Considering Self-Ban and Self-Ban Discussion

[Fluminator]

I have been studying Cheetory and his movements for quite some time now, I think I could pull off a good real life Cheetory disguise.

[Isis]

I thought zakk impersonated another user with their permission.

Regardless, with the advent of discord, it seems unlikely that locking yourself out of your account and then asking for a reset is going to be dangerous.

Anyone can make a discord account with your name and avatar and dm me that the reason S_S hasn't posted in a year is because of an email password scramble and an ms.net password scramble. If someone does that, I feel like I would likely email the email on file with "hey someone is saying they're you, if they are not please holler."
If you never cut off your own access to your own recovery email, you can respond to an email like that. My Spotify premium account was stolen for about 18 hours and I responded to exactly such an email a couple weeks ago, and the account was handed back to me.

If you say I'm supposed to write down your discord ID or do xyz other thing so it's more secure I do want to fall back on the whole, why are we hassling the mods for an unecessary selfcontrol device.

[chamber]

I thought zakk impersonated another user with their permission.

Regardless, with the advent of discord, it seems unlikely that locking yourself out of your account and then asking for a reset is going to be dangerous.

Anyone can make a discord account with your name and avatar and dm me that the reason S_S hasn't posted in a year is because of an email password scramble and an ms.net password scramble. If someone does that, I feel like I would likely email the email on file with "hey someone is saying they're you, if they are not please holler."
If you never cut off your own access to your own recovery email, you can respond to an email like that. My Spotify premium account was stolen for about 18 hours and I responded to exactly such an email a couple weeks ago, and the account was handed back to me.

If you say I'm supposed to write down your discord ID or do xyz other thing so it's more secure I do want to fall back on the whole, why are we hassling the mods for an unecessary selfcontrol device.

All previous emails are recorded on the backend here, you could still do this for the prescramble email.

[Dunnstral]

why are we hassling the mods for an unecessary selfcontrol device.

To me it sounds like some people have real problems with control and aren't capable of staying away without someone else stopping them. Maybe I'm presuming too much, but that's the sense I get, and if that's the case then I believe that's a good enough reason to continue to "self-ban" users and to even look into shortening the time to 6 months.

[Cheetory6]

I'm going to not be a dick.

As someone who has had really bad addiction problems on this site that have actually severely negatively impacted my personal life (while also just generally dealing with other mental health stuff at the time), being able to get away from the site for a few months was actually really good for me. I understand that it might be annoying for mods, but it maybe is worth just like a little bit of extra sympathy for people who are probably struggling with other things on top of self control with the site. If you want it to not be policy because staff doesn't have the resources to spend 5 minutes updating a password/email/confirming with some extra steps every so often then that's fine.

I just personally find the condescension on top of that really fucking frustrating.

[Cheetory6]

I have been studying Cheetory and his movements for quite some time now, I think I could pull off a good real life Cheetory disguise.

maybe, but I sincerely doubt you could impersonate Gorkington.

[Dunnstral]

I don't think Isis is trying to come across as rude. I don't think the point I was trying to make came across clearly because I'm trying not to unintentionally anger anybody. I want to say that discouraging people from wanting to self-ban is not the right path to take because requesting a self-ban is not a casual "I don't really want to play" kind of thing, it's a "I hate that I keep coming back to this site but I can't keep myself away if I'm not restricted" kind of thing. Yes, addiction is a good way to put it.

I'm also not asking the mods to be mental health counselors or anything like that, but to understand that this isn't just "unnecessary workload for the mods"

[Cheetory6]

I think constantly shutting down any path to a solution and painting people as just hassling the mods is pretty condescending when you're coming from a position of authority representing the site.
If you just bring these up as potential issues and say "hey this could be an issue, do you think there's a way around this that we could do this?" then that would be a totally different and much less antagonistic approach.

[lilith2013]

Could you/others in a similar boat explain why the current policy doesn’t work? Is it the inability to request only a mafia-side ban, or the 1-year minimum, some combo of both, or something else?

[Cheetory6]

Is it the inability to request only a mafia-side ban

When I've wanted to leave, it's been access to any aspect of the entire site that's the problem.

the 1-year minimum

The year long period has a sense of finality that may discourage people from using it as an option even if they feel like it's something that they really should do.
I also just don't really think that I would feel as comfortable reaching out to a moderator to ask them to set something like that up for me as I would be in just deciding and doing something myself.

And to be clear, I feel like the current policy is like generally probably fine.
I just personally was really upset by this repeated sense of it being some judgment on my character for having done anything like this before.

[lilith2013]

I might be misreading but I think the point was that a self-ban request is probably less administrative work at that point than the email/password stuff. I’m glad it worked for you, but theoretically anyone doing the same thing might run into unforeseen issues that prevent them from regaining access to their account permanently. I haven’t really been in this boat though so people should do what they feel like they need to do to keep themselves sane/healthy.

If a one-year mafia-only or discussion-only ban were an option, how many people would use that?

[Cheetory6]

I think there are valid points of concern on complications with what I did.
I disagree with the notion that there's some exceptional security risk where you may be putting everyone on the site at danger. To me that feels like just an impossible scenario where the modteam would have to make a terrible call by giving someone access to an account without being able to actually verify the person's identity. I agree that the worst case scenario is probably that you may lose access to your account because there's no way for the mod team to properly verify your identity.

I wasn't really arguing from a perspective of "hey this is less admin work" but rather "hey this is less emotionally taxing for someone who is probably already in a bad place".
Personally, I don't know what the back-end is for banning/unbanning or changing email/password information, but the implication that it's so much work that someone asking for help with that after 2-3 months rather than a year is like an unstoppable addition to the responsibility of the modteam just seems ridiculous to me, particularly when, it seems really likely to me that a lot of people who need space from the site are dealing with a lot of stuff and it's not just like a trivial reason that they may be asking to get off the site.

Like, if it's to the point where that's the case maybe there should be a role on the site that handles purely administrative stuff without any of the other authority/responsibilities of the moderation team.

If a one-year mafia-only or discussion-only ban were an option, how many people would use that?

I could imagine some people wanting to do partial sitewide bans, but I don't really think either would be applicable to my experiences.

[SleepyKrew]

I believe it is a public policy decision to avoid turning the mods into babysitters who need to juggle self-bans of varying lengths and domains.

this isn't really a good excuse but it's certainly better than

inappropriate tax on mod resources

[zoraster]

Would a joinable group that removed you from discussion (it's possible you'd have to leave the speakeasy/GTKAS groups too) be something that would help? This would allow you to ban and unban yourself. It wouldn't allow you to determine the length of your ban, but it would add a step of friction as well as reduce the visibility.

I'm a little more hesitant to do this with games because (a) they're a bit easier to add that friction to by not joining games and (b) I don't want people in games to do this to themselves. But I think it's workable for Discussion if that would be helpful.

[Cook]

ego

that sounds like a good intermediate step

would this group have any fancy dressing on its name or just "discussion hiatus"?

[zoraster]

I worry a little that adding something like that would be seen as a badge of honor, which isn't something I'm eager to encourage. In general I'm actually fairly skeptical of even this, so I'm just testing the waters on it first.

[Isis]

I don't mind the workload from pressing a button and someone getting self banned. I imagine many of them getting appealed before they're up, since their goal is to conflict with the user's own will.

[chamber]

Can you just reduce the minimum to some amount you think is manageable (2 months?) and completely disallow appeals.

[Isis]

We are discussing the pros and cons of different minimums internally and are at least giving consideration to a change.

[Isis]

Man how do I phrase that without committing to anything without sounding skeptical.

[Ythan]

If you mean the preceding post I think you got it across.

[NorwegianboyEE]

If you want to quit but can't, ask yourself the question.

Why can't you let go? What is holding you back? What makes you happy, what is the positive experiences you have with the site? Then seek for an way to replace those that doesn't involve MS.
For example, i often get tempted to gamble. What i do instead is that i play gambling simulators where you can pretend gamble and then when i lose "fake money" (like 999 out of an 1000 times) i can tell myself that might have been real money. But because it's fake money i'm still good om finances.
If it's the social networking you're after. Find some alternative source of fulfilling that need. Like social clubs or some other social networking sites.
If it's the excitement from playing games you want, find some other game that doesn't cause you the same negative experiences you want to escape from.

[Menalque]

I'm planning to respond here more thoroughly soon, but I wanted to say for now that the suggestion of adding something to one's sig with how long you won't be playing for has been working wonderfully in keeping me accountable on my commitment to not play for a considerable period of time.

In the meantime (I think vaccine is starting to make me a little tired), thank you everyone for both the advice to me personally and the healthy discussion around self-bans more generally.

[Jake The Wolfie]

Might as well throw my $0.02 into the ring.

Unrelated:

[Jake The Wolfie]

Ah fuck I've egoed this thread, haven't I?