Communism will win

Upon discussion of the answers, members felt she had demonstrated requisite growth from her past patterns of behavior in several crucial areas. As a result, it was decided that her ban should be lifted.

Initial Appeal: https://pastebin.com/kRmEP7mF

Follow-up Questions: https://pastebin.com/1dZxHTfN

Upon reflection and hours of discussion, review of activity in Discord servers shared with SCP environments, and review of other behavior on Twitter, it was decided that Scantron's appeal should be denied.

In support of perma.

1. First paragraph is fine and is simply a summation and slight addition to previous comments. Second paragraph is overly hostile and inflammatory and not critique in any sense, as far as I can tell.
2. We've said in the past that next offense would result it in a perma, but each time we never considered those offenses serious enough to perma. I think this is indisputiably one of the more serious.

http://www.scp-wiki.net/forum/t-7442453/scp-4911#post-3967149

We don't need a no-strings-attached 9/11sploitation article when the country's whole government and media apparatus has spent 17 years shoving it down our throats to justify the genocidal cash grab known as "the war on terror" and the institution of a domestic spying regime. Turn on the news if you're in the mood to have your heartstrings tugged.

Maybe our next circlejerk can be around a bunch of flag-covered coffins, and whoever's load is biggest gets dibs on writing the article about how Jesus draped a banner labeled "le freedom of le speech" over the Eiffel Tower after the Charlie Hebdo shooting. Maybe it'll be as chintzy and shallow as this one.

Give me a fucking break.

Dexa admin posted:

Your critique is legitimate but I can't support the utter vehemence here, CWW. Rein back your venom, you've been talked to about this kind of thing before. This is a warning from me, others might follow up.

Asking nobody replies to this post, or CWW's. We don't need a flamewar, thank you.

Please discuss if further action is warranted.

Everything Scantron said would be absolutely acceptable if they had clarified themselves with one or two sentences. That snark may have been necessary to accurately express the ridiculousness of the article in question in Scantron's POV. This is totally valid and I am in support of as much snark as is necessary for a critic to get their point across. However, the point must come across. In this case, it did not do so, and is therefore too vague for substantiality. It may be because Scantron themselves found difficulty in expressing their views in a clear, effective manner. This is also fine, and that is what warnings, etc. are for.

That being said, from what I understand, Scantron successfully accomplished their 6 month probationary period for which any infraction would result in another ban. Therefore, I would like to suggest we reset the clock in terms of disciplinary procedure. Because Scantron had been given two warnings previously, a short or medium-term ban is in order.

I also believe there has been a lot of disagreement between staff regarding the purpose of criticism and how criticism may be delivered. I will be putting this on the docket for the next Admin-Captain meet, and also in the forthcoming site criticism team meeting. I will also try to reach out to the forum crit team and Zyn, the captain, regarding a more unified opinion on such matters.

I finish with a disclaimer that I am not the sole arbiter of criticism; Zyn has equal authority to me in determining criticism policy directions, interpretations, and violations. I may be overruled by other admins, especially if my position is a minority position.

P.S. The discussion brought up by Moose and Joreth regarding how staff may or may not treat users unpopular with staff is not itself relevant to the topic at hand- which is 1) is scantron in violation of policy, and 2) if they are, what is the appropriate discipline. This has caused a dilution of discussion, resulting in the conversation being stonewalled as regarding to the core decision regarding Scantron. I would suggest that a separate thread is made instead of the continuation of stalling this thread.

As far as I know, wiki staff are not allowed to tell someone to knock off critique simply because they believe it to be toxic or snarky, unless it falls into one of those two categories.

If something is snarky or toxic beyond a certain point, it's not really critique anymore. You can have critique that is snarky, but snark that technically contains critique is not quite the same thing.

Additionally, people are supposed to obey staff requests to knock certain kinds of behaviour off, even if they're not explicitly against the rules. I have always believed this is intended to cover for us given the fact that a readably-sized set of rules can't explicitly cover everything. I don't know why toxic and snarky criticism would be excluded from the types of behaviour we're allowed to cut off. I'd need a really good reason to accept that as explicit policy. Snarky and toxic criticism is something we've been trying to move away from in general practically since I joined, since it tended to make new people afraid to post or even join.

That all said, to move for further disciplinary action than the staffpost under the "staff requests" rule, we would need to see the relevant staff requests predating the post being discussed.

EDIT: TLDR; if Deci's staffpost is linked and is indeed an order to cut this stuff out, I'm in favour of a ban as disciplinary staff for disobeying staff requests and leaving unhelpful, excessively snarky, crit.

Ask yourself the next time you're going to post a response to someone's work. Is this me trying my best to help another writer improve their work and/or improve the quality of the site's works? Or is this me trying to get the funniest or most cutting insult out on someone who's pretty much guaranteed not to fight back?

As a member of the forum crit team, I could make every part of a review as condescending and biting as I can without breaking the rules. I could do that, but I'm not doing that because it's both belittling to another user and less likely for them to act on it. The difference, I feel, is the intention of the user that is reflected in how the feedback is worded, which Magnus also points out:

Objectively, everything you're saying is correct, according to our current rules. By the letter, yes, no rule was broken. I can't help but feel like the spirit of criticism in general has been smacked around like a large trout upon a #site19 user's face.

As far as I know, wiki staff are not allowed to tell someone to knock off critique simply because they believe it to be toxic or snarky, unless it falls into one of those two categories.

This is…a serious misstep in our criticism policy then. We've had multiple shifts in behavior standards over the years, but I can't help but feel like we're in this weird place where we're basically like "As long as you're providing feedback, you're probably not breaking the rules unless you're attacking the author."

To wit, someone openly mocked the entire idea of a concept. Was there feedback? Sure, I guess. Was it constructive? No.

There's no way an author can be reasonably expected to take the feedback presented at face value, and not feel like their work is being belittled.

As for your point about logging, you're correct. It's on us to provide examples, and that should be done in a reasonable time-frame to back up the claims made here.

This is a personal feeling about our criticism standards right now. Feel free to ignore it, as it's not really relevant to the user's discussion, however it's relevant to the concepts being discussed.

I wouldn't want to see anyone else disciplined for this Dado post

anyone else disciplined for this Dado post

for this Dado post

Dado post

Dado

Dado

papa why have you betrayed me

And when staff have repeatedly told someone to knock off snarky toxic feedback

As far as I know, staff are only allowed to tell someone to knock off the following two types of feedback (on the wiki):

(1) Critique that violates a rule in the Criticism Policy (or another part of the Site Rules).
(2) Critique that is considered to be objectively wrong, and written by a person who has not written or cannot write a successful SCP.

As far as I know, wiki staff are not allowed to tell someone to knock off critique simply because they believe it to be toxic or snarky, unless it falls into one of those two categories.

That would therefore preclude using it as grounds for a ban.

I also argue that this post harmed no one and nothing, and has only caused the problem of "wasting staff's time" because of the O5 writeup. Users cannot be held responsible for prompting a writeup on O5 unless an actual infraction was associated. The actual snarky feedback was hardly toxic. It was just snarky.

Worth mentioning here that this is basically the exact same thing Djoric was banned for.

I see the parallel, but I don't agree. Djoric was banned under Chat Rules, which ask users not to be a dick, or excessively annoying. These rules don't exist on the wiki, and this is intentional, due to the different nature of chat. (Outside the scope of this post, but happy to address elsewhere.)

Djoric was banned for an actual, objective (minor) infraction: saying "Fucking newbies."

Since Djoric was brought up, let me do what I did for Djoric.

So to recap:

• Temporary ban.
• First warning.
• Unlogged violations.
• Permanent ban.
• Non-violation #1 (non-disc).
• Non-violation #2 (retaliation for calling out a staff violation).
• Possible violation (rescinded second warning).
• Non-violation #3.
• Second warning.
• Current incident.

To me, the difference is that Scantron simply hasn't done all that much wrong on the wiki since the return, compared to Djoric's situation (maybe Djoric's situation was a bad test case, but it's what I was given).

Some staff members have mentioned unlogged violations. Unlike in chat, this is easy to fix for the wiki. Scantron's post history is public. No one has claimed that they are targeting newbies, so presumably the questionable posts still exist. I suggest that a staff member write up any of Scantron's borderline posts and post them in this thread.

Yes, next time Scan steps out of line, they should be permanently banned. But they need to actually step out of line. Their response was snarky, but we've never banned people for snarky feedback. I could go through just about any staff member's post history and find comments just as snarky. It was legitimate feedback, just not completely respectful feedback. And that should be fine.

The thing is, this isn't just about Scantron. Yeah, there's a very good chance they'll get banned at some point, and I think a lot of us just want to tear the band-aid off and get it done with. I'm going to be entirely honest with you. My first reaction when I saw this? "Finally." Finally I wouldn't have to deal with this shit anymore. I'm as tired of this as any of you. But I also want to make sure we do it properly.

Our users need to be able to trust us. That means they need to know we'll follow our own rules. That's why I want to make sure we do this right. That's why Moose is so adamant about actually following our criticism policy which, yes, was written explicitly to allow snarky comments if they at least had some real critique. I know because 1) I've read the policy, 2) Moose has said as much, and 3) I wrote the original post the policy was built off of.

The biggest issue is that if we hit them for this, we send a message I am not comfortable with. We're saying "The policy doesn't apply if staff doesn't like you." Or even worse, "The policy doesn't apply if you're criticizing something staff wrote." Neither of these is a good look for us. I believe that that would be worse for the site than the low-level shittiness Scantron currently brings to things.

Finally:

How much borderline or actual dickery does it take before we stop hand-wringing, and saying "But it's not explicitely breaking a rule, just toeing it constantly!", and take action against behavior we wouldn't tolerate from someone else?

I mean, my main issue here is I'm hearing about this borderline behavior, but I'm not really seeing any examples.

That's the real solution here, if Scan's constantly toeing the line. Make notes. Keep records. Actually show where he's broken the rules. There are a lot fewer examples in this thread than you might expect, largely because we love to talk about it whenever Scan gets us riled up. Not a lot recently. I do agree that Scan needs closer watching than many other users, but that also means writing down what we see, and we haven't been doing a good job of that.

I do know that I wouldn't want to see anyone else disciplined for this Dado post, so if it is something "we wouldn't tolerate from someone else," I want examples of that too, because it means we're fucking up and yelling at people who shouldn't be yelled at.

EDIT: Broken or pushed against the rules, that should be. Examples can be borderline, with the understanding that one does not an infraction make.

some people are just snarkier than others.

And when staff have repeatedly told someone to knock off snarky toxic feedback, then it's beyond just "not liking a user" and it's move to a different sphere.

I really do not see what we gain out of policing what level of snark people are allowed to use when critiquing.

When it becomes detrimental to the people they interact with. I'd argue that scan is pointlessly and dickishly confrontational for absolutely no good reason. Consistently.

The only reason why this escalated to warrant a ban was because people that just want to find a reason to ban people they don't like.

I think it's kinda disingenuous to claim that staff are trying to just "ban people they don't like" while on page 7 of a user's disciplinary record. It's not like this is all just a groundless bushwhack.

They make no improvements to their general demeanor when they give negative feedback, and it's become disciplinary issues multiple times in chat and on-site.

How much borderline or actual dickery does it take before we stop hand-wringing, and saying "But it's not explicitely breaking a rule, just toeing it constantly!", and take action against behavior we wouldn't tolerate from someone else?

Responding to moose's comment:

I could see grounds that we should discipline a user for "not technically violating the rules, but causing endless problems for staff", which most of Scantron's actions fall under — but I feel that this should not have been "a problem" or "a problem for staff" in the first place.

Then frankly, let's do that. I'm not able to make any kind of official step to this, but let's clear the chaff off the table, and get down to brass tacks:

Scantron has consistently, and against staff order been a problematic and frankly toxic member of the community with frightening regularity. They were permabanned, told not to be shitcritty and overly snarky, and continue to do so. We've had to chat ban them. We've had so many borderline cases, and frustrated discussions.

One user has expended significant time, energy, and staff effort for their rule breaking behavior, post-permaban. I don't know how much clearer it is that this person is not going to change, regardless of potential penalties.

We all know what Scantron is trying to say, ARD put it in kinder words - some people are just snarkier than others. I really do not see what we gain out of policing what level of snark people are allowed to use when critiquing. Yes, there really is a level of "professionalism" or something that the site tries to maintain, and the high level of quality is what kept this site around for so long without getting swallowed up by miscellaneous petty drama.

Was the comment snarky? Yes, definitely. Was it a bit dickish? Maybe. But was it malicious? Compared to other bannable offenses, this does not even register on the table. The only reason why this escalated to warrant a ban was because people that just want to find a reason to ban people they don't like. I don't look forward to this being set as a precedent.

In my opinion, that precludes it from actually being critique and reduces it to the level of just being a dick and posting shitcrit.

I already told them not to leave shitcrit on articles in the past

I don't believe this is shitcrit. It's just snarky.

The r/SCP comment was shitcrit, not because it is passive-aggressive, but because it is content-free and is a version of "the problems with this article should be obvious", violating Rules 2 and 3 (of only 3!) of the Criticism Policy. Staff have the right (and duty) to discipline for this.

That doesn't grant us the right to discipline for critique that we think is shitty, if it does not violate a rule (or even a guideline in the Criticism Policy), and (B) is not objectively wrong and therefore damaging to the community (the grounds which we use to stop-order newbies from critiquing).

This critique had content, and can be followed as critique. It could, indeed, achieve some or all of its intended effect: to discourage people from overusing dado, or to avoid emphasizing potentially problematic or overused aspects of the character. (It could also backfire due to the tone, but that's not our business). Scantron just wasn't nice about it. Although, frankly, the tone was mild as hell.

Compare the r/SCP comment. This is shitcrit, regardless of mild tone. It just serves to dump on the author for liking or writing things like what's on r/SCP (without saying why), while also dumping on r/SCP (why? the world may never know, and neither will the author — and if they do, it becomes a mere insult with equal lack of content). One could make an argument that this implication is personal, and not specifically present in the article, but one would be disingenuous to say so. THIS is what skirting the rules looks like. You could contort an argument that if good faith is assumed, the comment is acceptable — but we are not required to assume good faith if it would be foolish to do so. That was a minor violation which we could have treated as a major violation, and could still do so for a repeat minor violation.

But not for a non-offense.

I do not think we should be granting ourselves context to make a perfectly acceptable action into a disciplinary action, no matter what the context. Disciplining harshly for minor offenses that would normally be overlooked is one thing. "Upgrading" a total non-offense to Disciplinary — and suggesting a long ban for it, to boot — feels like an abuse of power, even though it's in good faith.

I could see grounds that we should discipline a user for "not technically violating the rules, but causing endless problems for staff", which most of Scantron's actions fall under — but I feel that this should not have been "a problem" or "a problem for staff" in the first place.

I do acknowledge that Scantron's behavior indicates that they plan to cause more trouble for staff and will eventually get themselves permabanned. This isn't about Scantron specifically. Otherwise, I would not post in this thread, for many reasons. I do personally hope Scantron will choose to stop being a low-level jerk, but they do not seem to agree with that philosophical stance. This makes an eventual permaban inevitable.

But this is about philosophy of disciplinary enforcement on the wiki, which is much more important than any individual user.

Thank you for coming to my TED Talk.

I'm concerned that this is overstepping on our part.

Context is a big part of this, as mentioned below. I already told them not to leave shitcrit on articles in the past, the last noted one mentioned by tretter above, where I had explicitly laid it out. This, combined with repeated skirting of rules (particularly pertaining to shitcrit, a lot of it directed at newbies or people they don't like) is what makes me propose a perma.

It doesn't have to be perma if Disc thinks that as a whole, but I think a week is seriously too lenient, especially given Mann's statement at the top of the page. I'm amendable to a lot of options. What should be the next step?

But then context and history. It's definitely not really annoying - I think that would require someone to get annoyed. Passive aggressive dickery is more inciteful than annoying, and is definitely par for the course.

I don't think it violated that rule either, though. Being annoying isn't necessarily dickery, and it wasn't a personal attack.

I think what really bothers me is: Off the wiki, in the greater writing community, it would be perfectly acceptable, unlike all the old common behavior our rules were designed to stop. So this feels too far for me.

Edit: to clarify, my understanding of this is that the users above calling for a ban aren't doing so because Scantron violated the criticism policy, but because they violated rule #1.

What's the rules violation here, even minor? There was no personal attack on a user, and we do not require that critique be respectful of a work, only the author. It was snarky and passive aggressive, but contained content. It does not violate the criticism policy to my understanding. (Not addressing this specific behavior was intentional at the time I created the policy by admin agreement, though site culture has changed significantly since then.)

I'm concerned that this is overstepping on our part.

EDIT: Misgendered Scan. This was unintentional, but I should have known better. I apologize.

there he is. there's the funny pill man. isn't he so epic? i think it's epic when he's bad at english, or when you trust him. what funny antics will he get up to next time?

Scantron has been constantly passive-aggresively attacking people both on the wiki and the chat ever since they were unbanned, which recently culminated in a one week ban in chat. Most of the times they personally disagree with something they don't leave actual crit or just leave it alone and instead low-key attack or mock the other person. Most of these go unrecorded but at this point I'm going to go ahead and call for a one week ban from the wiki. They were previously permabanned for behaviour very much like this and clearly they don't feel inclined to change that.

On a recently coldposted tale, The Log They Didn't Want You To See, Scantron/CWW made this post:

Have you considered posting this to r/SCP? It seems right up their alley.

(LINK)

Decibelles staff posted it and told them to refrain from doing this in the future.

Mind, at this point, any major rules violation is almost certainly going to result in a permaban. Scan is way past the point of official warnings.

Thus, if there are no objections within 24 hours of this addition, I will issue an official warning to them.

We can't police off-site interactions like the one depicted in the second screenshot posted, but from the Site Rules:

Ended Discussions: If a staff member ends a discussion, it is over. Do not try to get the final word in; just stop.

Other staff made the point that continuing a discussion unasked-for in PMs after staff locked the thread where the discussion was happening falls under this, though there's some argument to be made that PMs are where conversations like this are continued. Noting for other staff members to hold a discussion on whether or not disciplinary action is merited here.

We could talk for hours about public spaces and opinions but, like, no.

Noting in case a pattern continues in the future, no discipline needs to be taken.

15:01 Kalinin joined
15:01 Kalinin Invoking my staff chat privileges to make a brief statement
15:02 Kalinin Not that it's my prerogative, but I'd like to request that staff refrain from any disciplinary action on the current thing
15:04 Kalinin Having thought it over for a bit, I wouldn't want staff interfering with creative content if at all possible. I think Nusquam raised a valid point in the last post he made, so consider that as you will
15:04 Nusquam For the record.
15:04 Nusquam I can't tell you "yeah man go for it" because it sounds like this is now a subject of debate
15:05 Nusquam But if you wanted to write something taking a jab at Scan the same way he did at you there, I would be all for it.
15:05 Nusquam I think you gathered that from my post, but, yeah.
15:05 Kalinin I'm actually trying to resolve this privately with Scan in a civil manner, but that's understood.
15:05 Decibelle joined
15:05 ChanServ has given op to Decibelle
15:06 Nusquam I'm glad to hear that.
15:06 anqxyr Kalinin, as someone not involved with this and such issues, and regardless of happens next here, I just wanted to say, kudos to you for your attitude
15:06 Kalinin Anyway, as the person initiating this, I would consider the matter closed with no action
15:06 Vince I'm not exactly involving myself with the situation, but escalating potshots don't seem the best way to go about it
15:06 Decibelle .ad deci
15:06 Nusquam I'll go ahead and post a snippet of this on 05.
15:06 jarvis decibelle: http://scp-stats.wikidot.com/user:decibelles
15:07 Nusquam So, for the record, you're withdrawing the initial complaint? Or just saying you're okay with/consider the matter resolved?
15:07 Nusquam So everything's clear.
15:08 Kalinin I'll withdraw it. I'm not happy with O5 being fodder for fueling mainsite drama, but from a standpoint of intellectual honesty I have to admit my mistake in raising the issue formally
15:09 Nusquam Understood.
15:09 Kalinin Thanks for registering that.
15:10 Kalinin left

I don't agree with any kind of disciplinary action here, or making Scantron change the title. Strong-arming an author into changing a positively-rated tale leaves a bad taste in my mouth no matter how we approach it. I think the time for this conversation to happen, if ever, would have been when Randomini posted his page titled something along the lines of, "wowee go kill urself."

I don't think what Scantron did was in violation of any rules. I see it along similar lines to the thing where the one author wrote a horrible character with the same name as some other author but having a tiny dick. It's a lot like that. It was a dick thing to do, but we really shouldn't be playing nanny for two grown men having a spat on a fiction website, and demanding they edit material so as not to offend each other. Especially not when this sort of thing has been part of literary tradition for as long as people have written.¹ I don't think we can disallow it if we want to be at all respectable as a literary community.

My recommended course of action is call Scantron an ass and tell Kalinin to cowboy the fuck up, and take no further action.

While I'm uncertain about whether staff should order such alterations to users' positively rated works that don't cross extreme lines (such as outing a person), I think we're far more within our rights to censor or discipline for "a work mocking a person's personal beliefs or non-artistic discussion" as opposed to "a work making fun of a person's critique, artistic stances, or artistic works".

The reason I feel that this crosses a line is that the conversation in question was not really related to anything on the site. It's more along the lines of a personal attack. Now, a personal attack can be art, but that doesn't mean we allow those. If Scan had grabbed a line from a story, or from a post or conversation where Kal was doing critique or talking about what direction he felt the site should go, I think that would be perfectly fair. I certainly don't want to say that Scan is not allowed to critique Kal's work on the wiki.

I agree with Moose that he is not under any sort of probation, since one was never established. Maybe it should have been, but it wasn't. That said, he is still someone with a history of trolling other users and deliberately pissing people off for chuckles. I don't have an issue telling him to stop before we need to ban him again. Looking at a user's history is very often the difference between a non-disciplinary report and an official warning.