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Public area => The Pub => Features => Topic started by: Arantor on October 3rd, 2012, 02:58 AM

Title: Hellbanning, aka global ignore
Post by: Arantor on October 3rd, 2012, 02:58 AM
I've been thinking about this for some time. As part of my extensions into the warning/banning system deal, I've been considering adding this in as a last resort.

Hellbanning, or global ignore, is an option whereby all topics and posts by a user are invisible to everyone except themselves. The idea is that they can post freely without realising that no-one else can see their nonsense.

There are some interesting asides to it:

1. Performance is likely negligibly affected, if implemented in the core. As a plugin it's a bit different but probably not that significant. (It's just way cleaner if I make it part of the core)

2. If the user was once a meaningful participant, it could be awkward to hide all the posts and topics as if they never happened, meaning you almost have to consider making it a filter applied at the post level to block a user's contributions after a given point (which *does* bring in all kinds of performance considerations)

3. There are potential issues with hiding posts - you never actively tell the user that they're being punished, but that's part of the point. Never telling them means they don't know, and beat themselves against a wall until they leave. It also means they never have a way to defend themselves or represent themselves.


Basically, I want to give people tools to be able to manage their communities. I want them to be able to deal with troublemakers and have whatever tools will be able to do that effectively. This is why I want to make the warning system more granular, so that instead of very broad levels of punishment (watched/moderated/post banned), you can have punishments that suit every level of troublemaker, right up from inappropriate signatures and avatars (temporary/permanent removal of specific privileges) through to inappropriate content (various tools that I don't want to mention yet, heh[nb]I have some... interesting... ideas that I don't want to spoil yet but that will really help with dealing with troublemakers IMO), and generally inappropriate behaviour (moderation, inability to login/browse, i.e. bans)

The other matters, removal of privileges etc. are fairly subtle but ultimately quite 'safe' punitive measures - a user who is subject to them knows that they are subject to them. But a user subject to hellbanning - or, for that matter, the annoy-user measures such as slowbanning[1] or errorbanning[2] - would not know they are subject to them. They can log out and not see these things, and before anyone so much as breathes 'by IP address' (:P) I would remind them that IP addresses are not reliable and that such things will cause people to be punished unnecessarily and unfairly.

Especially if, say, it's applied to a university or workplace range where proxies are in place. Getting another IP address is not a problem for anyone determined enough to really cause havoc anyway.

I'm also aware that this concept is absolutely nothing new, I just want to be sure that if I do implement it, it is with the best of intentions and that I put in safeguards to try and prevent it from being any more abused than it could be; I don't want to wrap admins' hands in kid gloves but I don't want to hand them a loaded gun either. This sort of measure is not a first resort for troublemakers, it is a last resort, and I want the system to reflect that.

Thoughts would be appreciated.
 1. Delaying the user's page loads.
 2. Throwing error messages to users.
Title: Re: Hellbanning, aka global ignore
Post by: spoogs on October 3rd, 2012, 05:21 AM
Sounds interesting but I'd lean plugin here, along the lines of Annoy User triggered by a filter to hide all posts.
Posted: October 3rd, 2012, 05:19 AM

How would a quoted post of theirs be handled?
Title: Re: Hellbanning, aka global ignore
Post by: Arantor on October 3rd, 2012, 05:25 AM
Well, it is exactly a variation on Annoy User - Annoy User is explicitly errorbanning and slowbanning as described above, and it comes with all the passive aggressive mentality, it's just one step beyond.

I've been debating bringing Annoy User into the core too - for those persistent pains in the neck that a typical ban would not deal with.

As far as quoted posts go, yes, you'd see quoted posts. But since no-one but admins would see the original posts, there wouldn't be any opportunity to quote them. All you'd have is a period of overlap where the posts would be able to be quoted but it would die off soon enough. This is where you get into the realm of users who were once good members but have gone bad.

Essentially, actually, I'm thinking you'd have to go through several lines of warning before this even became an option anyway, so it wouldn't affect anyone except the most persistent irritations.
Title: Re: Hellbanning, aka global ignore
Post by: MultiformeIngegno on October 3rd, 2012, 08:11 AM
I'd go with core it that means a much cleaner version
Title: Re: Hellbanning, aka global ignore
Post by: Nao on October 3rd, 2012, 02:14 PM
I absolutely love the idea... Wish I had it first :lol:

There are two things to say about it.

- How things could go wrong:
(1) Wedge is known to offer this feature,
(2) Banned user may not be so stupid and might read about it,
(3) they may simply log off (if they're not also tracked by IP), or look for their topics through google, then explore the cached version (in which case IP tracking won't help at all), and they would then be able to see the guest version of their topic -- which doesn't have their posts.
(4) User might then choose to retaliate for the waste of time and/or to complain about the silent censorship.

- How this could be implemented:
* That's an even better opportunity to rename the 'approved' field to 'status', and have it set between several flags, such as 'unapproved' (has to go through approval), 'live' (normal post), 'ignored' (hellbanning), 'hidden' (user chose to temporarily hide their post through a button, which they can re-publish later)... Or even, although I wouldn't recommend it, 'scheduled', i.e. post won't be shown until the scheduled time is right. Of course I'd rather have a separate table for scheduled posts, because otherwise the post ID would give away that it's not a live post, you could even recover the original posting date by comparing with posts with similar IDs.
* At hellban time, give the moderator the choice between 'ignoring all existing posts' (e.g. spammers), or 'ignoring future posts' (i.e. do not change status for existing posts).
* User can view own posts normally. Moderators can view them but with a specific style around the post showing that it's globally ignored, and the Quote/Reply buttons should be disabled to prevent a moderator from accidentally quoting a post and then having others point out that the post was non-existent in the first place.

I think it's an interesting thing to explore, provided we find workarounds for the 'things that could go wrong' area...
Title: Re: Hellbanning, aka global ignore
Post by: Arantor on October 3rd, 2012, 07:47 PM
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(1) Wedge is known to offer this feature,
I do not see this as a problem, other software has it out of the box, and there are mods for most forums that don't offer it out of the box.
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(2) Banned user may not be so stupid and might read about it,
If they're *really* looking for trouble, it's not that hard to figure out that it's in place, but no more so than any other method.
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(3) they may simply log off (if they're not also tracked by IP), or look for their topics through google, then explore the cached version (in which case IP tracking won't help at all), and they would then be able to see the guest version of their topic -- which doesn't have their posts.
I'm not entirely sure trolls do this. For the trolls that are smart enough to do this, even an IP ban wouldn't make a fat lot of difference because they'll be using proxies.

The point is not to be a single catch-all magic bullet. It's to deal with enough of the pains in the neck who aren't quite smart enough to realise they're being trolled.
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(4) User might then choose to retaliate for the waste of time and/or to complain about the silent censorship.
If no-one can see their posts...
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* That's an even better opportunity to rename the 'approved' field to 'status', and have it set between several flags, such as 'unapproved' (has to go through approval), 'live' (normal post), 'ignored' (hellbanning), 'hidden' (user chose to temporarily hide their post through a button, which they can re-publish later)... Or even, although I wouldn't recommend it, 'scheduled', i.e. post won't be shown until the scheduled time is right. Of course I'd rather have a separate table for scheduled posts, because otherwise the post ID would give away that it's not a live post, you could even recover the original posting date by comparing with posts with similar IDs.
I've been a proponent for this for a while - the problem is keeping it performant. This can trivially handle live, deleted, not-yet-approved posts.

Ignored is a complicated one because it's not simply ignored. It's 'ignored, unless the author is the current person' which starts to get expensive.

Hidden... I don't like the idea. I fail to see a situation where you'd ever want to legitimately do that.

Scheduled, very definitely should be in a separate table. There's all sorts of issues that relate to that, as I've been discovering with Game Memorial.
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* At hellban time, give the moderator the choice between 'ignoring all existing posts' (e.g. spammers), or 'ignoring future posts' (i.e. do not change status for existing posts).
For dealing with spammers, you don't really want to ignore the posts, you'd want them all to disappear, so surely it would be an account level thing not a post level thing?

As far as future posts goes, sure, that's a per-post flag.
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* User can view own posts normally. Moderators can view them but with a specific style around the post showing that it's globally ignored, and the Quote/Reply buttons should be disabled to prevent a moderator from accidentally quoting a post and then having others point out that the post was non-existent in the first place.
User can view their own posts normally and freely quote and reply, even if hellbanned. Otherwise as stated.
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I think it's an interesting thing to explore, provided we find workarounds for the 'things that could go wrong' area...
It's certainly interesting and that's why I'm bringing it up now :)
Title: Re: Hellbanning, aka global ignore
Post by: live627 on October 4th, 2012, 02:29 AM
It should be core so that plugin authors can implement this restriction.