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2022-11-18 Ban Evasion & Moderation

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wthww

Computer Janitor
Staff member
Hello all,

We've recently had some drama revolving around an ex-member creating sock-puppet accounts to evade being banned and disrupting the site. I wanted to take a second to talk about how we handle ban-evasion and in general how we moderate.

1) The ex-member was banned ten years ago for misbehaving severely on the community. We actually keep detailed records of every ban, and why. This member was not banned without reason good enough to stay banned. The cycle of making a sock-puppet account, misbehaving, and getting banned has happed 11 times since 2010 — about once a year or so.

2) We go out of our way to work with people before we ban them. In the past, we haven't acted fast enough to prevent damage to the community, and so we came up with a system: three formal moderation actions and then we ban someone.

3) Moderation decisions like warning points, restrictions, or banning someone are final because of the formal (and informal) lengths we go to in order to work with a member before we take the last resort of banning someone. You have to really try to get banned on our community.

We're working on updating our rules, and our processes a bit, and we'll likely be posting about those changes over the next year so stay tuned on that front!

Thanks so much for the read and your help in keeping the community fun and engaging!

//wthww
 
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