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.
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. |
