It's admittedly a little disheartening that the current circumstances have made this update necessary
Made this update necessary? As far as I know, there has been zero evidence, even circumstantial, that the SCP Foundation was used as a basis for a brigade on another site (the laughably tiny "five-people brigades" mentioned in complaints are just as easily explained from the pushing of said site on /x/).
That said: I feel this is a good and necessary rules change. I'm fairly sure this was always supposed to be a rule since Kondraki was removed from admin (one of many, many errors in Site Rules).
EDIT: By which I mean, the exact same rule that is currently present for Chat should have been on Site since at least 2010 (but in different style/tone & with clarifications.)
That said, this seems to be focused on the RPC situation, drama which staff seem overly engaged in. (I'm a hypocrite, but still.)
Brigading should explicitly be in the rules — but starting with no brigading our articles, and defining brigading from there.
More ways the current update does not address the issue:
- If a user downvotes every article on a rival wiki because they genuinely disliked them and it's clear they were (or could reasonably be seen to be) poor quality, this is not a raid, or malicious downvoting, or a downvote brigade. (This would not be possible on our wiki currently, but would have been very possible back in 2008 — which is where RPC is right now.)
- If a user does exactly the same thing in our name, or using us as a "base", or with malicious intent (often as admitted when confronted by staff per a complaint), then this is brigading / raiding and should be disciplined for.
- If the user had malicious intent, but the site & actions had no connection to us, then we should do nothing.
EDIT: Major omissions above ^, sorry!
It was correct to confront this user. This is standard with disciplinary complaints, regardless of their origin.
But if they had actualy downvoted all the articles based on the quality of the content alone, and then gave us a good, non-bullshit explanation of this, in no way would I support that being worthy of disciplinary action.
Removal from staff would be merited, but that's because it's "conduct unbecoming of staff" to do something that might reflect badly on us, this obviously. But rules for staff are much harsher by design. We shouldn't be trying to police our users' behavior so closely.
The same goes for anyone who downvoted in the recent downvote brigade, even though they were objectively part of a brigade.
We already kind of say that (malicious downvotes), but if we're making it clearer for 'no targeting outside sites', may as well make it clearer for us too. We should also NOT make the focus of the rule whatever any random offsite user's demands are.
(edit: for clarifications)
We should also think through our definition of "brigading" more carefully and more officially.