Rule Revision Regarding Banned Users and Proxies.

[Mr. Bambu]

Yes but as anyone who has done data management can tell you, getting the opinions of larger group of people lessens the overall bias regardless of what type of group it is. The staff are human after all, personal bias is a given. There would be a point where we would indeed have to trust imperfectly trust people but we have not that reached that point as of yet.



That could work but has issues of it rather slow or just never resolving like a CRT can. Through my nigh 6 years of the wiki I have seen the personal biases of many users on this sight influence their own choices which has happened to regular and staff users alike. I am capable naming examples but I am not sure if this thread is the right place for that.


I am again willing to reduce it to 3 staff approvals. I personally never had an issue getting over 3 before in my own CRT threads but that is at the end of the day my own perspective. 3 would have to be the minimum however any lower and the risks stated above take affect.


I see, Method 1 can be easily rewritten to do this as it also is about strictly banning proxying as a whole. So it would only require some changes before fulfilling your ideal scenario.

The philosophy of data management applies to very large groups of people, we don't have the luxury of dealing with those.

It probably isn't, but I don't doubt it.

Respectfully, I'm not willing to have it be 3. 2 is fine if we keep the rule as you present it in that option.

Correct. Method One is flawed currently but would match that ideal with some tweaking.

 

[GrathOfLux]

I've been asked to comment on this. Since I have already shared my thoughts on the topic on a couple of occasions, I'll quote my post from the staff DM to avoid being repetitive:

I've already roughly spoken on my thoughts about the proxying matter, but I'll outline my general feelings on it here as well, in the event anyone wishes to take this to a staff discussion. If someone does, all points should be made clear in advance.

I think direct proxying (i.e.: copy-pasting a banned user's messages directly onto the forum) should just be plainly disallowed. The practical impact of it is akin to temporarily unbanning the user so that they can make a comment - but I think we would object to allowing that on the basis of any single staff member's say-so, and rightfully so, considering that these decisions to reach a ban are nearly universally based on a discussion and consensus among a large number of staff members. The alternative, though, which is to make the process more elaborate (for example, by having private admin discussion threads to allow or disallow such comments) would inevitably slow things down drastically with bureaucracy.

There is also an issue of deterrence. A ban serves more purposes than just getting a problematic person away from the community - it is also a punishment that reinforces to people that they should not do certain types of conduct. People who would otherwise perform misconduct are supposed to be dissuaded from misconduct knowing that they will be prohibited from interacting with the community if they engage with it. Allowing this form of looseness only makes a ban - especially a permanent one - a less serious form of deterrence, as people are shown they can largely do what they did before even if they act out.

Perhaps more importantly, though, I don't really see the point of having a bureaucratic process for allowing direct proxying in the first place - whether a fast or a slow one. There realistically isn't any situation I can think of where someone can post a banned user's message directly onto the forum but can't just summarise the banned user's points in their own words. The latter would be essentially impossible to prohibit, and even if it were, I wouldn't think it'd need to be. I do think the negative impact is a bit exaggerated here, but - why do we have to have a process in the first place for these types of pseudo-ban circumventions when we can do all the same important, helpful revisions without it? Even in the current state of things, where it can be granted on the approval of a staff member, it is still a bureaucratic process for something that I think is totally unnecessary for the functioning and productive discussion of the wiki. Whether we choose to tell people to receive permission through such-and-such process to be allowed to proxy, or that they cannot and that their messages must be their own words, it's still a slowing down of the usual processes - why choose the variation that causes all of these headaches?

I just think it's a needless convolution of our system of rules and regulations that doesn't really provide any meaningful, productive benefit and which does cause troubles and controversies, like we have seen. Better to be without it.

To put it briefly: I think of "direct proxying" (in contrast to things like collaboration) as the means of directly posting a message from someone who is banned on their behalf. I believe enabling direct proxying via the current type of process is too loose, and generally strange in consideration of the otherwise relatively strict process by which a ban can be passed. But I don't think making the process more bureaucratic is much of a solution - these types of bureaucracy are always made with good intentions, but as the intentions disappear with time, what you're left with is an inefficient procedure that exists for little purpose other than to sustain itself. Furthermore, enabling direct proxying through any means makes the deterrent effect of a ban less clear, and I don't think there is any realistic situation in which we would need a directly proxied comment over, say, a user making an argument in their own words.

So I don't think method 2 as proposed has merit. I don't mind method 1, but Bambu expressed that he believes it doesn't specify the boundaries of proxying well enough:

As for your final paragraph, I would amend the rules to strictly ban proxying, clarify what proxying means, and provide an example to differentiate it from other activities such as just discussing things with a banned user off-site. That would be my ideal scenario, I think.

And I'm not strictly opposed to rewording it provided the extra clarification would have coherent benefit. Importantly, in relation to my above points, I would want any such wording to delineate direct proxying from other types of banned user interaction. I would not sign off on any such wording that attempted to make restrictions on, for example, off-site collaboration (in the sense of the interaction between banned and non-banned users off-site for revision ideas). I don't think there's any coherent way to restrict that and other forms of the general flow of information, and that even if there were, that it would just be spiteful. I have no interest in working off of rules built on a groundwork of resentment - I just think our current procedure makes the enforcement of the rest of our rules lackluster, and that the preferable alternative for future-proofing is not to strengthen the bureaucratic process, but to just get rid of it.

 

[DontTalkDT]

I think as long as an admin approved the post and no other staff disapproved the user's involvement it is fine to post.
However, I think the unbanned user doing the post should have a responsibility for the content beyond just ensuring that it doesn't violate any rules. Arguments should not be blindly repeated. If you use someone as a source, you have to ensure it's reasonably reliable.
So someone that posts a banned user's arguments should
a) be convinced of the validity of the arguments.
b) have looked into the content enough that they can answer obvious questions regarding the arguments on their own. E.g. be aware where quotes come from and of the immediate context surrounding them, having checked whether character statements are reliable, have verified passages if no clear source is provided in the post etc.

That will also ensure that the flow of debate isn't constantly interrupted by minor arguments having to be relayed back and forth.

 

[CloverDragon03]

Yeah no, I don't see the point in allowing any direct proxying because it's legit as simple as "what's the point of banning people if they can so easily circumvent it?"

 

[DarkDragonMedeus]

At the very least, it's preferred if posts were paraphrased rather than copy/pasted.

 

[CloverDragon03]

That's pretty much the equivalent of:

"Can I copy your homework?"
"Sure, just make sure it looks different enough to not get caught."

As of now, Bambu's point about Method 1 being best, but with some tweaking to concretely define what is and isn't direct proxying, makes the most sense to me

 

[Agnaa]

I disagree with your suggestions.

I believe that the ideal proxying rule would allow proxying, while being clear about where the argument comes from, without staff permission, as long as it is not done more than a few times in a thread, and as long as it doesn't comprise more than a small portion of a user's posts. If the post violates our rules, then we will ban the user who proxy'd for not vetting it well enough. If no-one else wants this way of running things, I'd go for whichever option is closest to this.

If we consider this thread to be helpful then would the thread that applied the information that this thread is trying to change be deemed unhelpful? If so then why?

We don't have separate threads just to apply information accepted in one thread, so this question is kinda asinine. One would not need to borrow the posts of a banned user to make a thread saying "hey can someone please apply this".

If you are getting what I am saying you would also realise that any thread can be labelled as helpful for any number of reasons that someone can simply just say.
"My thread is helpful as it is adding new information the wiki didn't have otherwise!"
"My thread is helpful as it is correcting information that is wrong!"
"My thread is helpful as it is improving the quality of a page/verse!"
These examples here could be applied to essentially every CRT that has ever existed on the wiki which trivialises the condition of the thread being helpful allowing banned users to post whatever they want with these examples being used to justify it.

Yeah, any decent CRT would qualify, but most posts on the forum aren't the OPs of decent CRTs.

The rule states that a post needs to be approved by staff before being posted. While this looks fine on paper it is highly exploitable. For starters, the rule does not specify how much staff is required to allow for a post to be made which would have people think that it only requires 1 staff approval to be made (which after some investigation with some staff seems to be the case). Such low requirements for this rule makes it extremely easy for a banned user to effectively circumvent their ban as it is a sad truth but a truth none the less that extreme bias exists within the wiki.

You've just claimed that without substantiating it.

This will damage the wiki as a whole as being banned would become a non-punishment and be hardly a deterrent for poor behaviour and/or conduct. In the example we have seen in Fuji, they are effectively able to interact with the wiki the same way they could have before. If a banned user is capable of interacting with the wiki in such a degree as this with such low requirements which can easily be satisfied by asking staff who are biased to get a certain result then the ban would effectively have done nothing.

This is completely false. How many posts has Fuji made through proxying? I've been told before that she's made three. Over six months. Her average activity on the site would be almost 1,800 posts over that period. That is miles away from effectively interacting with the wiki in the same way.

And hey, if you think a staff member is only allowing proxying posts because of bias, report them to HR! If we find that those posts were unreasonable ones to greenlight, that staff member will face an appropriate punishment.

This is the strictest option but it is a sure fire way to prevent this rule from damaging the integrity of the wiki and effectively removing the penalty that bans give. Some may say that this is too strict as it completely disallows any banned user from doing anything with the wiki I shall simply counter argue with the fact that if they are banned for some time they shall simply wait that period before making their posts as intended by that ban. Perma Banned users would then also be directly unable to ever interact with the wiki ever again, this can be justified by the fact that these users are permanently banned for a reason and that they had their chance on the wiki and would have received warnings about their behaviour.

I think it does more to damage the integrity if we refuse to hear out arguments. I would rather have the wiki become more accurate. I think bans are already punishment enough with this minor amount of proxying allowed.

That would be a disastrous option. While it is true we could never truly stop proxies, as with any issue our aim here should be to mitigate it as much as possible. That option would just fully embrace proxies onto the wiki rendering any sort of ban pointless.

lmao, that's how the site operated until, depending on which you count, last year, or 2021. It was not a disaster. We were not a wasteland until this vanguard against banned users was implemented.

For situations like this, in my opinion as long as the work isn’t mostly from a banned user (ie most of the CRT and the arguments are made by someone who isn’t actually banned) then the CRT should be fine.

The issue comes from when the CRT as a whole or the vast majority of it is literally made by a banned user, reworded or not it’s still basically just being a sock puppet with extra steps.

Spitballing ideas, getting scans from, or just bouncing ideas off with a banned user shouldn’t be an issue as long as they aren’t the ones directly creating the arguments

Not sure if that’s how other mods feel but that’s my opinion

Also pretty sure image helpers and translation helpers don’t actually get votes in staff threads

Well, first off, I think you should know better that we already have a rule that goes against such direct banned-member influence on the wiki. It is your job to scrutinise through their work if the shit they've done is reliable or not, as well as to discuss it with staff members about it, and obviously not to blindly put your trust in them; if you're simply asking them for scans and all, that is fine (unless the scans are fake) since you're not taking in any of their sentiment. Otherwise, yes, throw them all away since it is a direct violation of our site rules to include direct influence of banned members without any staff scrutiny.

This sorta thing gets me pretty concerned, since people have very different ideas about this sort of thing.

I've heard multiple staff members support stricter rules, but also, only targeting cases where the user's post is verbatim copied. Now there's people talking about it applying to even cases where a banned user comes up with >50% of the arguments used in a thread written by someone else. People seriously want to ban arguments from being used depending on their source. That's outlandish, and it's something that should be clarified if we're revising this rule.

If I may be so bold, I think we have enough common sense to know what does and doesn't work as far as far as the whole banned user situation goes (like yes you can use scans because those are fair game, no you can't just copy-paste banned users' arguments since that's functionally the same as our "don't copy-paste off-site arguments" rule, yes you can use arguments similar to them if they're your own)

Applying that standard would not work well here. You're allowed to copy-paste off-site arguments, as long as you:

• Do so in the general discussion or Q&A section of the forum.
• Are simply providing quick access to a large collection of feats.
• Highlight some core arguments and relevant evidence.

It's functionally very different, because the reason is very different. That rule was created because people were lazily copy-pasting things without considering our standards, and whether we'd evaluated those arguments before.

It's vague. What exactly are staff evaluating whenever a proxy approaches them? Is it the content of the thread (coherence, availability of scans, politeness, etc)? If yes, those will be evaluated by the staff on the actual thread anyway. So why the extra step? Is it the source of the thread, i.e., circumstances surrounding the banned user and reasons for their ejection? If yes, what are the qualifiers/disqualifiers? Does getting banned because of a slur usage result in an auto-rejection? Or off-site drama (Dread)? Or persistent annoyance/sock creation (Vapourr)? These things need to be clearly specified so that affected parties know what they're dealing with

I don't think we need to specify every single reason like that. I think our staff can handle that sort of thing pretty intuitively, and communicate that to the affected user if the post is rejected for that sort of reason.

We indeed can never truly create a gapless system that can never prevent this from happening, the intent of this rule change is not to influence how a member of the wiki can interact with a banned user (there are other rules for that which are not the subject of this thread) but to mitigate scenarios where a banned user makes use of another user to get the work they did onto the wiki and effectively circumvent their ban and yes the purpose of a ban is to cease negative activity on the wiki we must not forget that it also comes with the consequence of said user being unable to interact with the wiki. If we are to strengthen the worth of a ban and reduce negative activity on the wiki the rules on this must be more strict or a ban would lose that consequence. To give an example, let us say that I got banned for this scenario. I logically should not be able to interact with the wiki as a punishment for my negative actions, if I were still able to provide content to the wiki through the form of content revision would I really have been facing any real punishment? I moreso use the Fuji case as an example as while yes it has approval it is being used to show how these rules can be taken advantage of in order to get a desired outcome, as someone could leverage connections or shared discontent over a particular verse which over my nigh 6 years on the wiki I have sadly seen happen more times than I wished to.

As stated before, the intent behind such a high requirement is to ensure the integrity of the post. If the message is truly helpful it should not have any issue being allowed however, I am willing to reduce it to 3 staff as was my original plan. We need not forget that banned users are serving out a punishment placed upon them by the wiki staff, if the user was simply banned for a period of time then they can simply wait out their ban period before posting their thread as was intended by placing such a time limit on the ban in the first place. As stated above the worth of a ban is only as heavy as the consequence it deals and thus if these are to have merit they must give these users who do not care about how they are acting a reason to cease their negative activity as with the current rulings it is only a matter of time before they will get taken advantage of through the weakness in its requirements.

We don't need our bans to be maximally punishing.

We could make banned users face more punishment if we deleted all profiles where they were the only contributor, deleted all of their calculations, and discounted all of their votes in versus threads. Because "how are they really being punished if they got to leave such a legacy despite their bad behaviour?" Would this actually make the site better, or would we just be wasting our time doing vindictive nonsense that reduces the quality of our site?

And yes, needing to get permission to post is still facing a punishment. Your user experience is worse than before.

 

[Theglassman12]

And hey, if you think a staff member is only allowing proxying posts because of bias, report them to HR!

Do you realize how long it takes for HR to come back on reports that were sent to staff? They take ages and by the time they respond in regards to rule violations the damage has already been done, this isn't the end all be all given how long it takes for any response period.

 

[Agnaa]

Do you realize how long it takes for HR to come back on reports that were sent to staff? They take ages and by the time they respond in regards to rule violations the damage has already been done, this isn't the end all be all given how long it takes for any response period.

In cases where the decision isn't split, and there isn't a mountain of information, we can now get rulings in a day or two.

But yeah, an overhaul of how HR works would be great, and I think the stakes for that are generally higher than they are in the case of enabling proxying. I have some ideas on how HR could be changed, and I know others do, if there's will amongst the userbase to actually change things there.

 

[Theglassman12]

Are you sure it's a day or two? Because I've seen people talk about their HR reports on WeeklyBattles and Eficiente being done a while before HR bothered to do anything about it, and it's not done in the span of a day or two, plus an overhaul on how HR works doesn't address the Proxy issues.

 

[CloverDragon03]

Agnaa, your disagreement is noted and all, but these are some of the worst, most nothing statements I've seen on this topic for multiple reasons. I'll just get into some big offenders.

And hey, if you think a staff member is only allowing proxying posts because of bias, report them to HR! If we find that those posts were unreasonable ones to greenlight, that staff member will face an appropriate punishment.

You speak in terms of the ideal (that HR will actually do something about this), and not the real (that nothing comes of these for a multitude of reasons that I dare not get into). Anytime I see "just report to HR" I just sigh because I've tried with bad acting staff. Multiple times. And it's only ever worked out once, which was quite frankly a miracle.

I think it does more to damage the integrity if we refuse to hear out arguments. I would rather have the wiki become more accurate. I think bans are already punishment enough with this minor amount of proxying allowed.

You prioritize arguments over the community, and that's the problem. Like it or not, VSBW is not just indexing. It's a community that we should foster by not letting people who were removed from it have a means to return as if nothing happened.

Your assumption is that not a single other person will ever come up with such arguments, and that that assumption is sufficient to undermine the purpose of a ban.

We could make banned users face more punishment if we deleted all profiles where they were the only contributor, deleted all of their calculations, and discounted all of their votes in versus threads. Because "how are they really being punished if they got to leave such a legacy despite their bad behaviour?" Would this actually make the site better, or would we just be wasting our time doing vindictive nonsense that reduces the quality of our site?

And yes, needing to get permission to post is still facing a punishment. Your user experience is worse than before.

This is the definition of missing the point. We're not removing past work, we're just ensuring they don't contribute further because the point of a ban is that they can no longer interact in the future, not to remove past contributions from before they were banned. That's not how bans work, not just on VSBW but in general, which is why I say this is missing the point. You kinda just gave an irrelevant suggestion to try and make a point but the point fell flat.

We may as well allow banned users to make a sock that can only post once a month, but I think no one in their right mind would actually agree to that.

This argument just screams obtuse and contrarian, and I hate saying these things, but sometimes I really just can't help but feel like I've gotta take off the filter in what I say.

And lastly, it seems like you're pretty set in this position, so I'm just not going to respond further after this. My stance is obvious. So is yours. It is what it is

 

[Agnaa]

Are you sure it's a day or two? Because I've seen people talk about their HR reports on WeeklyBattles and Eficiente being done a while before HR bothered to do anything about it, and it's not done in the span of a day or two

Both of those were mostly before my time. The Eficiente reports were still an open issue when I joined, and took me about 10 hours of constant work to get through, during the course of which I wrote over 5000 words of notes. If you report someone for ~70 posts in ~30 different threads, then yeah, we're not going to be able to get through that in a day, no matter how we revise things. But reports which only involve a few posts/screenshots can consistently get done in that sorta timeframe, if we unanimously agree.

Agnaa, your disagreement is noted and all, but these are some of the worst, most nothing statements I've seen on this topic for multiple reasons. I'll just get into some big offenders.

You speak in terms of the ideal (that HR will actually do something about this), and not the real (that nothing comes of these for a multitude of reasons that I dare not get into). Anytime I see "just report to HR" I just sigh because I've tried with bad acting staff. Multiple times. And it's only ever worked out once, which was quite frankly a miracle.

I know how it feels; I was astonished when my report of Weekly for stealth-editing a blog after it was accepted to pretend that explicitly rejected speed ratings were allowed, and then immediately adding it to pages and locking them, only resulted in a warning. But I hope that we can get more on top of things.

You prioritize arguments over the community, and that's the problem. Like it or not, VSBW is not just indexing. It's a community that we should foster by not letting people who were removed from it have a means to return as if nothing happened.

In cases where I think it does intrinsically hurt the community, by revitalising trauma or creating fear, such as by allowing posts by users who engaged in harassment campaigns, or who are known pedophiles, I would be against posts of theirs being allowed.

But here, it seems like the outrage is mainly over the way the rules function, than outrage over the mere presence of a user. For an example of the latter, look at what happened when Dread's ban ran out.

Your assumption is that not a single other person will ever come up with such arguments, and that that assumption is sufficient to undermine the purpose of a ban.

Not that no-one ever would, but that the banned user will end up having it, and turning that idea into something presentable, more quickly. I think that time gap can sometimes be pretty long; it was years between when a banned user made a post on /r/CharacterRant about how our dimensional tiering was dumb, and when Ultima mostly revised away dimensional tiering.

This is the definition of missing the point. We're not removing past work, we're just ensuring they don't contribute further because the point of a ban is that they can no longer interact in the future, not to remove past contributions from before they were banned. That's not how bans work, not just on VSBW but in general, which is why I say this is missing the point. You kinda just gave an irrelevant suggestion to try and make a point but the point fell flat.

JoshSSJGod said "we need to strengthen the worth of a ban", so I mentioned things which would strengthen the worth of a ban, to exemplify why I don't like that philosophy. If it's about stopping future contributions, we could also try to do things like preventing IP banned users from seeing the forum at all.

We may as well allow banned users to make a sock that can only post once a month, but I think no one in their right mind would actually agree to that.

I do like how proxying requires the vetting of another user that we can hold accountable for bad decisions on what to let through. I wouldn't like that sock idea since ultimately there isn't really accountability, unless we only allow that sock until people misuse it. In which case I would kinda like that idea for certain bans, if we could magically remove the technical issues with implementing such a thing.

This argument just screams obtuse and contrarian, and I hate saying these things, but sometimes I really just can't help but feel like I've gotta take off the filter in what I say.

Fair enough to think that way, but knowing my own posting history, I've consistently been far more light than any other staff (and the vast majority of non-staff) in terms of bans, to the point where I have to heavily moderate my views on them when making actual decisions. I just have a different philosophy for that sorta thing.

 

[Nierre]

I'm for Method 1.

Banned users shouldn't be allowed to influence what happens on the site IMO. If they want things to be changed or fixed, they should've acted accordingly. Most users don't get banned immediately unless their trolls or do something incredibly distasteful to the point where it's decided we don't need that type of energy in this community, often times we give out warnings before we give the ban hammer. So I say all that to say, a good chunk of (perm) banned users from this site know what their getting into right before they get banned. Proxies, in my opinion, makes banning them useless if they can just use someone to convey what they want to say, in my eyes it's not different than an alt account.

On the other hand, we do sometimes give second chances if we feel that their apologies are honest, and we think that enough time has passed to the point where we think the user has matured (among other things), so it's not like there's NO other alternative once you're banned.