Re: Should mailing list bans be published?
On Sat, 26 Oct 2013 10:46:41 -0700, Steve Langasek wrote:
> Hi folks,
>
> Was discussing with one of the listmasters (Alexander Wirt) on IRC today
> about mailing list bans, because it turns out that someone I was just
> about to ask the listmasters to ban from debian-devel had just been
> blocked in response to a request from someone else.
>
> This led to a philosophical debate about whether bans should be made
> public.
> Alexander expressed concern that having them published could be harmful
> to a person's reputation, since employers will google your name and see
> that you've been banned from a large project such as Debian.
(...)
> What do the rest of you think?
After carefully reading the exposed reasons and with my mailing list user
hat on, I have to disagree with making such a list publicly available.
If a user has been already banned from a list, what kind of additional
punishment do you want he/she suffers? It should be enough by just
privately informing the user that he/she has been banned, what mailing
list is the ban applied to and what's the reason (and length) for the ban.
The mailing list managers/admins have the right to ban whoever they
decide, but in the aim of "fair play", the user should also have the right
to defend him/herself from the accusations, expose his/her reasoning and
be able to restore him/her reputation or recognize the error, say sorry
and come back to the list again.
So I have to agree with Alexander's POV that these things need to be done
in the background to preserve the privacy right of the user, despite if
he/she is using a real name or a nickname.
In brief: IMO there's no need to make a public list and Debian Project has
nothing to demonstrate nobody because being effectively banned is the only
"proof of action" worth doing.
Here in Spain we have a saying ("hacer leña del árbol caído") which can
resemble into "kick a man when he's down" and that's IMO what we should
avoid here.
Greetings,
--
Camaleón
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