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Q&A

Welcome to Codidact Meta!

Codidact Meta is the meta-discussion site for the Codidact community network and the Codidact software. Whether you have bug reports or feature requests, support questions or rule discussions that touch the whole network – this is the site for you.

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Q&A Probationary shadowban for new accounts

If it's possible to characterize the problem as being caused by "That Guy" - i.e., a singular person behind it all - then unless the problem involves a botnet or something, it's small enough that w...

posted 1y ago by Karl Knechtel‭

Answer
#1: Initial revision by user avatar Karl Knechtel‭ · 2023-10-26T01:39:27Z (about 1 year ago)
If it's possible to characterize the problem as being caused by "That Guy" - i.e., a singular person behind it all - then unless the problem involves a botnet or something, it's small enough that we shouldn't need to come up with new technical solutions just because that problem user exists. To me, that has the flavour of a "bill of attainder", and I'm opposed to it.

Shadowbans are also just generally evil IMO. The first time I saw the [term](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_banning) was when the feature was first discovered by the Reddit userbase. This led to massive drama when it turned out that the feature wasn't only being applied to spammers. Almost everyone seemed to agree that this is a *terrible* way to treat actual human users; modern Internet-powered life is atomizing enough without having *community-oriented* sites silently connecting the other end of one's line of communication to /dev/null.

The reason shadow-banning works for spammers is because they don't stick around for feedback. Human users, however, will inevitably notice when they *don't* get any answers or comments or votes - ever, including on Meta (which is readily available to them and not at all hidden or shuffled out of the way). On the other hand, a short one-hour shadow-ban of the sort you describe - I assume the idea is that it's short enough not to be obviously detected in this sort of way - doesn't seem useful.

In the rare cases where someone needs to be targeted, it's better that they are at least aware of the situation. Someone who consistently runs into an automated "Your question has been automatically put on hold, pending review", followed by consistent deletion upon such reviews, will get the message. This also minimizes disruption in the case of a false positive (or in the case that That Guy gets a clue).

As site posting volumes increase, it could be useful to have some stepped system of "lockdown" mechanisms. These could range from varying numbers of flags needed to take some automated action on a post; to having questions default to a closed state and requiring action from curators to approve (i.e. open) them; and many other possibilities which should be discussed separately (the options probably don't even neatly fit on a spectrum).