I just feel this is backwards. If someone were suspended/ silenced and have served their time, I would consider it done, and not hold grudges. And on the same coin as
A staff member can always lock someone to TL2 (or lower) if they aren’t comfortable letting them reaching TL3.
And locking a user to TL3 has the drawback that they can’t then be automatically demoted if they later fall below the threshold requirements.
A concrete edge case:
We have a user who was a very active and dedicated, but at a point needed to take some time off to focus on their exams. Because they knew they’d be tempted to check the community rather than studying they told us to suspend them for the period, and we did.
(I do realise that if this comes up again we can just set the suspension beyond the required period and turn it off manually when the times comes).
Another use case, currently I’m using suspend when people leave my company. Because we’re using the same community for Internal and External conversations, I have to make sure ex-employees can’t access internal material using their credentials. Of course people also rejoin the company, so I then have to remove the suspension. Given that I suspend them forever and then remove it, I assume they can continue as normal if they rejoin since they didn’t do the time / it was removed?
I’d also consider the case where someone is/was suspended for one day – after this change, that’s a much more impactful action than it was in the past. (No TL3 for 100 days, vs no TL3 ever.)
I think in many cases, silencing (née blocking) would suffice for doing temporary timeouts instead of the more severe suspending. A problem being that silencing does not have a “for __ days” and requires a tad more effort to unsilence a member.
If it could coded up I think a “silence expires after 100 days”, but “a suspension never expires” could work in terms of TL3 requirements.
It’s wanted on our forum. The Lounge and TL3 in general has a social function, and there are people who have been suspended but who we don’t want to be forever excluded from it.
Yes, and we’re about to do that actually, but it’s problematic. It would be great if there were some kind of setting.
So this is the problem, right here. The team create a function with (undocumented?) implications assuming a particular behavior, in full knowledge of the consequences. Customers go ahead and use those features for purposes outside of the original scope because the consequences aren’t widely understood.
There’s nothing wrong with suspension permanently blocking access to TL3 if the implications are communicated and accepted when suspension is meted out. Conversely, if it’s possible for moderators and administrators to suspend users not fully understanding the long-term fallout then we have a problem.
Users don’t care about how many others are in the same boat, just that they’re in said boat.
Over the past 17 years overseeing communities of all shapes and sizes, I’ve seen users suspended for a multitude of reasons that didn’t just fall into the neat box of bad behavior. We’ve had users request they be excluded so as to focus on their studies, users who have needed to be temporarily excluded due to a conflict, and more than one unfortunate case where an outburst warranted temporary suspension, but had mitigating circumstances. If it’s not made very clear that the suspension button will permanently limit the ability for that user to participate and grow into certain community features, then assuming a user should never become TL3 is problematic.
Do you think the issue could be resolved if instead of using “suspended_at” (any suspension ever) for TL3 requirements “suspended_till” (current or past suspensions) was used?
Could this be togglable? I have suspended users for one/two days because they would not drop an issue after being asked (usually arguing about who broke the rules), and suspended at least one user (multiple times) for bumping a ton of old threads. It seems egregious that a single one day suspension prevents a user from ever being TL3.
It’s either that, or it removes suspensions as one of the tools of my belt to get users to stop doing things that make the forum annoying for other users, while not actually being bad.
I’m interested to know why you Suspended them instead of Silencing them? Silencing puts them in “read only” mode which seems would be enough to temporarily stop them from causing trouble and I’m not seeing why preventing them from logging in would be needed.
Give a specific warning, telling them they will be suspended if they don’t stop it.
Suspend them if they don’t stop it.
Say “I will silence you” sounds either a) silly, or b) a whole more more threatening than I want.
Also, the point is to tell them to drop it and not obsess over it. Suspending them is the equivalent of throwing them out and saying “come back when you cool down” while silencing is the equivalent of saying “yea, keep brooding on this stupid beef and start kicking at it as soon as you can again.”
Also, it doesn’t matter because silencing does the same thing w/r/t TL3 (not that I knew it when I suspended them because the behavior was changed on me).
I don’t actually agree with your semantics here, which implies that this could be resolved with education.
That said, you’re correct about silencing having the same effect. I think we should consider making silencing a different case so that CMs can time someone out without a long term penalty.
I think there has been significant enough disagreement on this option to justify adding a setting. I plan on adding one this week: penalized users barred tl3 or similar, default true.
@eviltrout, I wonder if this could also be exposed on the user’s admin page. A simple on-off toggle in the trust level row for “prevent TL3”. That would allow sites to default block, while individually allowing users to obtain it. The current option is to manually lock the user at TL3, but that prevents them from being automatically demoted to TL2 if they fail to maintain the required usage.
Another option may be “delete offense history” that way we don’t need to make any data model changes and you delete offense history (maybe converting to a staff message) when you want to allow a user through.
I’m not clear which log you’re referring to - if it’s UserHistory that’s how I figure out if you’ve ever been suspended. If that’s removed, where do I query?