Currently, the duration and reason for a timeout is only visible if you visit that user’s page during their timeout. A chronology of prior timeouts is not visible to most of the bbs participants.
Given that timeouts are the considered judgement of the curators of this community, those that enforce the community standards, should that history be made more visible to a wider audience?
I can imagine good arguments both pro and con. I can also imagine how such a privilege might be reserved for those who earn higher trust-levels, as that’s in Discourse’s vision of having the platform enable the highest level of self-policing.
I would be fine with it as I think the infrequency and reasoning behind bans should help people feel comfortable that this is a safe forum for people of any sort to come and participate if they are civil and participating with good intent.
What’s interesting is we didn’t have this at the beginning of BBS and users complained when suspensions took place and no reason was given. This feature was put in place because a large amount of users asked for it to be public, including those who had received suspensions.
When I got a timeout once (for claims of derailing by discussing language), it took me a whole day to figure out what happened. I was still logged in, but couldn’t post, PM, or do anything with my profile. So I assumed the BBS was malfunctioning. When I explicitly logged out and tried to log in again, I got no warning or error message - it just said that I failed to log in. So I assumed that I had gotten my username and or password wrong, but when I tried using the link to email me my login info, it didn’t do anything because I was suspended. The email never came. I finally figured it out when I visited as a guest and clicked my profile in one of the discussions.
Some way of actually informing people about these actions could be helpful! ie “Your account has been suspended until XXX by user Y for reason Z”. Such as when they try to log in or get their login info emailed. Also, I was using an older browser at the time, so my experiences may not have been normal.
I would think an email to the user with the reason would be a good idea. You should not be wondering why you got a timeout.
In regards to the list @funruly suggests above: I also do not want banning to become a badge of honor on the BBS. A list the world can see could become the trophy case in your High School hallway.
I think I asked, and then realized that if I didn’t already know, I really ought to figure it out. You folks do enough providing conversation fodder and a forum to be necessarily giving personalized lessons on civility to the uncivil as a matter of course. Seems like a waste of energy, quite unlike the occasional PMs Falcor sends out, which seem to do just fine.
Don’t mind it being asked. You may have known but there are plenty of others on BBS who may not be aware of that. So if a question can help provide insight and also open discussion that will improve the community I am all for it.
You should definitely see the suspension reason at the time of login, that might be a regression. We will check it Monday.
Also we should make sure the suspended user is force logged out at the time of suspension.
There is no special notification via email or anything when you are suspended, however, a PM from staff will always be delivered to users even if they are suspended, it is the only interaction type that continues to work for suspended users, PMs from staff.
The general idea is that you’d say “oh, weird, I am logged out” then try to log in and be notified of the suspension reason. Obviously for that to work log out has to be forced.
As an expert in the field of being suspended I would like to say that I appreciate the effort that goes into informing me of exactly what it was that got me a timeout.
I agree with @daneel that making suspensions a persistent, public badge of honor would be counter productive.
