This proposal is related to moderation, and as such, input from GMT members is especially appreciated.
While I have tried to work around the fact I don't know most internal guidelines, remember that I am still taking steps in the dark here. The final implementation may be adjusted if necessary.

Intro / Reasoning

When a user is silenced after having been silenced within the past few weeks, the new silence is generally twice as long (unless it is a more severe type of offence or moderators manually apply a much longer silence), regardless of the correlation between the former and current offence.

The punishment should be harsher in cases where the offence is similar to a previous one, since they acted with clear intent despite forewarning and may have acted like that based on their character (e.g. extreme political opinions, antagonism towards a particular group of users), and therefore, the higher punishment is needed to deter them from repeating such an offence again. This deterrence will come from both the current punishment and the potential next punishment for the next offence, which would be 16 times the duration of the first silence. (e.g. 80 minutes -> 5 hours -> 22 hours)

Recently, there have been two strong examples for why this is necessary. The one is a user who continually spammed beatmap discussions, leading to the GMT jumping the silence length up to 28 days for the third offence (fourth if including the comments-related silence):

And a second example, a user who has been silenced eight times (!) within a week for variable misbehaviour, the last two instances of which were spamming forums:

Notice: I have redacted the usernames so as to not name and shame the users nor cause the presence of a permanent record. I am using them purely as case examples for this proposal.

The increased silences I propose would have made these users have been silenced for longer, preventing them from committing offences in the first place, and potentially deterred them from reoffending knowing that the path to a very long silence and/or a restriction is short.

Proposal

Therefore, I propose that if a user commits an offence similar to a recent previous one or for similar reasons to one of their recent previous offences, they should be silenced for four times the length of their past offence.

"Recent" refers to any offence within the past 28 days.
An offence similar to a previous one would be something like spamming forum threads or abusing the modding discussion system.
A reason/motive for an offence may include racism or insulting NAT members.

This would also not apply if the last silence was 14 days, since the 28-day silence is long enough on its own - unless the GMT deem a restriction necessary in that specific case.

Implementation

This would be enforced in that every time a moderator decides to silence a user for a non-chat offence, the moderator would look at the user's removed past posts (a quick link could be added to make this faster) and determine if any of them are similar to the recent silence. If it is, the moderator ticks a box/sets a flag to add the increased multiplier.


This should not be applied to silences imposed for chat offences, since when moderating chat, GMT members need to be able to make snap judgments without needing to take 10-40 seconds to look at a user's history.

Doing this will cost some GMT time, but I believe it will be worth it to moderate more effectively. Few people get more than one silence for non-chat-related offences within 28 days of each other, and for those that do, the effect the increased silence will have is often needed to keep them from repeat offences.

This is also not without precedent. Silences can and have been set far higher than they otherwise would have been in cases of repeat offenders.

Reading through this one thing kept popping up in my mind — why is this being raised by someone who's not in the GMT?

Time and time again I see what appear to be attempts to self-insert yourself within the role of a moderator, but I'm just not sure what the goal is?

In regards to this discussion, moderators have the freedom to apply a silence for any amount after consulting with other fellow moderators, so I feel like discussing this would be redundant.

As to your general engagement with GMT-related affairs, I have to note that moderation affairs have to be opaque to some degree, because being a moderator is not purely about applying the rules like a robot, but also being aware of the community, the situations they witness/take part in, and what the best way forward is to de-escalate any sort of conflict.

That sometimes means that a moderator will not apply a silence at all to someone, or they might silence someone for more than "the usual amount".

lol apparently people outside of gmt just can't have ideas??

the guy wants to help, i don't see why you need to be an armchair psychologist about the way he's processing the rules part 1, part 2, what does this concept have to do with "being a robot" i think there's always a level of self discretion but i don't think it needs to be mentioned every 20 seconds??

like what are you trying to accomplish except shading someone who's interested in moderation?? can people just not want to assist??

boys kissing wrote:

[...]the guy wants to help, i don't see why you need to be an armchair psychologist about the way he's processing the rules part 1, part 2, what does this concept have to do with "being a robot" i think there's always a level of self discretion but i don't think it needs to be mentioned every 20 seconds??

I'm not sure how you deduced that i was directly stating that towards them, and i don't know what you mean by "needs to be mentioned every 20 seconds"?

I am also not trying to "shade" anyone, its just that in general you would expect suggestions like this to be raised by someone who's actually in the team, knows the ins and outs, and who would be affected by this.

0x84f wrote:

Reading through this one thing kept popping up in my mind — why is this being raised by someone who's not in the GMT?

0x84f wrote:

its just that in general you would expect suggestions like this to be raised by someone who's actually in the team, knows the ins and outs, and who would be affected by this.

Because a non-GMT is, in fact, allowed to make such proposals. I just do it a lot more than others have historically because I have an interest in this topic — and can't join the GMT because I don't feel comfortable with the risk of extremely disturbing content, 18 or not.

0x84f wrote:

In regards to this discussion, moderators have the freedom to apply a silence for any amount after consulting with other fellow moderators, so I feel like discussing this would be redundant.

[...] I have to note that moderation affairs have to be opaque to some degree, because being a moderator is not purely about applying the rules like a robot, but also being aware of the community, the situations they witness/take part in, and what the best way forward is to de-escalate any sort of conflict.

That sometimes means that a moderator will not apply a silence at all to someone, or they might silence someone for more than "the usual amount".

Of course, and I'm trying to not lock the GMT to anything, but trying to change the default, non-exceptional cases, that I feel could be handled better. The discretion to apply a lesser or greater silence is arguably being increased with this proposal, and by implementing the "quick view tool" I suggest, it would inform them better should they want to take further discretion.

No one is saying you can't make proposals, I just think that this proposal is out of touch with how the team actually functions.

As I said, any moderator can up the silence length to whatever they think is suitable (after conferring with other moderators), so putting in arbitrary rules like you are proposing just seems like making our lives harder for the sake of codifying things.

As 0x84f mentioned, for extraordinary cases it's already discussed between the moderators if there's a need for a harsher silence duration. This often applies to repeat offenders, as the user's history IS considered when silencing.

Doubling the past silence duration is already does the job of sending the "if you keep doing this, things will only get worse for you" message, be it for the same reason as the previous silence or for another completely unrelated reason.

I feel like this proposal adds unnecessary extra steps to a system that already works fine. In my personal opinion this is a loss-loss scenario, as it'd be more frustrating for users to deal with longer silences (which could backfire on more rebellious users), AND would take more time from the team to assess backgrounds for each and every silence.

At the end of the day we're supposed to be moderators, not butchers.

0x84f wrote:

As I said, any moderator can up the silence length to whatever they think is suitable (after conferring with other moderators), so putting in arbitrary rules like you are proposing just seems like making our lives harder for the sake of codifying things.

First things first, I am not making this proposal merely to codify things, but rather as a change in how sanctions are imposed outside of special circumstances.

I don't think the guideline I'm proposing to add (which may still be foregone in favor of a custom length) would make things needlessly hard to handle. I think that it may have led to a better result — without the need to discuss a custom silence duration, as the proposed system takes effective measures against such repeat offenders.

And if you don't want to always quadruple on reoffence, fair enough — you can add some extra rules on when GMTs should hit the "quadruple for reoffence" button. It's your (group's) system, after all.

I'm trying to make this proposal with as much consideration of GMT workflows and not using too much of their time. You can see an example of this in that I considered chat moderation to be exempt because of the needed fast judgements.

If we deem that a player needs a higher silence duration (based on the four factors from the wiki), we'll apply it. For others, doubling their current silence is more than enough to imply that what they are doing is not right.

From my perspective this proposal doesn't bring anything new to the table, if anything it complicates what's currently a simple way of enforcing rules.

Your current process makes sense, but I wanted there to be a clear distinction between a user breaking a rule and then breaking a rule in a completely unrelated way - which can be considered two separate "mistakes" not needing as much of an escalation in silence lengths - and them doing very similar things, which I believe should have a distinct increase since they have had a much higher level of intent.

What the exact increases are is not important to me. The main reason I went with 2x and 4x is that silences are based on factors of 5 minutes, and I suspect this is deeply baked into the internal code somehow.