Talk: Blocking policies

I’ve looked at your blocking policy. I agree with most of it. I note, however that Wikipedia does not like short blocks. See When blocking may not be used. RationalWiki regularly uses short cooling off blocks. Wikipedia says they don’t work. I don’t know who is right.

Gentle blocking policies need a large number of sysops, in my opinion. Warning users before a block creates a relationship. If a block later becomes necessary the user is more likely to come back after a block or to create new accounts and evade a block. I agree it’s better to warn users. I personally feel that must wait till there are plenty of sysops here to give necessary warnings and patrol. I may be wrong. Also short blocks may mean we have to keep calling janitors when blocks expire and users reoffend. Uberfuzzy probably know better than we do how to judge the length of blocks. See Wikipedia blocking policy Proxima Centauri 19:54, 23 June 2008 (UTC)

Ok. Good points. Thing is, if we start out with CP style infinite blocks from the beginning then I'll bet that that will become the norm. I would suggest that it would be better to start with a tolerant policy and then stiffen it if necessary. I suspect that it will be harder to go from a strong policy to a more tolerant one. Also I wrote "sysop discretion" - in other words any sysops would, in reality, apply whatever block they felt was appropriate. Look at the RW block policy - I suspect that never in the history of RW has their incremental block policy been properly used. Sysops simply pull numbers out of the air. I think that we should be careful about blocking people simply because we disagree with them, although I didn't put that in as I guess it should be obvious. Anyway - having said all that - would you like to suggest a different wording?R Fitzroy 20:09, 23 June 2008 (UTC)

Just reread you note about "cooling off" blocks. I agree completely - they just enrage people. But I wasn't trying to suggest that.--R Fitzroy 20:10, 23 June 2008 (UTC)

I see that we now say that blocks should be hours or days. OK - but even CP sometimes give blocks of less than an hour.R Fitzroy 16:18, 24 June 2008 (UTC)

On Old Liberapedia blocking policy is very strict. It was impossible to argue against this because the wiki depended on two active sysops. The two were under heavy pressure. Reducing their workload was a priority. With New Liberapedia this no longer applies but changing blocking policy will be an uphill struggle. You are right we should try a gentle policy first. Proxima Centauri 18:39, 24 June 2008 (UTC)