Is there any easy way to verify who was barred in the past? Or would this mainly allow the retroactive removal of a player shortly after they’re mistakenly added?

I think there have only ever been two successful ban proposals - but I might be wrong on that.

There’s no list of barred humans. I don’t think we’ve ever explicitly barred a human anyway, just a couple of player accounts (the only one I can remember offhand is Udqbpn, who had their blog account deactivated for solely posting nonsense proposals and DoVs).

If we’re formalising the ban system we should start tracking that list somewhere, which this proposal doesn’t try to do.

But I don’t think barring individual humans from the game can work. If we deactivate the player account “Bob” and record that the human controlling that account, “Mallory”, is now barred from BlogNomic and can’t rejoin it, we’d be relying on Mallory introducing themselves when signing up a new account. If they choose not to, the admin adding them to the game would be performing an illegal action.

(Aesthetically it’s also a bit unfriendly to open the early how-to-join section of ruleset by saying “welcome to BlogNomic, here’s how to join, unless we banned you, we ban people sometimes”, when this is something that hardly ever happens. I think it’d be better buried in the appendices.)

@Kevan We do have “in cases of extreme or repeated violations, remove them from the game and bar them from rejoining” in Fair Play, so that empty / unenforceable / unformalised threat does already exist in the ruleset.

I think that the intent of this proposal is just to add some consistency to that threat, rather than having it exist in inert isolation in the Fair Play preamble.

Haven’t decided how to vote on this yet. Leaning mildly against on the grounds of ruleset minimalism.

The Fair Play threat is couched as “a Proposal or CfJ may be made to…”, though, rather than mentioning some lever on an existing ban system. I think the implication is that if we needed to, we’d hand-craft some appendix rule - and that we haven’t needed to, yet. (I don’t think the old Udqbpn ban would be binding on whether an admin could, today, welcome an account operated openly or secretly by that human, but no further steps were actually needed after their account was blocked, in that case.)

This change also couches itself behind a CfJ or Proposal, though, no?

I think the key difference there is that fair play takes a cfj or proposal to remove someone once it’s decided that it’s needed. This change would render gamestate illegal from the moment that a banned player manages to join, and would need another cfj to get the game back to a reasonable state once they’ve started taking actions and altering the course of the game.

[Josh] It does. I just think that that “empty / unenforceable / unformalised threat” is already doing its job by saying that we will, if needed, get our chisels out and craft a new rule to enforce it. We don’t necessarily need to define what a “bar” is, in advance.

And it might actually be counterproductive to do so, if it’s telling would-be barred players exactly how far and no further any barring would go. If barring just means “this human cannot legally make wish-to-join posts”, that creaks open the implicit door that using a loophole to get a banned player back into the game by some other means would be a fun, respected scam.

Maybe.

I think I’m , anyway, on the balance of arguments.

; citing above