Bans of a user, removal or deletion of content, review/termination of an account

[Graham Perrin]

Bans and removal

I understand that:

• any user can ban any other user (person to person)
• if a forum owner bans a user, that ban is effective forum-wide
• a forum owner can remove content from that forum.

Terms of use

In the Terms of Use (highlights) I see that Nabble is not responsible for reviewing content, but that posting of inappropriate content may lead to deletion, or blocked access, or termination of an account.

Question/suggestion

Might a spike/flurry of bans against a particular user trigger a review of that user's account?

Considerations

A high sum of bans against a user, over an extended period, may not indicate inappropriate content. Personal bans normally indicate differences of opinion or style.

Multiple bans in a short space of time are a more likely indicator of inappropriate content.

Congratulations, and a comparison

Today I stumbled across Disagreements + Groklaw = Deletion? and <http://scofacts.org/groklaw.html>, both of which are old news — but they're news to me.

In comparison: as Nabble users' content is preserved, within or without a forum, in all but the most exceptional circumstances: disagreements between Nabble users can not reach such an ugly conclusion.

The Nabble user-oriented approach to banning and removal, without raising volume in a forum, does seem to work very well. I'm not mistaken, Nabble presents in excess of 25 million messages; in that context, calls for moderation or deletion are extremely rare.

Well done!

[Graham Perrin]

Graham Perrin wrote

• any user can ban any other user (person to person)

I no longer find the option to ban. Has the option been removed?

[Hugo <Nabble>]

We moved this option to the forum level. So only forum administrators can ban users.

[Graham Perrin]

I'm curious, was the option misused?

In forums that I do not administer, all (except one) of the people I banned were spammers.

In the one exceptional case: the ban was a most effective way of discreetly turning down the heat.

[Hugo <Nabble>]

Yes, but this was not the main issue. We have a distributed architecture and ban actions would have to be replicated through all servers. The original idea was "one user can ban another user". So this would have to work on all servers independently of forum because accounts are shared by all Nabble applications. So we decided to keep it simple by moving this feature to the root node only. I hope you understand.