Crossposting this from lj-multiplicity.

[sethrenn.livejournal.com]

As of today, there's now a new community, multi_dispute. We're hoping that it will resolve a lot of the confusion about who to contact if there's a problem on the community, and the problems it's caused in the past.

At this point:

-Membership is moderated, but we'll almost certainly let you in if you're a member of multiplicity. The only situation under which we would turn down a request for membership is if you've been banned from this community for a specific reason. Only members can view the community posts, though (I think we can agree we'd really all rather not have people staking out the community just because they want to find drama to report on).

-Basically, the purpose of it is so people can have a specific place to request mod intervention, if a problem has arisen or they want to request arbitration for a dispute/ban/etc. We thought it would be easier to have a community to post in, when problems do arise, than for members to have to PM 5 or 6 separate accounts. We check LJ more often than we check our email, which I believe is true for some of the other mods as well, so the quickest way to get a message to us is to have it pop up on our friends list.

-Posts are moderated and require approval before being shown to non-mod community members. The reason for this is because the nature of some people's problems may require them to disclose personal information that they don't want the rest of the community to see, or they may fear harassment from a specific person. Tentatively, we're going to start out making all posts visible unless you specify in your message that you don't want it to be seen by others. (I won't go into detail, but this kind of situation has happened in the past.)

-If you're having a dispute with another person or system, we encourage you to see if you can work it out with them before posting to multi_dispute; however, we also understand that in cases where harassment, bullying and intimidation are taking place, trying to reason it out with the other party is often not possible. And we definitely don't want anyone to feel as though they can't post on the community because of the behavior of one specific person or system.

We've had some fairly in-depth talks with ksol1460 over the past day about the need for people to feel that they don't have to "fight their own battles" and be left without allies. I, personally, definitely don't want people to feel as though they're alone, unprotected, and can't ask for help-- we felt silenced for years about a lot of issues because we couldn't get our head around the idea that we had the right to protection from abuse of any kind. And I think most people here would probably agree that this community has a higher-than-average number of abuse survivors-- not because I believe all multiplicity arises from abuse or anything, but because there still is a large crossover between the multiple and survivor communities online, and some people are abused specifically because they're plural-- by family, by peers, by partners or by doctors. And when a community is likely to have a lot of survivors in it, I do think, nowadays, that it's especially important to remind people that they aren't alone, and that it can be done in a way that isn't "whiny" or about "coddling people," or catering to victim complexes, etc.

Okay, on to the second half of this post, which is about trying to lay down new rules about exactly what kind of behavior is considered unacceptable here, and what actions will be taken if someone does these things.

These rules were proposed by Fenners^Kerry, but the rest of us agreed that they sound reasonable, and we would like others' input about them.

Behaviour that can lead to a warning or ban:

Insulting comments and posts ('you asshole', 'you always cause trouble in the community')
Threats
Identifiable passive-aggressive attacks
Snark that appears to have a specific target

Here's what I'm proposing as a disciplinary system:

Three warnings on insulting or offensive posts and comments. After the third warning, a five-day temporary ban/suspension will be placed on the person/system in question.
The second time someone commits a bannable offence, the suspension time will be increased to two weeks. The third temporary suspension will be for a month.
Permanent bans will be issued if the people in question refuse to modify their behaviour even after three temp bans.

There was also some discussion about whether individuals or entire groups should be suspended/banned. I'm currently not sure what my opinion on that is, but fairly has suggested that if members of a group have individual journals, they should be warned/suspended/banned on an individual basis, unless everyone in the group has been participating in the same bad behavior. On the other hand, if the entire group uses one account, and one person in it has been persistently breaking comm rules, there would be no choice but to suspend/ban the group account.

I do understand that a lot of this stuff-- like what does and doesn't qualify as snark or as a threat-- can be subjective at times, and so I also think people should have an opportunity to defend themselves in the more ambiguous cases. I'm hoping that multi_dispute can be used for that kind of thing, when there really is genuine disagreement among community members about whether someone was unfairly snarking/insulting/threatening, or someone feels they have a convincing case that they were wrongly warned or suspended.

Anyway, I'd like to know what others think of these suggestions, if they're fair or unfair, and, if someone thinks they could improve on them, what improvements they would make.

~Riel

ETA: I've been reminded by a system mate that fenners posted a slightly more refined version of the rules I just posted above, in a previous post in this community.



Disciplinary Action:
* Initial offences will be addressed with an official warning. Warnings should be marked as warnings, so that it's easy both for the community member and the moderation to note when a member has been warned.
* Three warnings on insulting or offensive posts and comments. After the third warning, a five-day temporary ban will be placed on the person/system in question.
* The second time someone commits a bannable offence, the ban time will be increased to two weeks. The third temporary ban will be for a month.
* Permanent bans will be issued if the people/systems in question refuse to modify their behaviour even after three temp bans.
* Exception: Incredibly egregious behaviour -- that is, severe harassment, violation of others' privacy, death threats and other similar things, will result in an immediate and permanent ban from the community.

Behaviour that will lead to warnings and bans
* Insulting comments and posts — this includes thinly-veiled digs at other community members that are solely intended to provoke an unwanted reaction, as well as overt attacks like 'you're an idiot'.
* Harassment
* Threats
* Identifiable passive-aggressive attacks
* Impersonation of other members
* Deliberate attempts to provoke negative reactions in other community members

One more question here: personasystem raised the issue of whether three temporary bans/suspensions was too lenient-- that two should be enough. Agree, disagree? We actually are leaning in the direction of thinking that two is enough, right now, but want to hear possible alternate opinions.

Comments

[myorp.livejournal.com]

I think the idea of the new dispute comm sounds reasonable.

I do think that this thread (http://community.livejournal.com/multipolicy/771.html) still raises valid questions about the exact formulation of the quoted disciplinary policy that remain unanswered.

Also, one of the threads(I can't seem to find it but it's somewhere in this comm) brought up the question of whether the disciplinary steps would be downgraded after some amount of time of good behavior. I realize that that sort of a system can be "gamed" but it also seems unreasonable to keep people at some kind of warning level that could conceivably build over a number of years without the person even really realizing it if it's an uncommon occurrence.

As for the system/user-ban question, I'm not really sure where we stand on it. We see the arguments for both standards as being good ones. I may rather like the idea of systems being held responsible for their member's actions because it mirrors the way things really work in society as a whole(if one person breaks the law, the group goes to prison) and that also helps build group-responsibility. On the other hand, if a system was really fragmented, it's possible that individuals with separate journals could really use advice in dealing with problem-members and could keep their journal to themselves so to speak... I just don't know about that one. Maybe it would just need to be decided depending on moderator knowledge of the respective group?

~Kent

[sethrenn.livejournal.com]

Also, one of the threads(I can't seem to find it but it's somewhere in this comm) brought up the question of whether the disciplinary steps would be downgraded after some amount of time of good behavior. I realize that that sort of a system can be "gamed" but it also seems unreasonable to keep people at some kind of warning level that could conceivably build over a number of years without the person even really realizing it if it's an uncommon occurrence.

Yeah-- like I mentioned in my most recent post here, we are... definitely not, as a group, innocent of shooting our mouth off in inappropriate ways in the past. Some of it we feel pretty crappy about nowadays, actually. What seems most reasonable to me, at this point, is to just go on a case-by-case basis-- see how people change, and don't change, over the years. For example, one person who had persistently engaged in bullying behavior over the years, towards several people on the community, was banned in 2007 (I think) and then asked to re-join with a new "secret" account, promising that they would just read and not comment. They couldn't keep to that rule, and began posting with the account they had promised just to lurk with, using some of the same condescending and provoking attitudes and behaviors that had gotten them banned in the first place. So we, at least, saw that as evidence that... they really hadn't changed much at all, and due to a joint mod decision, they were eventually banned.

But there are some other groups and people who've caused trouble in the past, and managed to calm down somewhat over the years, so we do believe it can happen.

At this point (and Yushyu is kind of co-fronty with me here and agreeing very adamantly with me about this), I also prefer the idea of holding people to group responsibility-- that if certain members of their system persistently threaten/harass/flame/troll/etc, and the members who don't do this either don't see it as a problem, are unwilling to ask them to stop it, or genuinely don't have their operating system together enough to stop them from acting out, those are not really the types of groups we want on the community. I do understand that, in the case of groups whose communication/cooperation is really bad, they genuinely may not be able to help it, but it still makes them a potentially highly disruptive element on the community, and might be better off in a more therapy-oriented community.

(In the interest of disclosure, I'll mention that we have a few people in our system who would never be allowed to front unsupervised-- not that we think they're "evil incarnate" or anything; we think everyone is equally capable of cruelty and amorality under the right circumstances; but because they have some problems with judgement and empathy, and if we just let them post whatever they wanted, it would likely cause trouble. We're actively trying to help them get to a point where they can understand that their actions have consequences, and that their desires and impulses can be rather misguided, but things don't... happen overnight. So we have some sympathy, in theory, for people going "But Fh'targhn wants to get out and flame everybody!", but our sympathy runs out if they insist there's absolutely no way they could ever control him, and that they be forgiven for everything he does. Because we've had to work on some creative ways of restraining our own anger urges, individually, a lot, to say nothing of dealing with those in our system who don't yet have great judgement.)

[myorp.livejournal.com]

Yes. Saw the new post. It helped clear up a lot.

And we generally prefer the idea of system responsibility too(we use the In Essence agreement without much real reservation), but still can think of particular instances where it might be reasonable to have some particular groups it wouldn't apply to.

I'm thinking both generally, and specifically of groups where one member comes here seeking help dealing with their headmates who may be "troublemakers" for lack of a better word and who might happen across their activity and come on the comm specifically to pursue them.

Also it might be problematic to ban a group when a particular member is here but has a headmate who thinks they are the "original" and wants to get rid of the individual who wants to be an upstanding member.


I guess what I'm saying is, I can think of too many legitimate exceptions for me to say that the system-accountability method should be a hard-and-fast rule. Maybe an overall guideline, but if someone makes a good case that they should have an exception made for them, I think it's unlikely that it will reflect badly on the moderators. If it comes back to bite you later, the worst it means is having to follow up with a more complete ban a bit later!

~Kent

[fairly.livejournal.com]

Agreed. I tend to lean more towards case-by-case evaluations of the situation, rather than hard-and-fast rules like this, anyway.

[fairly.livejournal.com]

I lean towards individual bans in the case of groups who maintain separate journals and tend to have only one or two people who get involved in flame wars. In the case of shared journals, there's really no way to handle it *but* by banning the group journal itself, to prevent the problem person posting in the community.

That being said, I understand your (and Yushyu and R's opinions below) on group responsibility -- if you ban the group for a particular person being inflammatory in the community, that would enforce group responsibility for that person. Philosophically, I tend towards individualism when dealing with plural gropups, so it's a difficult issue for me. I think that this should be handled on a case-by-case basis: sometimes, individual bans work; at other times, group-wide bans work.

[myorp.livejournal.com]

Yes, that would be incredibly useful.

~Kent

[ksol1460.livejournal.com]

Yes. One of the reasons we are taking on new admins.

[myorp.livejournal.com]

Also, it strikes us that for this new comm to actually work, it needs to not turn into another layer of bureaucracy. Actual moderator interaction, coupled with relatively(within a day or two seems reasonable) response seems like it will be key to making the community actual work in the intended way.

~Kent

Re:

[kalsportsf.livejournal.com]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aMzgVshG6CI

Re:

[brenanedyz.livejournal.com]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aMzgVshG6CI