On Mon, Jun 10, 2024 at 11:14 PM Brian E Carpenter <brian.e.carpenter@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> What I mean by moderation is that the posts of a person who has demonstrated even a single instance of apparently antisocial posting are blocked until they can be reviewed by a moderator, one by one.
Yes, that's a possible policy, but not the one described by BCP 45, which specifically refers to "a pattern of abuse". It is much the same in BCP 25 (RFC 2418) with phrases like "If the behavior persists..." and "As a last resort and after explicit warnings...".
Note, I'm not saying we couldn't change our rules, which were perhaps designed in a kinder, gentler age, but for the moment those are our rules.
I thought I was very clear, but to reiterate: I think the current rules are woefully inadequate. They err on the side of protecting the transgressor, not on the side of protecting the community. The text I wrote that you're analyzing was a suggestion, based on the request of a working group chair who asked for opinions about it, on how to improve the rules. I did not say, nor did I intend to imply, that the rules already say what I proposed.
> I don’t mean that someone steps in once after a pattern of abusive behavior has continued for multiple exchanges over a day or more.
>
> Regarding the rules, I very much meant what I said there: if you are socially competent, I’m sure the rules are quite clear, but for someone who is not, figuring out what behaviors are okay and what aren’t is hard: my go-to is simply to never do anything that I can even conjecture might violate one of these rules or ever make anyone in any way uncomfortable. And I still screw up.
We all do.
I again feel that I have failed to be clear. I'm not a doctor or a psychologist. I reached adulthood before diagnoses of Asperger's first went into and then out of style. I'm not competent to diagnose my own damage, much less anyone else's. What I was pointing out is that not every one of us can take a generalization about how we ought to behave and quickly extrapolate from that to specific behaviors. Some of us have to painstakingly figure this stuff out. I still sometimes realize that I don't know what to do next when some new situation comes up, and then I have to pretty much apologize, flee, and go figure it out. I make this effort because I care about and value my colleagues in this community, and getting it right is important to me.
When I say that the rules are not clear, that's what I'm talking about.
> So simply dismissing my comment about this feels pretty unhelpful,
Sorry, my point was really what I just said in this message: our existing rules don't allow for that interpretation of "moderation". We'd need to change the rules.
Yes.
That seems like useful input for the eodir folk (https://datatracker.ietf.org/group/eodir/about/), although educational/tutorial material in this area is tricky to get right.
There's a tradition in Buddhism that each of the renunciates' vows (e.g. don't put the robes outside to dry during the monsoon) came from a specific incident. I think this is actually a good model for this sort of thing—come up with the best list we can, and expand it when we find a gap. It's what we do with protocols, after all. We can also look at the trainings that various orgs do on these topics. It's really not that hard. A lot of good work has been done in this area—we don't have to reinvent the wheel.
That said, the idea that this should be a voluntary tutorial is maybe questionable. Trainings of this sort at least where I work are not optional. Everybody has to do them, and they have to pass a test at the end to show that they understood the material and didn't just zone out. I took one recently, and it was actually really helpful for me—there weren't any surprises, but there was additional clarity. Maybe we should consider that model.
We do put up the Note Well, but that's really CYA, so that we can claim people were notified if a dispute covered by them comes before a court. We honestly kind of suck at being a welcoming community. We've known this for years. Lots of efforts have been made on the organizational side to improve the situation, but I think this particular contretemps illustrates very clearly that we still aren't doing a good job.
