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Stream: meta: welcome

Topic: moderation policy

Morgan Rogers (he/him) (Aug 20 2024 at 08:41):

A few weeks ago, moderators took the decision to ban a member from this Zulip. In the process, offensive messages leading to the ban decision were hidden, which led to a (somewhat overheated) discussion of the moderation process. The main conclusions of these events to my eyes were as follows:

• The original situation was exacerbated by the fact that moderator intervention is contingent on some discussion between moderators (behind the scenes) and thus we were collectively slow to react in both the original discussion and the subsequent one.
• All parties agreed that greater transparency could be achieved in the moderation process.
• The limits of what can be acceptably discussed on this Zulip needs greater delineation.

As such, here is the updated policy we will implement from now on.

• Inflammatory political statements/discussion is banned. Members of the Zulip making statements that are judged to fall into this category by moderators will receive a warning. Since what counts as in inflammatory political statement is vague, our general moderation policy (proposed by @Paolo Perrone ) will be one of enforcing tolerance, meaning:
  1) All people and all opinions are welcome. (That's the tolerance part.)
  2) The only exception to rule 1 is that we do not tolerate those people and those opinions which want to oppress or repress other people or other opinions. (That's the enforcing part.)

• The above is not to say that political discussion is banned altogether, but it will be restricted to the channels #meta: off-topic and #community: discussion . Constructive political discussions that emerge elsewhere will be moved to one of those channels by moderators.

• If necessary, offending messages may be quarantined: moved to a private channel as was done with the discussion after which Leopold was banned. Access to such messages will be available to anyone who requests access from a mod. The aim of this is both to hide offensive messages from those that might be harmed by them and to put the discussion on ice to give mods time to discuss appropriate follow-up action. Access will be automatically rescinded after a period of three weeks, assuming moderation decisions have been settled by then.
• Warnings from mods regarding unacceptable behaviour are to be treated as formal. Continued or repeated bad behaviour in the face of a warning will result in a ban (this was the basis of our decision to ban Leopold Schlicht). We do not have a three strike policy; moderation decisions will be made on a case-by-case basis.
• Opinions were mixed about the permanence of bans. The compromise we propose is that after a three week delay, a banned member may contact one of the moderators by email to convince us that the rules will not be broken again if they are allowed back onto the Zulip. For severe enough infractions, bans may remain effectively permanent.
• Moderation decisions such as banning which may not be visible to users a priori will be announced in a topic entitled moderation decisions. Any updates to policy will be posted in the present topic. Any other discussion relating to moderator policy and decisions will be restricted to #meta: meta.

Morgan Rogers (he/him) (Mar 13 2026 at 10:31):

To formalize an informal policy update that has already been applied, I'll add to the above:

• Moderators will be more tolerant towards Zulip participants posting in their own name than those who post under a pseudonym, presuming the former to be more invested in participating in good faith.
• LLM-generated content should be presented as such and should be posted in limited quantity and remain on-topic. Using LLMs to generate large volumes of content is not acceptable.

Morgan Rogers (he/him) (Mar 13 2026 at 10:36):

The above moderation policy was moved here to make it visible to non-members, since moderation-related discussions are not amongst those publicly archived. :judge: