I was in the unfortunate position of having to ban someone from an online tech support forum of which I was the mod. This was after weeks of myself and other mods trying to resolve the issues with them. Issues like name calling, trying to stir up racial issues, making fun of new users for being noobs, trying to stir up other users against the mods, all that teenage BS (although the person was in their 20s or 30s).
The result was that they followed me on to Twitter and other social medias and started calling me names like Nazi and so on. I blocked them there but it was frustrating - we were just trying to run a small help forum for an open source library and I spent way too much time in good faith trying to help this person and still got publicly name called from it.
I ended up feeling totally burned out by this and stopped moderating the forum soon after.
Because of following me and other mods onto Twitter we made the temp ban permanent. I have no idea if the person is still banned.
If I had to deal with this kind of situation a lot I can totally see adding a rule that the banned person can't follow you onto social media and complain as a requirement for the ban remaining temporary.
Contrary to this being weaponized shunning, I see it as "we need space from you for a while and if you don't give it to us and come back with a better attitude we're gonna permanently remove you from the community".
That all said, it probably could be worded less severely.
I'm sorry to hear that. I fully believe in people's right to cut off contact, even across platforms. It's more that in this case this power seems to have been centralized by the project, whereas I believe it should rest only with the individual - cutting off contact for another member, using community participation as a threat to enforce it, is what raises my hackles.
Having such a rule won't actually guarantee people, who are already breaking your rules to begin with, will honor them. You're still going to have to block them, exactly the same situation as if you didn't have that rule.
Having such rules is essentially pointless. The people you want to shun won't listen to your silly rules, and everyone else will just be weirded out by your authoritarian community.
The result was that they followed me on to Twitter and other social medias and started calling me names like Nazi and so on. I blocked them there but it was frustrating - we were just trying to run a small help forum for an open source library and I spent way too much time in good faith trying to help this person and still got publicly name called from it.
I ended up feeling totally burned out by this and stopped moderating the forum soon after.
Because of following me and other mods onto Twitter we made the temp ban permanent. I have no idea if the person is still banned.
If I had to deal with this kind of situation a lot I can totally see adding a rule that the banned person can't follow you onto social media and complain as a requirement for the ban remaining temporary.
Contrary to this being weaponized shunning, I see it as "we need space from you for a while and if you don't give it to us and come back with a better attitude we're gonna permanently remove you from the community".
That all said, it probably could be worded less severely.
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