Multiple warnings about conduct violations were conveyed, but they were not heeded. We didn’t act on the violations of the warnings to avoid interfering with the PSF elections. We thank our community members for flagging inappropriate interactions and their patience waiting for our response.
Now that the election is over, we are enacting an 18-month suspension due to the repeated, continued violations.
To be explicit, we’re open to other points of view, and disagreement, and we support the right of community members to run for positions on the platform of disrupting the status quo. However, behavior that goes against the code of conduct cannot be accepted even under those circumstances. Our guidelines explain how to participate successfully.
Additionally, to improve our processes, we are reaching out to the Code of Conduct WG to establish how proactive we should be during future elections to find the right balance between election integrity and maintaining a civilized level of discourse in line with our guidelines on the platform.
EDIT: To be clear, the PSF Conduct WG was not consulted and this was an action taken by the moderation team alone.
Thank you to the moderators and CoC WG for their forbearance and handling of this issue. I look forward to hearing the CoC WG’s advice in handling issues like this in the future.
They weren’t ignored, they were handled on an individual post basis. It was a fine line to walk especially with no prior guidance on how to handle something like this.
I’d like to thank the regular community here on DPO which I think did an admirable job of trying to engage with Franz Király, appreciating that at least some of the questions he had were valid, even if his framing of them and response to others appeared rude to a lot of people, including myself.
I exclude myself from that regular community, as I got irritated very fast when I thought I was helping set expectations, and was met with what I considered a bad-faith rewording of my post. I think I made it obvious then that I was irritated, and later when I got tired of repeated implied conspiratorial claims based on what I perceived as misconstrued interpretations which therefore wasted people’s time. I should probably learn to ignore conversations like this.
That said, I wouldn’t characterize the public posts I read on DPO by Franz Király as more than “rude” and “time wasting”, although I didn’t read 100% of them. I do think such posts should be moderated, but I also think it’s important not to permanently expel people based on that. We all have times we are rude to others, either intentionally or not. I am therefore happy not to see a permanent expulsion.
I understand the timing of the PSF Board election made it tricky for DPO moderators to act quicker with smaller actions, I hope that can be ironed out in the future. Perhaps there could be an explicit exception to some CoC rules for a single thread which is clearly a proposed mandate for Python-related elections? To me, Franz Király’s initial post in the PSF category wasn’t clearly communicated as such, and I think that added a lot to the confusion.
Just my two cents, I understand this is not a thread for coming to any kind of constructive conclusions.
I don’t know exactly how moderation works, but perhaps there should be a well-defined “punishment ladder” for repeated offenders. An example ladder could be:
3 of your posts are moderated in less than a month? you get a 1-week suspension
you already got a 1-week suspension? the second suspension will be 2 weeks
You’re looking for more of a “rule of law”. Instead we have a “rule of people”. Clarity, consistency, coherence, proportionality of “punishment” to “offense”, and predictability are goals of the former, and systems are tweaked to better achieve them over centuries - but even under the most sophisticated rule-of-law systems humans have devised, glaring injustices aren’t all that rare.
As is, who can guess? Here Franz was suspended for 18 months. Last year, David Mertz was suspended “indefinitely” with no defined way to return. To my eyes, Franz was much more combative, and with many, than David was. David’s chief actual offense was seemingly getting visibly angry with a mod for editing his posts in material ways.
Not intending to relitigate that here, just illustrating that such things are to be expected under a “rule of people”. But then crafting a rule of law is a massive undertaking.
It’s clear (at least to me) that the moderators are not interested in a two-way street here. There is no acceptance of discussion among the community about how moderation should be done, nor any recognition that there should even be rules that moderators are bound by. It is just the moderators deciding among themselves. Given that, it seems pointless to debate what would be the best way for moderation to be done.
As you allude to, every system of law ultimately relies on people, and on subjective decisions. This forum is no different. There will always be people deciding, those decisions will rely on individuals’ judgement, and those decisions will never be based solely on precisely quantified criteria.
Such things happen under every rule of law to varying degrees. You are making a binary distinction (law vs people) that does not exist.
Endpoints on a continuum. The endpoints only exist as Platonic ideals. All systems in real life lie between them. I won’t belabor on which end of that scale I believe we’re currently on.
For example,
Moderators will not edit post content, only formatting, links, and confusing typos (like “pypy” vs “PyPI”)
which was adopted last year. But I’ve seen that happen this year, very material edits, ironically enough in the first topic Franz started (in March).
The only form of “feedback” I see there is sending email to the CoC WG. Did I miss others? Honest, it’s the only form I found, but I didn’t read every word again.
I’ve tried that myself, but never got a reply, apart from, once, getting a one-line response “Tim, we acknowledge receipt of your report." That was the end of it. I sent a polite follow-up 7 weeks later, and that one wasn’t even acknowledged. I let it just drop then (all last year).
They’re busy, and I don’t much care. But my experience isn’t unique. If you ask about someone else, “privacy” prevents them from replying. If you ask about yourself … well, try it .
People who have don’t post about it here, but some do tell me. An exceptionally brave one asked me to keep their name visible when I wrote up one such case on my “blog”:
I emailed the Code of Conduct group to ask them to explain the situation since he [the moderator] wouldn’t. They were also unwilling to provide any clarification.
Although that mod’s actions were soon enough reversed by another mod. “Rule of people”, with no reference to “the rules”.
Which post in there? I just went through all of them. With the exception of a tiny correction in the title, no posts were edited by moderators.[1] You can check the edit history. 4 posts in the middle were completely deleted for being off-topic, 1 or 2 of which were mine.
You found the right topic, but no evidence remains. The edits left the post so incoherent that Franz deleted it himself rather than try to repair it. Soon after the post vanished entirely (which I don’t believe “just users” can do).
I didn’t save screenshots, because it was just “business as usual” to me.
BTW, if a post remains hidden for “long enough” (IIRC, 30 days is the default), Discourse will scrub it entirely all by itself. So, in defense of the mods, it should be made clear that not all deep-six’ing of “evidence” is by their affirmative actions.
But in the case at hand, the post vanished within a day.
So it was one of the 4 posts that were all scrubbed for being off-topic? No other posts in the topic were deleted, you can check this yourself. (notice the post number with always increases by 1 except when there are deleted posts)
It’s very convenient that the one example of moderator misconduct you cite is completely gone, and neither I (who was actively participating in that thread at that point in time) nor one of the moderators remember this happening…
Seems extremely unlikely. The mod didn’t hide the post, Franz deleted it himself. The mod just edited the post - and presumably vanished it after Franz deleted it.
Ya think? No kidding
IIRC, I didn’t participate at all. But I was interested in that topic, and partly because I had corresponded with Franz earlier about unrelated matters.
I’m retired, and quite possibly spend more time staring at Discourse than anyone else could spend I doubt anyone took more notice of things happening there, as they happened, than I did.
Did I miss something? How would you know what the mods remember? I didn’t see them say anything here..
This site is mutable, and human memories are fallable, I don’t think it’s constructive to discuss the accuracy of different peoples’s memory of Franz Király’s posts.
I will note that users who have enabled mailing list mode have a copy of every post in the state 10 minutes after it was posted. But moderators have previously made it clear that using that information in a discussion after it has been removed, or hidden, is a guidelines violation.
I will note that users who have enabled mailing list mode have a copy of every post in the state 10 minutes after it was posted. But moderators have previously made it clear that using that information in a discussion after it has been removed, or hidden, is a guidelines violation.
Indeed, I’ve been warned by a mod in the past for replying by E-mail to a deleted comment, told that since I choose to rely on “mailing list mode” which doesn’t notify me when posts get deleted, it’s my responsibility to first check the Web version of the forum before sending any reply.
As such, I’ve stopped engaging here much; my time is better spent in communities which have actual mailing lists since the overhead for communication is, for me, much lower. I still read and follow a lot of the discussions here, but tend to not reply very often any more for worry I’ll accidentally violate the forum’s guidelines again.
I’d also prefer this forum were moderated more like a mailing list - give posters tempbans for conduct violations (lengthy bans for repeat offenders) but don’t retroactively hide/edit/delete their posts unless they’re illegal or seriously disruptive.
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