Recently Silber and not_a_seagull brought up a topic to me, regarding cease and desist orders given in the forums.
As a quick background, cease-and-desists are enacted when any user begins to give a substantial amount of low-quality, vague, misleading, or otherwise problematic feedback in the forums. Typically a C&D automatically expires when the user has written a successful mainsite piece of their own (as in nearly all cases of problematic feedback, it's given by someone who has never written work on the mainsite that's stuck/survived deletion, and one of the most straightforward ways to indicate familiarity with the community's expectations is to write something the community likes).
Given that we have had plenty of authors over the years get hit with downvotes they weren't expecting, due to receiving overly positive or misleading feedback in the forums, or authors attempting to get feedback and only receiving a single line of minutiae response, bad feedback makes it a lot harder for the forums to move smoothly, and as such Forum Crit tries to prevent those cases from happening.
I've always considered them Non-Disc since giving low-quality feedback on the forums in itself isn't against the rules (though the requirements for forum crit are higher, since forums are expected to help authors improve, whereas feedback on mainsite posts is considered a favor done rather than an obligation); it was the ignoring of a staff order that would merit disciplinary measures.
However, it was pointed out that a C&D effectively removes a community privilege due to bad behavior, and would be a disciplinary measure more than a non-disc "hey, you need to improve".
I'm fine with C&Ds being considered disciplinary measures in the same way that revokes are, but I'm not sure if this is completely necessary given that a lot of the newbies who post bad crit simply don't know better but are really trying to help. It'd also make for a fair number more disciplinary records, which I'm again not sure of because I don't consider giving bad crit as bad a behavior as say, spamming or being a dick (which has no indication of attempted helpfulness).
What do we think?