On Tue, 06 Mar 2007 20:45:25 +1000
Stuart Longland <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> On a somewhat related note... I've sat back and watched this
> argument for some time now. Banning people seems like an extremely
> drastic measure. Sure, it's easy. It's also easily circumvented,
> and is only a short-term solution. I don't think it's the answer.
Banning people is not drastic. We do it all the time on #gentoo and we
have rules in place to stop ourselves from becoming power crazed
maniacs as well as giving banned channel users the benefit of the
doubt.
Circumventing (evading) a ban on IRC means giving up your nickname, and
if you happen to value your own name, you won't, hence you will not
evade the ban. The same applies to mailing lists. If you ban a user and
he comes back using a different e-mail address, you just ban him again.
Getting banned from a community happens to be a lot worse than just not
being able to get your point across (i.e. continue the flamewar).
Losing the right to use your own [nick]name / e-mail address within a
community is an extreme penalty indeed, but if the ban is temporary
(in the case of MLs, say two weeks or a month), even the people passing
the ban can live with it.
> How's this for an idea though... Rather than banning
> *people*... why not temporarily ban a thread? I know this is easily
> possible on forum threads -- mailing lists are more difficult, but if
> one could lock a thread for a day or so -- that might allow people to
> cool off before picking up the thread again.
Banning certain threads isn't just infeasible (technically impossible),
it's actually worse than banning someone from your community: by
"banning a thread" you censor whoever is left in the community.
And actually, circumventing a "thread ban" is much easier than getting
back on a mailing list: you just start a new thread. In fact it happens
all the time on this list when someone thinks writing a new subject
will make all the difference, or tries to set a new tone to the
conversation. It just does not work.
Banning certain users, perhaps banning them for a period of time to
maybe cool off, is easy to implement and these bans are easy to
maintain. What you are suggesting, i.e. moderating the content of this
list before it even hits our mailboxes, is censorship of the worst
kind, and would be impossible to uphold.
As someone suggested before, maybe the forums.g.o people might like to
chime in and give their view on "debate management"? I wouldn't think
it gets as heated as IRC does, but maybe there are some parallels
between forums and MLs that could be of interest.
Kind regards,
JeR
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