Officer ~Beepsky~ devanoobot

[DigTK]

Since Slack is lacking the feature to ban someone from a channel should we add a thing to devanoobot that monitors a channel and automatically kicks specified people?

[StrangeWill]

This is stupidly useful -- while we haven't had any moderation problems so far, I'd like something between a full ban and just talking to someone, historically when people have had problems it's been caused by them being in an environment that isn't healthy for them, it would be nice to basically channel ban someone if need be.

I'm honestly impressed that I haven't seen something like this for Slack already.

A cool use for devanoobot would be moderation tools like this that @DigTK mentioned.

[agarzola]

This sounds useful in theory, but I wonder about what is being implied when we actively develop a disciplinary tool that has, so far, remained wholly unnecessary in our community. The most active members in our group have so far demonstrated self-discipline and a willingness to be persuaded via relatively light-handed moderation.

Take #opportunities, for instance: Most job/contract opportunities were getting buried under jokes and gripes about this job or that. An opportunity would get posted and a discussion would start about how this job posting “reminds me of that time I had a similar job and let me tell you all about the horrible boss I had… [cue mile-long exchange about horrible bosses]”. One day we realized that this kind of exchange is detrimental to the usefulness of the channel, so we addressed our community members directly, removed the most recent exchanges (including that of our own admins participating in it), set a more explicit channel purpose, and that was that. Since then, we have led by example and we haven’t had this problem. There is no indication that the same light-handed approach would not work should it happen again with different, newer members (which is doubtful considering that what newer members see is a channel full of opportunities, not discussion about shitty jobs). I don’t want to reciprocate our community’s good faith with distrust implied by the pursuit of more authoritarian tools.

I welcome discussion about how we might implement and use this feature, but I would advise against actually building it until it becomes clear that it would actually benefit the community. Personally, I’m of the opinion that the chances of this ever being the better option are extremely low.