Over the last couple years, I posted a lot of stories about the crazy things I saw as the Plugin Rep on WordPress.org. A great number of those situations ended with someone being banned, but those aren’t the only stories out there.
Still, with the recent situation on WordPress.org, I felt it was appropriate to break down my views on banning, and when it’s the right thing to do.
Bans are about Safety First
The number one reason to ban anyone is the physical safety of the community.
With the recent announcement of a “Jubilee” and how people who were banned between August 2024 and now are being reviewed and (in some part) unbanned, I made a fairly vocal statement on Mastodon and BlueSky that this was a dangerous thing.
So #Wordpress (org) is really unbanning EVERYONE who’s ever been banned. This was confirmed by Matt on Twitter (screenshot attached).
I’m going to have to cold-stop any and all contributions because it’s demonstrably UNSAFE for me to be a part of the community.
Stalkers. Harassers. DEATH THREATS.
It’s NOT safe for me to be there.
Until someone SANE comes up with limits, guidelines, and restrictions for this ‘all bans,’ it is NOT SAFE for me to be on WordPress.org.
I repeat: THIS IS NOT A SAFE COMMUNITY FOR ME OR ANY OF THE THOUSANDS OF VOLUNTEERS WHO HAVE WORKED HARD TO ENFORCE GUIDELINES EQUITABLY FOR OVER A DECADE.
I will note, I posted that before any clarifications as to who was being unbanned.
While I have had one credible death threat (and a half dozen others that were laughably stupid, including threats to have various Gods wreak vengeance on me), I am aware via my friendships with Automattic employees that there are a significant number of legit threats out there.
Those people can and should be banned, and must remain banned. Period.
Safety isn’t Just Physical
The number two reason to ban anyone is the ephemeral safety of the community.
By ‘ephemeral’ I generally mean code. That is, if someone is putting backdoors in their plugin, we need to kick them out and ban them because they are an abject danger to the sites the plugins are installed on.
But this also means things like extortion, harassment, name calling, bullying, and so on. If someone demonstrates, through their repeated actions, that they can only communicate in a hostile manner, then they need to leave the community.
There’s a saying, once a single Nazi is allowed into a bar, it has become the Nazi Bar. All communities need to stringently protect the safety of their users. If leadership is okay with a couple people mistreating their community members, then they have just demonstrated they are not going to protect the more vulnerable members.
This protection is bidirectional, by the way. I’ve banned as many users for harassing developers as I have developers for harassing users!
The Community is More than Users and Developers
The number three reason to ban anyone is the legal safety of the community.
Any community of a decent size is one that faces legal matters. It can be a fan-club, an open-source development community, or a writing group. You have to be aware of the legalities of what you’re doing.
You have no idea how many times I’ve had to explain the basics of copyright and trademark law to developers, who just want to have a plugin for Facebook. I totally get it, Facebook is delulu about how they enforce their trademark — you can’t even use the word ‘Facebook’ or ‘FB’ in any of your plugin names, meaning no ‘Integration of Blah with Facebook’. But that’s how it is, and you have to obey the law.
For example, if a plugin is closed for something like that and the dev complain but make the change, that’s good. But if they make the change back when the plugin team isn’t looking, because they happen to know the team doesn’t review every change, then what happens is the plugin team gets a very nasty legal doc that threatens the entire repository. They plugin gets closed a second time.
You can see how this would escalate. Especially when the dev starts complaining ‘but someone else got away with it!’ See what really happens when they do that is the team goes and looks at the other person and closes their plugin. No one wins. The legal team from Facebook gets angrier and angrier, and the legal mess gets worse and worse.
If someone is the cause of putting the entire repository (or worse, the project) in legal jeopardy, they’re going to get banned and should be. They’re reckless and a danger to all.
Fake Content Hurts the Community
The number four reason to ban anyone is spam, auto-generated content, and lying.
I’m sure someone is confused that I’ve lumped them together, but they’re all worthless content.
Spam, no one would argue is ‘good.’ I know you get that one. Lying? Again, pretty obvious why you’d get banned for lying over and over again. If you can’t be trusted, then your contributions can’t be trusted.
But auto-generated content? I almost called it ‘low quality content’ because that’s what it is. People who post copies of AI generated ‘answers’ wholesale are posting low quality content. Since we know that AI has issues with hallucinations (read ‘it just gets things wrong sometimes’), you have to verify it. If you’re doing that, you’re going to end up changing some of what it says.
When someone doesn’t change anything it said, they’re not adding anything of value. It’s like dropping a ‘Let me google that for you’ link. They’re wasting everyone’s time and aren’t educating someone on how to help themself in the future. This is especially true on support forums.
Community should help itself. If someone wants to look things up with AI, more power to them, but if they come to a place to ask for help, they deserve to be treated as a human, not a bot.
Protect the Community From Yourself
The number five reason to ban anyone is they’re actually acting harmfully to the community, not just you.
This is sort of a backwards thing. It’s more ‘the number one reason NOT to ban…’ but it works anyway.
I have never once banned a single person because they annoyed me, or hurt my feelings, or even threatened me.
I’m pretty sure there are some people out there who are scoffing.
As hard as that may be for some of you to believe, it’s the truth. I have only banned people for guideline violations. Pretty much all the threats I’ve received happened after I banned people, first of all, but more to the point, everyone who devolves to threats tends to have a violation first.
There are some rare exceptions. I remember a few plugin reviews that had the sole reply of “fuck you” (or similar eloquence) and those were pre-emptively banned. Not because they swore at me, but because they clearly were incapable of following the guidelines. I didn’t want people thinking it was okay to talk like that to the community.
Not me.
The community.
Call me whatever you want, I don’t care, but when you do that I sure as hell judge you.
The Community Must Come First
You may sense a theme here.
Every single reason you ban someone is to help the community. Sometimes you’re protecting the community from itself, sometimes you’re doing things because there’s a grumpy lawyer standing over your shoulder (metaphorically), but at the end of the day you ban people who are actively harmful to the community.
There will always be people who cannot be unbanned because of the danger they represent. Those people, the people who hurt the community, must stay out.
Ipstenu (Mika Epstein)
I’m Mika (aka Ipstenu) and I’m complicated. I’ve been on the net since the days of dedicated terminals and Novation CAT modems and solved Missionaries and Cannibals (or Goats and Cabbages) before I was six, and blog about WordPress and technical/computer things at Half Elf on Tech.
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