Security Argument
There are pages on O5 that contain sensitive data. Things like record pages with usernames and in some cases ages, persistently-abusive-user records, et cetera. These pages are intended to only be viewed by staff, and thus are in a special category that is only visible to members of O5. Expanding O5's membership beyond staff dilutes the effectiveness of being able to use O5 as a staff site. While I will be clear and say that I genuinely don't think any of the people this policy would apply to (about 30 people, the vast majority retired/inactive Junior Staff) are gonna go and do something insane, I also don't think we should be building access measures on individual judgement of "how likely do I think Joe is to go insane, and who's vouching for him", because that has bitten us in the ass before. It should be a consistent, fair thing.
Consistency Argument
In the not-too-distant past, O5 membership after you retired was used as a signifier of popularity. Having your O5 membership revoked after you quit/retired/were boosted was basically a not-so-quiet "fuck off now", and retaining it was a sign that you were still socially accepted and welcome back. That's just a fact. I'd be insane to dispute that, considering my own membership was in that weird social limbo the first time I was kicked from staff.
That said, I don't think the fact that we used to do that is good reason to overcorrect and continue allowing O5 memberships to people we like on the basis that they're welcome back one day. Because then when we do have to remove people, it signifies they're not welcome back. And now we've formalized what was once informal social culling.
Jumping the Queue
There's also a material concern that some people who are not staff have used their O5 membership in a way that's inappropriate and not really what we intended. For some reason, MAs of INT sites were at one point given O5 membership. I'm not sure when, or why, but the only time I saw it used in recent memory was when they posted on O5 voicing their thoughts on a policy discussion — despite not being staff.
I think that people who aren't staff should absolutely have a fair and equal voice in suggesting and improving our policy. It's why we made the mainlist mirrors! So everyone could chime in. It's really not fair if we let some nonstaff's voices be heard louder than others with no real basis for it. They can post to the mirrors, just like everyone else.
Rebuttal
There's a concern that removing the membership of a small handful of old-guard staffers will be perceived as insulting to them/make them feel unwelcome, and make them unwilling to share any institutional knowledge they might have. Three responses to this:
a) I think that Gears should retain his, for the sole argument that he can take backup control of master admin if, for some reason, Mann cannot hold it anymore. Gears was one of maybe 4 people in this small handful, fwiw.
b) I genuinely think that if we're upfront and send them a PM explaining the situation and that this is a routine consistency measure, they'll be fine with it. If not, we can deal with that as it comes.
c) I was informed privately that the situation where one of these staffers' institutional knowledge was needed has happened only once, and even that was a nonurgent situation. This comes with the notable exception of Bluesoul, but tech team also has a number of alternative ways to reach them that aren't O5. Like I said, the vast majority are Junior Staff, maybe 5-6 are mod-rank or above, all inactive and almost all relatively new, so this argument doesn't apply to most of them. But even for the ones it does, I remain unconvinced that the institutional knowledge, if it really even is useful and applicable, is a concrete enough reason for us to draw up an exception.
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