Topic on All The Tropes talk:How We Do Bans Around Here

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.