get bored and go elsewhere or repeat, if not, fine…

That's a good point. If someone blanks a page and replaces it with a message for people to kill themselves, then I think we can reasonably assume they deserve a permaban. Otherwise, depends on context and severity as TBeholder rightfully points out.

...so I'll start. Overall this looks good. I've read through it several times over the past few days, and no real changes come to mind. I'd be comfortable with making this a live page as-is.

Strong language per content pages should maybe considered not an immediate tempban

Good point. I've split "what is grounds for..." into two subsections: immediate tempban and tempban only after a warning. Did I put things in the right subsections?

Just added a reason for an immediate tempban that we've had in place for years now. As for when we shift from temp to perm, well, we had someone on a 4 month tempban which expired in November. IIRC, we promised a permban after that, so we a have a precedent to follow: if we reach a point where we're going tempban someone for over 4 months, we might as well permban.

One thing maybe we should also have is a schedule of tempbans -- do different offenses merit different initial ban lengths? And should we have a predefined series of durations -- one day, 2 days, 3 days, 1 week and so on?

Thanks, LT.

As for the schedule: It seems to me that a one-day or shorter tempban doesn't do much, especially if the offender doesn't try to login for a day - a two-day tempban is the shortest that I'd give if I was making the list without input. Beyond that, I'm lazy and wouldn't be averse to using as a list the predefined options that MediaWiki gives us.

It occurs to me that we should probably lay out explicitly the bans for spam somewhere, too. Our current procedures are permanent ban for a registered account which spams, and a six-month or one-year tempban on an anonymous IP. (I've used both one-year and permanent bans on IPs that have any results at all on StopForumSpam.com's IP Check, which generally means they're IPs owned by spammers.)

More changes made to the draft. Input is requested from @Labster, @GethN7, @Looney Toons, @QuestionableSanity, @Derivative,@SelfCloak, and any other interested party before I start turning this into a proper article/guideline/policy page.

If we decide that this is going to be a policy instead of a guideline, then all current Tropers should have a chance to comment.

I checked the draft, it all looks good to me.

I think it's safe to turn this into a proper guideline page.

Agreed, although we should clean up some of the chattier or uncertain parts first.

Okay, the text has been polished.

I think this is now almost launchable. The sole flaw that I see: It needs a better name.

Assuming an "All The Tropes:" namespace before them:

"Tempban and Permanent Ban Policy"

"Bans: Rules and Guidelines for Qualifying and Applying"

"User Bans - How to Earn and How to Avoid"

"How We Do Bans Around Here"

I like the last one - succinct and clear.