Tia-Lewise - Tread lightly, she is near, under the snow. Speak gently, she can hear the daisies grow TALK - Summoner of Nyan 13:26, April 11, 2015 (UTC) | |||
So recently I've blocked the same person twice, first for being a spambot and the second for abusing accounts to then post the same spam. I blocked for a fortnight on both these counts, but then I realised from looking at the block log that there seems to be a lot of variation between how long we block users for, ranging from 1 week to a month on most cases unless it's a well known abuser who of course then gets blocked for a lot longer. With this variation, the offences are always "Spamming" or "Inserting nonsense/gibberish into pages". Also, I've been told on more than one occasion to just rollback edits and see if they mess up again before blocking, but I have also seen admins block just based on the singular edit. So, in points -
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I oppose a policy on this because I think it is ultimately up to the administrator's judgement. This is a responsibility that comes with trusting people with the admin powers anyway and does not need enforcement. That said, I do not oppose making general guidelines for it. Stuff like, "generally do not ban for first offenses", "do not block IPs indefinitely due to changing over time", "do not be too harsh for the first block", etc. Making a guideline page outlining what admins should normally do might not be a bad idea, but enforced policy is pointless. | |||
Tia-Lewise - Tread lightly, she is near, under the snow. Speak gently, she can hear the daisies grow TALK - Summoner of Nyan 13:44, April 11, 2015 (UTC) | |||
"Guidelines" works better, come to think of it. This would still come under the Policy Pages section of the Help Portal, I imagine, so I'm just going off that with regards to naming. | |||
Honestly, now that I think about it, this isn't a terrible idea to just make a page for conduct or blocking guidelines or something, as long as it's not a bunch of instructions it's fine with me. I think we as a wiki are fortunate that we haven't had to make policy on this already, but it'd be nice to just give new admins an idea of what to do. For instance, Xeno indefinitely blocked an IP before knowing not to do that; it'd be nice to give people an idea of when to use the block button. | |||
Tia-Lewise - Tread lightly, she is near, under the snow. Speak gently, she can hear the daisies grow TALK - Summoner of Nyan 14:03, April 11, 2015 (UTC) | |||
Well, I've been guilty myself of indefinitely blocking IPs without realising before, and have had to be corrected and the block length changed, so yes, I do feel, particularly for new admins, that we should at least have a page with some guidance and advice. Calling it "policy" is a bad idea, so I apologise for asking for a new "policy", I can see everybody rolling their eyes at the thought of yet another one. | |||
Why do people think policy is bad? Want to prevent arbitration? Know exactly what to do in each scenario? Use policies.
Or guidelines. There's actually not a lot of difference. Or any really, we just tend to use the word "policy" when being more specific, and "guidelines" when being more loose. We're still going to shorten overly-long blocks because of it.
I started to do a "what to do in what scenario" thing here. If that comes to a fruition block policy can be covered there. Or anywhere else, whatever.
Never block after first offense, never block for longer than two weeks on first block if it's for basic vandalism. Be more lenient to the blocking of IPs, never block one indefinitely. There are some cases where users can be, though really only badusername reasons, and I guess being a sock too. JBed (talk) 14:16, April 11, 2015 (UTC)
Tia-Lewise - Tread lightly, she is near, under the snow. Speak gently, she can hear the daisies grow TALK - Summoner of Nyan 14:25, April 11, 2015 (UTC) | |||
First offence bans I've seen are more often than not when people have replaced words with "penis", "fuck" or something else inappropriate. Does that affect whether or not a ban is needed? | |||
RE: policy. It is unnecessary and turns the wiki more bureacratic than it needs to be. We don't need strict rules on this, if you permaban someone for disagreeing with you, it will be immediately flagged up and you risk having rights revoked whether there's a rule against it or not. I think these guidelines can be incorporated in the "so you" page effectively, though. That is a good idea. | |||
Tia-Lewise - Tread lightly, she is near, under the snow. Speak gently, she can hear the daisies grow TALK - Summoner of Nyan 14:36, April 11, 2015 (UTC) | |||
Thank you for your help page, JBed. I didn't know you had this and I enjoyed looking at it. If you add anything here, do we also create a page for the Help Portal's policy section? | |||
A lot of vandals make "hit and run" edits. Which means they are on a page on the wiki and think it would be hiiilaarious to edit it and vandalise because they can. Though they don't sit around to respond, or vandalise other pages. Which means they probably wouldn't notice if they were to get blocked but there are times when vandals decide to edit good soon after their first edit.
Really, "penis" edits are the least offensive form of bad faith. Intentionally inputting legitimate-looking but incorrect data and linking to websites are far worse. (A) because it's hard to catch and misinforms our readers, and (B) because websites have images and videos. JBed (talk) 15:00, April 11, 2015 (UTC)