Option to notify users if they are block, silenced or banned

[vel]

Is it ethical to block, silence, mute or ban a user without telling them?

As a comparison on social media like Twitter and Reddit, they will ban or shadow ban accounts. They have done this recently to progressive candidates. Is censorship ok now?

[Thomas_G]

When silencing a user, an automatic message is sent to that user informing them that their account is temporarily on hold. When suspending someone, I think there is an option to send an email informing them about their suspension. (Not 100% sure though).

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When it comes to mute someone, it’s your choice to do so. Why should they know about that? You do not want to receive any notifications related to that user and that’s why you mute them. Imagine being a user and everyday a message is sent to you saying that someone has muted you. Would you be happy about that? No. It just causes drama.

[ondrej]

@vel

silence, mute or ban a user without telling them?

In my opinion if you suspend them then they probably know why…

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@vel

shadow ban accounts

Sort of relates to this post Jeff made

Ban symbol next to suspended usernames

No; this was already covered elsewhere. The community may wonder why they don’t see Bill around any more. They may also need to see evidence of moderator action to prove that this is a place where negative people cannot just run around being jerks to people with no consequences. That said, we still want to avoid the “hello there new community member, check out our fabulous collection of heads-on-a-pike!” [image] So I would avoid… showing any indication a user is banned on their username n…

[neounix (Dark Matter)]

@vel

Is it ethical to block, silence, mute or ban a user without telling them?

According to the TOS, it is the right of the forum owners:

https://meta.discourse.org/tos#heading--enforcement

The company may restrict, suspend, or close your account on the forum according to its policy for handling copyright-related takedown requests, or if the company reasonably believes that you’ve broken any rule in these terms.

Agree, however, it is a good idea to notify users in their own profile if that is done.

For two decades on our forum, we have always notified users when our moderation team took any admin action and we provided users a process to appeal.

Sometimes even mods have a “bad day” and make mistakes, for sure.

[rahim123]

It appears that Discourse now sends a notification email to the silenced user with the “Why are you silencing this user?” reason included in the message. This feels like a mistake. I thought that the “Why are you silencing this user?” field was only for internal staff purposes, and I think it should never be revealed to the user. And I think the silenced user should only receive an email if the optional email field is filled out.

[Architect]

@Thomas_G

When silencing a user, an automatic message is sent to that user informing them that their account is temporarily on hold.

The default text for this notification states: “Account temporarily on hold,” and “you won’t be able to reply or create topics until a staff member reviews your most recent posts”

This seems correct if an account is automatically silenced by the system, but I was surprised to see this is sent when an account is manually silenced by administrator. That can be customized of course but may be good for the default system text to have a basic notification of just “Account has been silenced” if that is done manually.

@rahim123

thought that the “Why are you silencing this user?” field was only for internal staff purposes

Noticed this also, that isn’t clear in the form that what is written will be sent to user account.

[Architect]

This is an old feature request just showed up in search for me about the account silence notification.

With the individual user mute option, I believe a notification is sent to the user being muted if they have been muted by a certain number of other users (that might be three?), which may be better than sending a new individual notification stating which specific member(s) have muted them.