If I’m being real, I couldn’t actually care less if the guy was unbanned or not as it doesn’t concern me. And yea, I’d imagine this type of thing is rare. What does concern me is the way it was handled. That really doesn’t sit well with me.
IDK, are you trying to strawman me?
You seem to be fixated on this, “memes aren’t spam” idea, which seems to be the crux of our disagreement. Since you hold this aberrant definition of the word, you are acting like the rules aren’t clear. The rules say, and have said for a very long time, “No spamming”. Literally everyone who has refused to recognize that this means “no posting unsolicited memes outside of an ongoing discussion” has ALSO expressed that this kind of posting also should not be discouraged, from which I take the understanding that, “the rules are unclear” is just code for, “I don’t want to acknowledge that memes are spam”.
A major reason we have three strikes in the first place is to provide room for people to learn the specifics of our rules without generating pressure to craft an overly specific set of rules that no one will read. Excessive specificity is another failure mode rules are prone to, and we are cognizant of that being a problem, hence my unwillingness to expand an existing rule or add a new rule that specifically calls out meming.
You’re operating under a false premise here, that there is a problem. With a great deal of uniformity, people that have this particular “misunderstanding” are people we don’t want on the server. In this specific case there was a unique additional complication in that they were mistaken for a spambot, and therefore instead of getting a warning, most likely followed by arguing about it and getting banned, they were instead banned first and we had the argument that justified the ban afterwards.
Literally thousands of people have joined the discord server in the past six months without any meaningful level of problem and 15 have been banned. This is not a poorly operating and authoritarian server, it’s a server that is operating just fine and has a low noise level.
The “this is not a meme channel” has been there as long as the channel, because we anticipated this issue from the start.
I still think that being lenient in unbanning should be a must as the original ban reason seemed to have been a mistake from what you said.
He came here and asked to be unbanned. I said, “contribute usefully here and we’ll unban you there.” He decided that contributing usefully here was too much of a requirement, so I assume that meant he wasn’t planning on contributing usefully on the development server.
Again, the development server is for contributing to the development of CDDA. If we had a fool-proof way of limiting access to the server to people who wanted to contribute to the development of CDDA, we wouldn’t let anyone else in. We’re not trying to build a generally inclusive, social community[1] on the development server. We’re trying to develop CDDA.
He may have gotten banned under slightly mistaken circumstances, but he stays banned because we don’t want him on the server. And we don’t want him on the development server, not because he posted some meme spam, but because he does not intend to contribute to the development of CDDA.
[1] We do want to build a community that is inclusive of anyone who wants to contribute to CDDA development, whether they are a Republican or Social Democrat or a highly advanced dog using bark-to-type software.