It's not clear to me that this is even the right approach. Someone who behaves in this way on IETF mailing lists even once should be moderated from that point forward, or banned. The end of the PR-action should not be "back to normal." It's utterly naive to think that a 14-day cooling-off period is going to fix something like this.
Banning does seem like an extreme, but making people feel unsafe so that they stop participating is effectively a ban as well.
What I would suggest is a good approach to this is:
1. We should have clear policies about what is and is not appropriate. I would say our current harassment policy is actually fairly vague. Many IETF participants are not particularly socially competent (I count myself in that number) and can behave in ways that are disruptive to the community without even intending it. If the way the community responds to this is unskillful, these people can become more combative and ultimately abusive, where if we had engaged more constructively early on that might not have happened.
2. If policies and gentle outreach don't work, or if the behavior constitutes an emergency (as I think was the case here), then PR-actions are appropriate and should be undertaken. If someone is behaving poorly on the list but shows a willingness to try to address their behavior, then a cooling-off period makes sense and I think can reasonably work. However, this assumes that the person in question is motivated to change their behavior, and actually able to do so. This will not always be the case.
3. If a person engages in behavior patterns that clearly indicate that they do not respect the community and are not willing to work to engage more constructively, then we have to decide whether that justifies a permaban or a permamoderation. I don't think there's a middle ground here: a person who has decided not to respect community norms would have to really make a major about-face before we could justify allowing them to post again without moderation. A mouth-only apology would not be adequate. A waiting period while doing nothing to address the antisocial behavior is even less adequate.
4. If someone returns after a PR-action and continues to post in ways that are disturbing to moderate, or that simply consume too many resources, that person should be perma-banned and no longer allowed to post even with moderation: nobody here is getting paid to do moderation, and even if they were, nobody deserves to have to wade through abuse as part of their job.
Based on the history that Adam shared, I would say that this PR-action is too little, too late. I support the action, but I agree with you, Chris, that we also need to rethink how we do this. Right now we don't actually have any sort of formal moderation process, and I think that needs to change if we are willing to restore posting rights to people who don't seem willing or able to restrain themselves. We should not just abstain from responsibility for addressing situations of this type, and I think an eventual restoration of posting rights in such a situation amounts to abstention.
On Mon, Jun 10, 2024 at 10:58 AM Chris Box <chris.box.ietf@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
--On Mon, 10 Jun 2024 at 14:44, Ofer Inbar <cos@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:Responding to someone's comment by publicly hitting on her and using
that to deflect from the content of what she wrote is so over the line
that the fact that he did not very quickly apologize means he should
be banned permanently.Ofer,The standard operating procedures [1] of the IETF list Moderators do not have a sanction higher than L2 which is a 14-day posting rights restriction. Looking at the list charter [2] I don't see any prohibition on going longer than that, but I'd like to hear community views on what a Level 3 should look like, if you think such a thing is sometimes necessary.Chris
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