Code tour: 2018-07-15 to 2018-09-01

[kaberett]

Tiiiiiiiiiiny code tour!

Issue 2227: [#2227] remove remaining references to AIM (pull request)
Category:
Patch by: kareila
Description: If it looks familiar, this is because it was previously mostly fixed! Display of AIM usernames was removed... but it was still possible to specify what your AIM username had been on the Edit Profile page. Whereupon it would be swallowed into the depths of the database and digested, silently, never to be seen again, which doesn't do anyone much good. The Edit Profile field was, therefore, pruned.

Issue 2228: Link to image hosting pages from Site Map (pull request)
Category:
Patch by: rshatch
Description: Dreamwidth has image hosting! It... is optimal to actually provide links to it from the site menus, so it's easier to find and manage. Ta-da.

Issue 2329: 1661 banned behaviour (pull request)
Category:
Patch by: swaldman3
Description: Hilariously, what exactly happens when user A bans user B is that user B gets banned from user A's journal, not from... replying to A in other people's journals, or in communities. This is not as intended -- bans are supposed to apply to the person who made the ban, not the journal. Because of the number of different ways Dreamwidth provides to reply to comments, the logic for this is a bit convoluted, but banning functionality has now been extended. There is a some tidying up left to do, but this is progress and progress is good.


3 total issues resolved
Contributors: kareila, rshatch, swaldman3

Comments

Re: Issue 2329

[20_00]

Hello.

Compromise number two.
Give the user two options to choose from a ban: a) ban it everywhere, b) ban it only in my blog.

In this case, I can introduce a new rule in the community: the participants undertake to refrain from using the total ban, but in case of protracted conflicts and unmotivated aggression, they can contact the moderator or the Abuse Team. At the disposal of the Abuse Team is the option "ban on communication", which was still in Livejournal 10 years ago.

I think this is an acceptable compromise. I will try to write an post in dw-suggestion :)

Re: Issue 2329

[denise]

We have no plans to ever remove anonymity from the site! Individual users can already choose whether or not to accept anonymous comments in their account, and, in the case of a community, account admins can choose whether or not to accept anonymous comments in their community. So someone who's the target of serious harassment can disable anonymous commenting and only participate in communitites that don't allow anonymous commenting -- they can take steps to protect themselves and to be reasonably free of further anonymous harassment. (Someone creating and using a different journal to work around a ban is a Terms of Service violation, and we've had processes for that for a decade.)

Under the existing system, someone who's the target of serious harassment and has banned the harasser from their journal can no longer participate in communities (or even, sometimes, comment in other people's journals), because their harasser can contact them in reply to any comment they make there and continue the harassment. That's happening now, a lot, and it means that the victim of harassment is having their use of the site seriously restricted. This change switches the direction of the consequences so that the harasser is the one who's having their use of the site restricted, in that they can no longer reply to their victim's posts and comments in a community they're both a part of.

I understand your concerns! I really do. I know the social patterns and style of communication is different in the Russian communities of the site. But we aren't going to make changes to this system until we see how it changes behaviors and what goes well and what goes wrong with it. We're absolutely not going to get into a situation where the answer to ongoing harassment is "contact the Terms of Service team every time they contact you" instead of "ban them and you'll never have to hear from them again", because I was there on LJ for that and it was terrible. We started DW to learn from our mistakes, and this is a (long-overdue) example of the kind of changes we meant by that.

The solution for your scenario of someone posting to a community and banning everyone who disagrees with them is for the admin of the community to say "don't do that". Admins of individual communities can say "if you have banned any member of this community from contacting you, you can't post in this community", and you're welcome to remove anyone who violates that rule from the community -- people who don't agree with those rules just won't participate in that particular community. But we aren't going to ever create a way for the admin of a community to override someone's security settings.

Re: Issue 2329

[pan_2]

Hello again.

The second 20_00's proposal looks interesting:

ban the person from communicating with me everywhere option will retain the new/current ability to completely cut off harassers;

ban the person from communicating with me only in my journal option will give the ability for the ban recipient to still contact the user in other journals and communities; also it can be changed later to the total ban if the need will arise.

For the regular communities this will not change anything, and for those who choose to refrain from using the total ban for it's members - this is a matter for that community members only.

Both options don't need the involvement of the ToS/Abuse team in any way.

From my POV this is interesting proposal, and it is in the spirit of the "freedom of expression".

Re: Issue 2329

[lxe]

I wholeheartedly side with the second proposal. It doesn't introduce hidden state/context variables (such as community settings) and presents the user a clearly "aforeexplained" set of options. The extra cost would be, I presume, one extra boolean filed in the [banner, banned] association table (provided the backend is an RDB) and an extra condition term in the WHERE clause.