Forum:Chat Ban Regulations

In a recent discussion on IRC with between Smilular, KATANAGOD, Carbonite 0, DarkMetroid567, and myself, an interesting topic came up. We realized that chat bans seem to have varying lengths not because of the offense, but because of the chat mod who issued them.

For Example if you look through COD:CHAT/B you will see that one user Ely Delta was one his second warning for spam and received 7 days ban from Redskin-26. However another user, Dp1337pwnage received his second ban as well, the moderator this time being Smilular. Initially it ran 21 days, but was recently shortened to 14 days by KATANAGOD. Despite being shortened, it was still double what the other user experienced as his second ban.

My point here is that Chat bans should not be regulated simply by what moderator is handing out the ban, as this violates AEAE as different bans are given out to different users. Instead a regulatory chart which lays out what offenses equal what bans. As an example:

Trolling: (as an example, what is below should not actually meant to be considered part of the proposal)

1st offense: 1 day

2nd offense: 3 days

3rd offense: 1 week

4th offense: 2 weeks

5th offense: 1 month

6th offense: Permanent

And then have a different out line for something like being a dick such as:

Breaking DBAD:

1st offense: 3 days

2nd offense: 1 week

3rd offense: 1 month

4th offense: Permanent (Non-proposed stuff ends here)

This would effectively let every user know what kind of punishment they could expect from what kind of offense. If that was undesired, it would at least make chat easier to moderate, as all moderators would know exactly what ban for what length a user should be receiving.

Now I know one of the arguments of this will be "What about the severity of the offense?" Let me answer that with this. Say the offense was Spam. The only difference between posting huge copy and pasted block of text and continuously spamming one word is that the one word will likely break up the chat, while the block of text will simply create a large amount of text in the chat. Either way, both situations are equally severe and equally disrupt the chat, thus shouldn't be treated as different.

This topic should be used to discuss what length of a ban for a specific action (i.e trolling) and a specific number of the offense (i.e third time).

I hope you consider my proposal, thank you. 04:22, January 27, 2012 (UTC)

Discussion
Honestly i think it should be up to the chatmod to set up the time for the ban at his/her own discretion, similar to how administrators ban people for various amounts of time. The blocking guidelines don't set any guidelines for the amount of time some user should be blocked. If you feel that the time that some other user is wrong, be bold and adjust the time, but if you need to explain yourself, make sure you're ready. 04:35, January 27, 2012 (UTC)

I think while there should be regulations on chat bans similar to blocking guidelines, chat mods are trusted with their rights and received them as trusted users. It is up to a chat mod to hand out bans on a case-by-case basis, rather than a black-and-white one. However, there should be a limit; something unreasonable like a 2-week block is blatantly excessive. 04:43, January 27, 2012 (UTC)

I think that there should be guidelines, but there be a "give or take" policy with them. For example, a major offence should be punished harsher than a lesser offence should be. In simplest terms, per 1337. 04:55, January 27, 2012 (UTC)

While yes a mod should have their own right to judge how long a ban should be, after this disscusion in IRC, I realized it's not consistent. Say one mod banned a user for spam for 3 days, but another mod would of for longer, there may be a dis-agreement between the two. However, some more major offenses will need to be taken into consideration, for example: Spam is one thing, but if a user was spamming something offensive, stricter actions may need to be taken against it.

While I like the guideline idea, I think that that's what it should be, just a guideline, set as an example, but still flexible depending on the mod. 05:50, January 27, 2012 (UTC)