likewhoa is banned from groups.drupal.org for 1 week

I may find the comment immature or of inappropriate humor but not something worthy of banning from drupal.org or g.d.o.

If you are banning likewhoa for this you must ban http://groups.drupal.org/user/13263 for his comment on the same thread. It is that comment that introduced the blue balls reference (though with a far more tongue in cheek with his approach than the user: likewhoa).

The other comment was clearly non-sexual in nature

That's the thing about inferences now isn't it? (was it blue balls because of drupal? or blue balls because of sex? for the user you defend?) I can't tell, but you claim to. Obviously there is room to take it either way. Whether you believe it ridiculous or not.

Thanks for quoting the standards. It doesn't say anything about banning users or the protocol for doing so. It's merely a reminder of conduct. One readers of comments should employ as well, when they come across a comment they don't like. ; )

I find it ridiculous to ban a user because of this one comment. Bans should be a final course taken and not an immediate action taken.

+1 for no ban. I’d rather see the DrupalNYC community explode and go elsewhere than have to put up with their immaturities every day. Seriously. It’s been like three months since this has started. I’m sick of hearing of it. Mass bans and go-aways for everyone.

suggesting that f's comment and likewoah's comment are equivalent is just not logically valid. Only one of the sexualized the word "ball", only one was something that would be considered inappropriate in a professional setting (which the nyc drupal group once was and is trying to become once again)

Morbis, there is a serious problem in our community. Put your fingers in your ears and ignore it if you want to, but that won't solve anything.

I have to say that I find it very disturbing and depressing to see you say that you would rather see the drupal community explode and fall apart than see it address these issues.

suggesting that f's comment and likewoah's comment are equivalent is just not logically valid.

whether you view it as logically valid or not, it's an unbiased assessment. Clearly that isn't the case for all here.

VM, you really read F's comment and thought about body parts? I only saw a reference to blue -- the color of many things drupal.

I think your bias is showing more clearly than you might want to believe.

http://groups.drupal.org/node/68643#comment-226213 = another inference when the subject of blue balls comes up.
it seems like an ongoing tongue in cheek thing and you're pointing the finger at one specific individual because he went "too far" in your opinion.

likewhoa's comment in that thread = http://groups.drupal.org/node/68643#comment-221713 and is completely benign.

directing the heat at me for disagreeing with you or the petition here, isn't productive.

VM, I'm debating the logic of your statement. I am not pointing fingers at you or directing heat at you. I'm debating your position.

Going "to far" is certainly a valid line between things, is it not?

The ban request is not the result of one comment. It's a recurring problem with this one user taking it "too far" repeatedly. Sure, we can ignore it. That is an option. However, it wont be too long before the next inappropriate comment by him lands and this discussion is brought up again. Want us to wait for that? Fine with me.

Going "to far" is certainly a valid line between things, is it not?

It should certainly prompt a warning from the community the user is involved in.

I took at a look at the users tracker when I caught this issue and I didn't/don't see a history of this kind of situation. Admittedly I did not look at every post the user has made. My sample was 10 threads on the first page of the tracker on g.d.o. I also looked at 10 d.o. posts in the users d.o tracker.

@ericg: I have to say that I find it very disturbing and depressing to see you say that you would rather see the drupal community explode and fall apart than see it address these issues. Not the “Drupal community” - the DrupalNYC community. From the outside looking in, DrupalNYC is primarily full of three types of people: a) those who ignore the trolls, b) those who insist on shouting “trolls! trolls! I ARR TEH OFFENDED!”, c) the trolls. *No other Drupal group is having these problems on the same magnitude as the DrupalNYC group*. Every week, there seems to be Yet Another Controversy within DrupalNYC. It’s getting a little old.

As such, I am recommending to @winston the same thing I recommended to someone else who asked me about Druplicon logging for the #drupalnyc channel: get a majority vote from the 7 admins of the DrupalNYC GDO group. Discuss it and waste time about it amongst yourselves. Collaboratively create an actionable d.o issue that shows the vote of the seven admins. Stop bothering the overworked Drupal webmasters.

On a random side note: my understanding (having been told by a few #drupalnyc regulars) is that one of the griefers of the DrupalNYC group is, in fact, an administrator of it too. That’s hilariously entertaining, and I’d prefer that similar bad decisions be discussed interally by your group, in your own little land, before infecting the rest of the low-maintenance Drupal world.

my understanding (having been told by a few #drupalnyc regulars) is that one of the griefers of the DrupalNYC group is, in fact, an administrator of it too.

that person is no longer an admin and from what I understand, is also currently banned from groups.drupal.org

Thanks Morbus, very good summary.

As such, I am recommending to @winston the same thing I recommended to someone else who asked me about Druplicon logging for the #drupalnyc channel: get a majority vote from the 7 admins of the DrupalNYC GDO group. Discuss it and waste time about it amongst yourselves. Collaboratively create an actionable d.o issue that shows the vote of the seven admins.

That works for me - can we get more of the admins to post here saying whether they are in support or opposed?

one problem is that 3 of the 7 admins on the group are more honorary positions, people that used to be leaders in the community who have moved on to other things but who's opinions we all still trust. As such, a vote of all 7 is most likely not possible. I guess we'll have to remove those people from the list so its more clear who the real admins are for this sort of thing.

Just one final note before I move on, winston was simply following through on advice given to us last week by chx. he suggested that instead of engaging the trolls we should request they be banned, that we should have a 0 tolerance policy for inappropriate content. This was simply an attempt to follow that suggestion. Sorry to bother you all, we'll reopen this issue after we get consensus from the 4 currently active admins.

There are very few places in the community where we wait on majority much less unanimous decision making. If just a few of the others agreed I think that would be fine.

I'd suggest unpublishing the comment and leaving a trail for those of us who aren't part of the NYC group to get an every day understanding of the issues.

Blame drupal. OG's distributed authority model is based on node access control and comments are not nodes. It would take a hack to core to support this, and the hack would never get into drupal proper. If greggles and joshk and others still want this given the downsides, I can help.

Silly me. As an admin I can edit any posts in the group. But apparently I can't touch comments. That makes sense.

That's a limitation of OG. Add "edit comments in my group if I'm an admin" it to OG and I'll happily deploy - #826190: Allow admins to edit comments on nodes in their group.

In general - I'm not sure how to help. Drupal as a project is generally consensus driven. You (and others in NYC) have asked for outsiders not to intervene. People who can do a ban are asking for you to show some consensus from the local community.

I think EricG marked this as "won't fix" by mistake ;).

I'm a NYC group administrator, and I support a short-term ban of something like 1 week, and longer or permanent bans if the problem continues.

Likewhoa's comment comes at a time when the group is hypersensitive to inappropriate and offensive behavior. His post is clearly inappropriate, and when Jacine pointed this out, likewhoa was not receptive said that Jacine was in the wrong for finding the post offensive. This indicates to me that likewhoa needs a stronger message about what is appropriate behavior in the group.

Looking through likewhoa's tracker a bit, I see a similar pattern of behavior within the NYC group and within the webmaster's queue:

http://groups.drupal.org/node/57318#comment-163023
http://drupal.org/node/709398#comment-2579040

VM is correct in #10 in pointing out that there was a previous mention of the phrase "blue balls" . That case seems different than the present one. There, the double entendre seems somewhat unavoidable and the comment itself is constructive (helping to get supplies for a social event for Drupal people). Likewhoa's comment is neither constructive nor appropriate, and most importantly, he was unreceptive when someone called him out on it.

Let's help clarify the rules for likewhoa by banning him for a week.

ezra-g's suggestion seems reasonable to me. if anything i think the problems the nyc group is experiencing are what's going to be occurring more and more as groups in other cities reach the same size. as a community we need to proactively set standards early to avoid it becoming a norm.

OK, based on this additional input his account on g.d.o is blocked for a week.

For the record, there are other groups that have similar problems and don't have good solutions other than lots of work in discussions (in person, on skype, on g.d.o).

I don't have the preference for banning or not banning likewhoa. But, I do have the preference to stick with whatever our "rule" is. If we end up banning likewhoa, I'd like the webmasters to ban or warn everyone on the lists below, since each of them used "Pimp" on d.o and g.d.o, which, by any English dictionary, is sexual related word, and not appropriate for people under 18.

http://drupal.org/search/apachesolr_search/pimp

http://groups.drupal.org/search/apachesolr_search/pimp

I don't have the preference for banning or not banning likewhoa

Whatever comes after this should go in another thread (or 100+ separate threads?), as this is already focused on a specific issue.

Banning everyone who says or does something stupid on d.o or g.d.o is, well, stupid. And I don't think anyone really disputes that. I'm very glad to know how many people have used the word "pimp" on these sites. That's incredibly useful information.

Moreover, if we banned anyone who said or did anything stupid once, I don't think any of us would be here.

As many people in this thread have pointed out, however, temporarily removing someone from the community who has shown a repeated disregard for the norms of the community is a different situation. This is especially true in situations where individuals respond negatively/poorly to constructive guidance.

We all make mistakes. Only a small percentage of us allow those mistakes to escalate into situations that suck time and resources from other community members.

As drewish and greggles both point out, this is an issue that will likely occur in other groups; this is one of the reasons a more standard set of expectations would be helpful.

Bans should definitely not be used lightly, but in this case, there appears to be some consensus from people directly connected to the situation that a temporary ban makes sense.

Now can we please all get back to building web sites?

thanks for the ban, and thanks for those that disapprove of it.

Well, This admin was hiking for a long weeknd and is thus late on this issue, but feel like I should chime regardless.

The way I am seeing this, and I may be wrong, is that if the Groups admins in NYC had a button to ban our users from our forums we wouldn't be bothering anyone. The original request wasn't "Let's have a community discussion on this" it was "ban this user" a request that wouldn't have needed to be made had the admins had the tools to do it themselves.

It's pretty common internet-wide for forum moderators to have the 'authority' to ban. I would be a +1 for allowing any admin of a group the ability to ban temporarily or permanently members of their group, with the understanding that yeah, sometimes admins abuse authority.

This isn't a complaint about the tools, I fully know why we can't do it ourselves, but if a request comes in from an admin of a group for a ban, I don't think it needs to be subject to much discussion. They're the admin, banning and the consequences thereof are their responsibility.

Agreed with Tressler; in other Internet communities in which I've been involved, group administrators have the ability to temporarily ban unruly users from their groups for a limited amount of "cooling-off" time, and users are generally only given perma-bans if they continue to flout established community rules and standards (or are obviously spammers). All group moderation decisions can be reviewed by site administrators, who have the ability to overturn or remove group admins if necessary.

I understand that the Drupal community is much different, and that many would chafe at this kind of hierarchy, but on the other hand, the current system means that any time someone decides to cause trouble that requires action, the only recourse group organizers have is to escalate it all the way to the site maintainers. It would be great if group organizers were able to give someone a "time out" without it turning into a community-wide issue.

Greggles set this to need work, I presume for a reason?

Greggles, were you just setting it for the ban to take affect, or is it set that way so the un-banning happens in a week? Setting back until that is answered so it doesn't get mis-tracked. Thanks.

Let me quickly add that I am very much in favour of giving admins the possibility to kick people out of their groups.

If only so I don't get inundated with silly threads such as this one...

As an alternative I'd love g.d.o to have its own issue tracker...

I'm in favor of a new queue that is specific to groups.drupal.org. Obvious components are account synch, spam, content, notifications

And yes, I set this to "needs work" so I can unban him in a week and then mark it fixed. IMO, we shouldn't take permanent action the first time that we block someone who has been a community member in some form.

@Tresler, I agree with most of what you're saying. I'm working on #528572: Restrict Groups list to group managers which would let admins kick content out of their group. I guess next up is banning users. Just needs an issue and a patch ;)

I've activated likewhoa's account on groups.drupal.org.

I also created http://drupal.org/project/groupsdrupalorg but we need to make it more active by updating the components and moving all issues from infrastructure/webmasters over there.