Board Thread:The Panopticon/@comment-188432-20131207065154/@comment-188432-20131207165017

Mini-mitch wrote: It should happen to those who we think have changed and deserved another chance, a prime example for me would be OS25. But what grounds would we have for believing someone has changed, if they've not been here to demonstrate a different behaviour? I'm not sure I'd be using the case of OS25 as your poster boy of change, since he's been blocked twice for the same offence.

It should not be every person who has been blocked - as some of the reasons have been for offences where they should not given a second chance. See, to me, the amnesty should be general and without exception, or not at all. I don't have time for a case-by-case review, and even if I did, we have no rules, as a wiki, which assesses scale to offences. Is two instances of swearing actually worse than two? Which words are worse than others? Is it worse to break T:ATTACKS or T:VID? We really haven't worked such things out, and I personally have no enthusiasm for doing so.

The proposal here is a simple one: it's Christmas, so shall we wipe the slate clean and start over? Also, I think if we do go down the road, those Users who have been blocked, which has now expired, should be notified as well. People might have forgotten, or not known when their block was over, so to tell them "you can come back" may bring them back. I am thinking of Bob here... Technically incredibly difficult. There is no wiki-wide list of expired bans, unfortunately. We'd have to check each user's page for their block history to determine whose bans are now expired. Or we'd have to comb through Special:Log/block, reading every single entry carefully and doing the math to determine if their block had expired.

So — that's obviously not happening. This Santa Claus ain't spending his time checking that particular list.

The truth is that most people who have been blocked have probably received an alert to check their talk page, as the bot has made several visits to all talk pages, which would have tripped their message alert. The last was on 1 September 2012. There have been a number of other partial runs of talk pages since then, as well as a number of runs that would have hit large numbers of user pages, which most people follow by default. Most registered editors who have been banned before have had a message alert within the last 6 months.

As for Bob specifically, I personally made an edit on his page on 13 February 2013, after his block expired. However, he hasn't logged into Wikia at all since 8 August 2012, so he wouldn't have received the message. Either what would be said to these Users? And how would we contact them, via their talk page of email? Well as a matter of general internet safety, we certainly wouldn't email them directly. You never want to give your email directly to someone you don't personally know, or to a party who has no legal responsibility to protect your email address. So, fine, give your email to a company like Wikia or Amazon, but not to some random Wikia user. Wikia does, of course, offer an anonymous email forwarding service, which is safe to use. Unfortunately, most people don't have email enabled in their Special:Preferences, so that's not a way to go.

What we would do would be a blanket talk page announcement by bot, where we placed a message on everyone's talk page that wished them a happy holiday season and incidentally mentioned that everyone who had been blocked was "let out of jail" for Christmas. So all our users would get a little bit of Christmas cheer and possibly "come home for the holidays".