Week 8: A removal is a message

Enforcement as writing — the removal reason, the ban notice and the appeal, and what each one costs the person receiving it

26 April 2027

The interface gives you a button and, if you are lucky, a dropdown of canned reasons. It does not give you a text box and it does not ask you to justify yourself, so most moderators never learn to, and the result is an internet full of people who have been removed from somewhere and have no idea why.

A removal is a message to a person. Write it as one. Name the rule, quote the part of their post that hit it, say whether the door is open, and stop. Do not be sarcastic, because it will be screenshotted. Do not explain at length, because length reads as defensiveness. Do not apologise for enforcing a rule you believe in.

Then the appeal comes back, and here is where the course convenor takes a turn on the other side of the desk. In 2014 the Arbitration Committee topic-banned me from an area I had worked in for eight years. I appealed. The appeal was declined, correctly, by people applying a process I had spent three years clerking for. I will walk you through the case, including the parts where I was obviously wrong and did not think so at the time.

You cannot run a fair queue until you have been in one.

Outline#

• the canned reason and its costs
• writing a removal: rule, evidence, consequence, door
• proportionality — warning, removal, temporary ban, permanent ban
• appeals: what a good one looks like, why most are refused
• a worked case, from the receiving end