Board Thread:Moderation Desk/@comment-644222-20150815034345/@comment-7263041-20150817110155

I think we kinda got off topic a bit honestly, chatting about individual page locking and the like.

To move this back to the policy at hand, and I'll try to keep this brief.

Will a policy like this work?

In my honest opinion, it will not. Mainly because the admins cannot enforce proper access restriction. The best the admins can do is a IP ban, and that can be circumvented within minutes of being enforced.

The statement made, that the admins will ban an individual if they are found to be behaving in such a manner, comes across as an empty gesture, because unless the person being banned is happy to abandon the site entirely, the best the admins can do is play whack-a-mole, assuming the individual doesn't start working through friends or proxies to keep their content up to date.

And we cannot scare the individuals through condemnation either, because a ban is not public knowledge. Unless an admin says an individual has been banned for this exact reason, or someone objects to an individual being banned for this reason, very few people will ever learn about it. Even then, if the individual honestly feels that what they have said is perfectly acceptable, any form of condemnation is going to fall flat. They're not going to feel shame or indimidation.

There are a number of other issues that also come into play as well, such as the legitimacy of the offense, the age of the offense and potential conflict of interest. All of which can be abused if there are not careful safeguards in place to ensure that there is no manipulation of policy.