ppy
Make the "Account not in good standing" text appear only when recent infringements are bad enough
Introduction
The "username's account is not in a good standing" text appears when a user has a silence of any length within the last 28 days. But does a chat silence lasting 5 minutes, which are used with the impact of warnings in practice, issued 22 days ago, mean that a user should think: "I'd better watch out, a couple more offences and my account is at serious risk..."? It doesn't, because this isn't how things operate in practice. Being implicitly told that your account is at risk for any minor infringement is a bit much.
For non-moderators, this text is redundant, since the presence of the Account Standing tab indicates the same thing, with the exception of some tournament-banned users. The message is a hold-over from the old website design, where the "not good standing" warning would be displayed along with the actual amount of infringements until restriction.
However, this warning can be used as an additional factor of deterrence instead of being removed completely. Here's how:
Proposal
The "not good standing" warning as a middle step between "any silences at all within the last month" (accomplished by the Account Standing tab's presence) and "official final warning" (accomplished manually by the GMT).
An example pseudocode implementation would be the following (the conditions are, of course, just an example and may be adjusted as seen fit):
if (recentInfringements >= 4 || (recentInfringements >= 3 && longestRecentSilenceMins >= 160) || longestRecentSilenceMins >= 2560) || activeUser.isModerator:
displayAccountStandingWarning()
What good would implementing this do?
First and foremost, adding these qualifications required would make the bad standing warning actually mean something - and therefore, be taken more seriously, since it wouldn't just appear for any minor infringement. This alone would be a worthwhile reason to make this change.
In terms of the practical benefits this would have, this would give users an extra warning that their infringement history is on the severe side, which may have a significant effect since it appears right where a user would go from "having made a mistake or two" to "being a persistent offender" - or for users with silences long enough, who should be taking their account standing seriously regardless of infringement count.
Notice how big the gap between "having been silenced within the last 28 days" and "receiving a formal final warning from the GMT" is otherwise - this would mean it isn't a small enough step to be insignificant, and putting a small "hey, watch out" sign there would be likely to have an effect on at least some users.
Addressing potential issues and criticisms
This proposal does not make moderators have to act in a different way or alter GMT workflow, since it's something the user will see on the UI/UX side. It is from the point of view of a silenced user, not the point of view of a GMT.
This also does not make things significantly more complicated for anyone after its implementation, since it would most likely involve adding only a few lines of code and change the conditions for showing one UI element, even if it wouldn't be quite as simple in practice as in my example.
It wouldn't reveal any info the GMT doesn't want revealed either.
The current system works? I don't really see why we should be re-inventing the wheel.
The current system is as transparent and clear as we can possibly make it, adding weird abstractions like discord's system (which does NOT work in practice if you've been keeping up) only makes it more complicated.
'at risk' means nothing to tournament hosts that want to check their signup's behaviour, seeing 4 silences all for racism actually means something to people.
My primary argument is that the "not in good standing" warning is redundant, and I see a way to use it for an actual effect on the user in a manner that wouldn't make things much more complicated. I don't see why that shouldn't be done, since you haven't made arguments challenging the benefits it may bring.
Any problems Discord's Trust and Safety might have (which you can PM me about to detail further) other than the five-stage system being ineffective are not relevant; I just used them as an explaining tool.
This is a very simple change, and cannot be described as "reinventing the wheel".
That section contains more than just silences for moderators (user notes etc) so the indicator makes it obvious whether or not there's any silences without needing to check the whole table.
In that case, one can set the condition up to always show the indicator for moderators and similarly privileged users.
Edited the original post as it was far too wordy.
@chromb The system's transparency and clarity isn't impacted significantly by this proposal, since currently, most users (presumably) ignore the warning message anyway and just look at the silences. This would make it actually be noticed, and users may continue to look at just their silences if my proposal is implemented. In its current state, the text might as well say "username has been silenced within the past 28 days" since that's what the message means in practice (and it would be more clear and accurate than "username's account is not in good standing").
In addition, I was considering this from the perspective of the user receiving silences; other users checking profiles for infringements for whatever practical reason (which is rare FWIW) still have the silence list to check.
@nanaya Thanks for pointing this out; I've changed the proposal to reflect this.
CC @Albionthegreat since they seemed interested in the proposal in DMs.
I agree that it probably shouldn't show for anything under a day long, when the silence isn't currently active. It's a bit much.
I agree that it probably shouldn't show for anything under a day long, when the silence isn't currently active. It's a bit much.
The silence being active is indicated by a separate warning message with a yellow background with text reading "username will be able to speak again in 46 minutes", so this seems a bit redundant.
Otherwise, I strongly appreciate the support!