Preventing Community Abuse

[venomgfx]

Dillo needs a tool for preventing users from abusing the system.

It would ban:

• Creating new posts.
• Voting.
• Commenting.
• Liking comments.
• Editing own posts.

Banning users could be done:

• On demand
  • By the community admin/moderators.
• Automatic
  • After a number of report flags.
  • When an extremely low karma level is reached.

Un-ban

• On demand by admin/moderators.

Must-have features:

• Report/Flag of posts.
• Report/Flag of comments.
• Comment deletion by admin/moderators.

Would-be nice features:

• Changing status of posts
  • e.g. make it unlisted, still visible by direct link or notifications, not on search/list
• A way to give a warning to the user.
• Lock threads (prevent new comments and edits).
• Log the dates of warnings/ban/unban as user history. Good to keep track.

[Fweeb]

I'm fully in favor of this (though saddened by its necessity).

One thing worth adding is the ability for an administrator or moderator to reverse a ban. This can be used to allow for temporary bans that let users cool off or to undo situations if a user gets banned on accident (or if auto-banning works improperly).

[ChameleonScales]

I'm in favor too but I think it would be good to first implement post templates (at least for RCS) to orient users in the right direction: https://blender.community/c/rightclickselect/s7bbbc/proposal-template

Otherwise some users might think the system is a bit too unforgiving

[Fweeb]

@ChameleonScales I think that's really an unrelated issue. Although it certainly would be nice to have post templates, I don't think they're going to have much of an effect on the types of users that these type of user management controls would provide. This is specifically for preventing abusive users from acting in bad faith.

[venomgfx]

One thing worth adding is the ability for an administrator or moderator to reverse a ban. This can be used to allow for temporary bans that let users cool off or to undo situations if a user gets banned on accident (or if auto-banning works improperly).

@Fweeb Good point. I've added this to the list.

I'm in favor too but I think it would be good to first implement post templates (at least for RCS) to orient users in the right direction

@ChameleonScales That is indeed an important feature, and it is planned, but IMHO that won't stop the trolls.

[ChameleonScales]

@Fweeb if over-using RCS for - lazy, invalid or nearly offensive to the developers - feature requests or even using it as a means to ask for support on existing features don't qualify as "abusing the system", then yes it's unrelated.

[L0Lock]

Being a moderator myself on some forums, I know that there are always needs of such tools no matter the community.
But I also always have concerns about automated moderations. But you already thought about the key element about moderation tools: everything must be reversible on demand. This is really required, to prevent mistakes or allow second judgments, ... How the quotas would be determined?

Also, I think it's interesting to have some sort of ways to write down some notes about specific users and communicate those between modos/admins.
In two sites I'm moderating, each profile has a "whiteboard", essentially a text area when modos/admins can write down notes like "10/02/2018 Modo_Name on that topic_link: toxic behavior, last warning". It's efficient, any modo/admin can be aware if someone already proceeded actions, etc... (And we also use it to write goofy stuff on our profiles but shhh.)