Regarding the recent troubles, and in particular Anti-Cleisthenes's
Cantus Cygneus:
In one sense, nothing new has happened. Rules whose effects clearly
include "Players can be deregistered via proposal" have been on the
books for a long time. The reasons could be anything from "repeal
corporate personhood", to "clean up after an ambiguous deregistration
attempt", to "clean up after something that was intended to trigger
deregistration but a mechanism turned out to be broken", to "execute a
scam that involves the scammer and eir confederates briefly being the
only players".
In another sense, as far as I remember (having played Agora for most of
its existence), the recent situation is indeed unprecedented. While a
few other players have caused widespread upset, that was due to their
disruptive actions affecting gamestate (e.g. Maud causing the Annabel
Crisis, or Fool repeatedly doing something ambiguously effective and
then intentionally going against the Agoran tradition of minimizing
knock-on ambiguities); Madrid is the first instance of causing such
upset via the discussion fora, with eir discussion pertaining more to
the people playing the game than to the game itself.
That said, A-C's claim that we jumped from zero to expulsion is
disingenuous. There were some intermediate steps, also via discussion
fora (and/or private e-mails / Discord messages): e was kicked off the
Discord server (though allowed to rejoin); e was informed of the
recurring and upsetting nature of eir actions in the eyes of several
others, and presumably was similarly informed at various points in the
past. Eir complete failure to express concern or attempt compromise,
sticking to "I'm not actually X because Y", is on eir own head. (In
contrast, Maud was clearly apologetic. Also, that particular form of
disruption is basically a solved problem now, anyway.)
The claim that the Banned switch is only intended for Madrid is also
disingenuous. It's only intended for Madrid /right now/ because Madrid
is the only person /right now/ who (a) is considered to warrant it due
to eir behavior, and (b) would likely continue otherwise. Hopefully that
remains the case, but if a new player joined the game and behaved
similarly, then it would likely be applied to them at some point. Or if
Fool returned and resumed eir previous style of gameplay, then it would
probably at least be sincerely discussed as a hypothetical.
I spent several years running a different type of game (I've mostly
retired to an advisory role) that had a ban policy from day one (written
by my predecessors, but it seemed sensible to me). It was intentionally
broad (and has been used several times). Here are the high points,
paraphrased, as they may offer useful guidance for an Agoran framework
going forward (combined with a summary of some specific things agreed to
be detrimental, such as R. Lee's recent proto).
* The person's behavior must be doing the game more harm than good,
and they must be very unlikely to behave differently in the future.
* Almost always a judgment call. An objective system like "three
strikes" lets a bad-faith person get away with it twice, while
penalizing a good-faith person who makes mistakes.
* Lesser in-game penalties are ineffective, as are shaming/belittling
the person.
* Actively hostile people should be told to stop. If they don't, then
they may be temporarily banned to achieve a stop and demonstrate
that this will happen. [The game uses real-time communication, plus
mail/forum systems; standard length of a temporary ban there is
three days.]
