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taking-out-the-trash.md

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Taking Out the Trash

These are my personal guidelines that I've built up while dealing with a rather large community (on the order of tens of thousands). Smaller communities may require a lighter touch.

What is a Violation?

Given that all of the open source projects I moderate for use the Contributor Covenant code of conduct, I'm going to use that as the basis for the examples here.

The main thing to keep in mind is:

Talking about a person or people rather than an idea or concept is the "to a first approximation" test of whether a post is a violation. It can still be a violation even when talking only about an idea or concept, but if the post is talking negatively about or to people then no further rumination is necessary.

Insulting or Derogatory

This is by far the most common code of conduct violation. Some examples I've seen:

What garbage code is running [here]?

How is this still a thing? ... Pathetic.

Try fixing the sodding thing, or put diagnostic logs in, or something. Don't just sit there in your ivory tower and disavow all knowledge of the problem.

Notice that none of the above are directly targeted at a person or people but they're still negative, argumentative, and just rude. If you can't treat others with respect and dignity, you need to get out.

When to Warn and Ban

  1. If someone’s very first interaction with the project is a violation (most often spam, but sometimes porn, doxxing, or harassment), block them outright with no warnings ... they’re just there to cause trouble
  2. If someone flagrantly violates the code of conduct but it isn’t their first interaction with the project, for example posting hardcore porn, threats of violence, obvious racism, etc, block them with no warnings
  3. In all other cases, issue a warning for first offense, block on second offense ... no matter how much time has lapsed in between offenses

In the years that I was community manager and moderator for various open source projects, I reversed a block maybe three times when the person being blocked wrote a sincere email and talked through the situation with me, could see my side of things, etc.

Though most of the time, when you warn people, they double down on the behavior and argue about the warning or whether we have "the right" to moderate our projects (First Amendment baloney, etc) ... which I consider a second violation and block them for it.