Right now, we're not very good at actually engaging with staff for the purposes of disciplining them. There are lots of times in the past that we could and should have taken care of something, and we didn't, because there were two options: remove someone from staff or ignore the problem. I want to insert a middle ground to deal with scenarios where we know that a staff member has done something wrong, and we wish to punish them, but we don't want to remove them from staff because of a single incident. I am currently calling this concept "Censure."
Someone who is Censured would have restrictions put on their ability to act. Effectively, they would have the same level of ability as someone who has been put on Inactive Status (unable to vote, unable to use their rank abilities, etc). They would continue to be a member of the site, continue to be a member of staff, but their ability to influence events would be highly limited. Effectively, a "staff time out" for someone who has messed up somewhat but not to the point that removal would be necessary.
Censure would have a time limit set at the time the punishment is meted out. My suggestion for a basic escalation would be: one week, two weeks, one month, three months. I stop at this point because I personally feel that anything that would be beyond three months should probably have resulted in the staff member's removal instead of their censure. As a note, there is nothing preventing the removal of a staff member instead of a censure, and depending on the severity of the offense, a longer censure from the beginning would make sense (such as giving someone an initial ban of a week rather than a day for a grevious screw up). Each time a staff member is censured, I strongly recommend that the accusing parties look at previous censures and see if this is a pattern worthy of removal; I suspect that it will be very often, far before the fourth tier is reached. I see a Censure as replacing the "Warning" tier of staff discipline, though if the crowd still wants the fairly weak "punishment" that a warning is, then it could remain.
To work this into our current process, I suggest that it simply be added to the Site Charter's Demotions Tab (Section C, Part 2), and renaming that tab appropriately. A fairly simple, painless fix.
Edit: Removing Timer.
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