Re: Should mailing list bans be published?
My feeling before reading this thread was that bans should be accessible
to DDs somewhere but this thread has convinced me that they should be
made public. I think bans should be time-limited in almost all cases,
with perma-bans being very rare indeed. I don't think that ban durations
should be disclosed publically or to the person banned (otherwise badly
behaved people will just count down to the ban lifting before posting.)
I think if we did this we may be more inclined to suggest bans more
often, or softer solutions for less egregiously bad behaviour (periods
of time-delayed posting for example) which might mean manpower issues
for the listmasters. In which case a seperate moderator team should be
considered (superlist of listmasters?), or teams, or perhaps per-list
moderator teams. I'd trust the listmasters to decide if and when they
needed help.
I found Charles' post about self-limiting post frequency very
interesting. One of the disadvantages of the threaded model of
communication is that various facets of a discussion get scattered to
all the leaves which means if you have several points to make, the
logical place to make them is at the leaves. This has advantages and
disadvantages (not least, many duplicate leaves as the same points
are raised and re-raised in sub-threads). I do like the experiments to
use the wiki to maintain "position statements".
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