Hi, I would like to start a discussion/brainstorming about the technical aspects and means of blocking OSM user accounts.
First of all, the wider OSM community uses a wealth of communications channels, most of which are not even controlled by us; here I just want to discuss the actual OSM account and the means of communication associated with that. Currently an account can be blocked (by the DWG for a limited time, or by admins for arbitrary timespans). There's a UI for that (even though I think the long-term blocks need manual database fiddling). A blocked user cannot edit OSM data. They can, however, still use the various communication functions: write personal messages, write or comment on diary entries, comment on changesets, and open, close, and comment on notes. And they can modify their user page, change their account name, and "befriend" other users. Currently, if we wanted to keep someone from using these functions, we'd have to "suspend" the account altogether, which is almost the same as deleting it: The account will not be visible any more, at all, and nobody can log in to it (cf. discussion in https://github.com/openstreetmap/openstreetmap-website/issues/1946). OSM has largely been spared from obnoxious nutcases that you find online elsewhere, but our increasing popularity will certainly send a couple of them our way in the future. Some examples of borderline behaviour that we have seen in the past: * user creating tons of playful/funny notes, and modifying his user name several times a day * user closing 100s of notes without actually doing something about them * user "stalking" another user in changeset comments, writing rant-y comments in response to everything the other user writes * user writing longish, rant-y, unwanted, and off-topic diary comments to third party's diary entries * user sending legal threats to other users in personal messages * user adding a "shit list" to his profile page listing the account names of other mappers they don't like I wonder what the best way would be to deal with issues like that. The ticket I quoted above is from a DWG member suggesting that normal user blocks should simply be extended to block all the "communication" functions as well. In the discussion it was suggested that someone blocked for, say, participating in an edit war, should not necessarily be prevented from writing and receiving messages. Is the opposite true as well - would/should someone given a cool-off period for being a dick in a discussion still be allowed to do mapping? Should a normal user block perhaps simply come in two flavours, "block mapping only" and "block all"? It has been suggested that blocking *all* communication functions might be problematic because one thing you might expect from someone you have blocked is that they apologise, or set something right, which they might not be able to do without the ability to write messages. Do we need a full array of permissions - "can change user name", "can edit own user page", "can write personal messages", etc. - and the ability to short-time suspend any and all of them? Thoughts are welcome. This also ties in somewhat with a separate discussion, on how a prerequisite for allowing children on the platform might be that we can disable the "social" functions of an account. In that case it would not be a short-term block, but a whole class of accounts that can edit, but not participate in discussions (for their own protection). I'm not sure that can work at all (given that the ability to contact a mapper is very important to us). Maybe such accounts would have to be linked to a "responsible" parent account who then gets the messages... Bye Frederik -- Frederik Ramm ## eMail [email protected] ## N49°00'09" E008°23'33" _______________________________________________ dev mailing list [email protected] https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/dev
