Impose a re-entry delay on users kicked out of a chat room

Question

Currently, moderators can kick users out of a room. I've done this to two users now, and they just come right back into the room. I conclude that it's not effective for its presumed purpose (slowing down trolls or other troublemakers, on a room-specific basis).

I propose that a delay be imposed on users after getting kicked, before they can re-enter a room. It wouldn't have to be a large delay; 15 minutes at the most. This would satisfy those folks who need a way to slow down users that are disruptive, without having to resort to long lists of users with write access and use of "gallery mode." It's also a less blunt instrument than suspending users from chat.

In addition, if this isn't already a feature request, I think room owners should be able to kick users.

Answer 1

This has been implemented now. The short story is: room owners can kick abusive users, who will then be banned from re-entering the room for a certain time.

Of course you want not just the short story but all the dirty details, so here they are:

In the user popup that appears when you click on an avatar in the "who's here" list or next to a chat message, room owners have a new action available:

We chose the name "kick-mute" mainly to clarify that this is different from the old "kick this user" (which was only available to moderators, and, as you noted, was fairly useless). We just say "kick" everywhere else.

Room owners may have to reload the page to see this new menu item.

Clicking this item and confirming an alert saying

Do you want to kick [Name] out of this room? A high number of kicks may be reported to moderators.

will, well, kick the user. They will drop out of the "who's here" list, and they will be redirected to a page that (almost precisely) contains the message that Shog9 suggested. They will also be shown this page if they try to re-enter the room.*

The kicking room owner will be informed how long the kickee will have to wait before re-joining the room (see the section "Ban duration").

_{*If the kickee has loaded the current chat page before this change came into effect, they may be redirected directly to the rooms list instead, so they'll have to try re-entering before they see this message.}

Who can be kicked?

A room owner can kick any user (including other room owners) from their room, provided all of the following are true:

1. The kickee has spoken in this room within the last 24 hours.
2. If the kickee has previously been kicked from this room, they have spoken again after said ban was over.
3. The kickee is not suspended.
4. The kickee is not already kick-banned from this room (this also pretty much follows from 2.)
5. The kickee is not a moderator.

The kickee does not have to be in the room at the time they're being kicked (requiring this would allow trolls to prevent being banned by entering a room, quickly saying "TABS ARE BETTER THAN SPACES!!!!one", and immediately leaving the room again before anyone could have taken action).

Ban duration

If this is the first time the user is kicked anywhere (i.e., not necessarily in the same room) in the last 24 hours, the ban will last one minute. If it is the second time, the ban will last five minutes.

If it is the third or more time the user has been kicked within 24 hours, the ban will last for 30 minutes. In addition, the user is automatically banned from creating new rooms and from sending invites. This automatic ban does not expire and can only be removed by a moderator. Moderators can also remove the kick-ban before it expires.

Auto-flagging

If a kick action fulfills any of the following criteria, an automatic moderator flag will be raised (on the kickee's last message):

• This was at least the third time that this particular user has been kicked within 24 hours (this is the same criterion as for the invitation/room creation ban, so moderators can immediately evaluate whether this defensive ban is unnecessary, appropriate, or not even enough).

• This was the 3rd, 6th, 9th, etc. time that this particular room owner has kicked a user within the last 24 hours.

• This was the 5th, 10th, 15th, etc. time that a user was kicked out of this particular room within the last 24 hours.

The automatic flag will contain the numbers for all of these values (number of kicks against this user, number of kicks by this room owner, number of kicks in this room) that cross the minimal threshold (3, 3, or 5, respectively), and a link to a page that shows the details on the kickee's current and previous bans, and that also lets them remove the bans.

If a kick action caused an auto-flag, the kicking room owner will be informed of this fact.

Answer 2

I've been thinking about this for a while... It'd be a really nice way to allow room owners to actually moderate their room without the sort of tricks you refer to (I'd include mass-migration of posts to "bin" rooms in this list as well - fine for cleaning up abuse, terrible if it has to happen as a matter of course for everyday interactions).

My only concern here is that it doesn't actually improve on the whole "gallery mode" trick very much, in that you could presumably write a script to implement this today without any additional support from the system. IMHO, if someone is getting kicked a lot, there's a problem - either with the kicker or the kickee.

I'd like to see this implemented as follows:

1. First kick exits the user from the room (loading the list of rooms, as today) and blocks the user from talking in the room they were kicked from for 1 minute. They should be shown a message that explains what happened and what they should do to avoid it in the future:

   You've been kicked from [room name]. Generally, this means that your behavior was not in keeping with the norms established in that room.

   • Most rooms have a topic or topics they prefer to chat about. In [room name], you should try to talk about the topic of [room description].
   • Always be respectful of others.
   • Spend a bit of time reading what others are talking about before speaking up yourself - try not to interrupt active conversations!

   You'll be allowed to talk again in 1 minute.

2. Second kick that day (from any room!) blocks the user from talking in that room for 5 minutes.

3. Third (and subsequent) kick that day (from any room!) blocks the user from talking in that room for 10 minutes and raises an automatic moderator flag.

This would then accomplish three things:

1. It gives room owners a little bit of extra moderating power for their room only.
2. It would automatically escalate abusive users to actual moderators if they got kicked enough. They could then be suspended entirely if need-be.
3. It would automatically escalate abusive room owners to moderators if they're misusing "kick"... (may also serve to escalate from one moderator to the entire team in cases where such oversight would be appreciated)

Necessary restrictions:

• Don't allow kicking users who haven't talked (at all or since the last kick).
• Don't allow kicking users while they're down (already waiting out a kick or a suspension).
• Don't allow kicking moderators (this restriction already exists).

"Nice to have:"

While discussing this internally, RobertC made the point that we currently do very little within the system to encourage users who've lost their cool to actually take a break-even suspension has no guidance associated with it, and users who can't chat can still read the conversation that first raised their ire - even as it continues without them. If feasible, we may wish to consider...

• Blocking kicked users from re-entering the room after their third kick until they are allowed to chat again.
• Blocking suspended users from re-entering any rooms for the duration of their suspension.

Naturally, they'd still be able to read the transcripts, however, this may remove some of the temptations for angry users to sit, stoking their anger, until the system allows them to release it upon the hapless villagers.

Answer 3

Here's my suggestion for the situation:

We should disable 10K user flags in the chat as they're broken anyway since they bear no context and I'm not sure I trust most 10K users to be good judges in this case. Mod flags are always there in cases of abuse.

Instead for the 'keeping the user outside of a chat' use case - implement Shog's suggestion and let room owners kick users from a specific chat room. This type of system should keep us covered from most types of users who disrupt the chat. Most of the conversation in the chat is quite nice and of high quality, it's a good gathering ground to discuss interesting questions in SO and help users with questions too small to consist of a SO question.

We've build something that does this outside of the system in the JS room and I'd like to share what we learned from this experiment:

Some problematic users just don't understand the system - the first 'kick' should remove the user from the room and show them a help screen like Shog suggested. A user may rejoin the room immediately after reading the help text. We're found out that (surprise surprise) kicking users is really antagonizing to them. If talking to them doesn't help initially or they don't understand what they're doing wrong - this should serve as a strong indicator.

There should be no 'stigma' here and this should be a step designed to help the user understand the system better. People easily get antagonized by hostile behavior from a community and can turn into problematic users quite fast.

Some people are genuine trolls or help vampires - those people are not looking for constructive discussion. Sometimes people want to test their boundaries. The 20 rep limit really helps cut down the noise here, but there are a lot of people who come to the room, ask for help, and when they're told to do their own research before asking start acting in an abusive manner. The second flag should last 30 minutes so the user has sufficient time to cool down.

It should be made clear to the user that they can correct their behavior at this point and become constructive members of the community.

Some people are repeat offenders - we've had random people we don't like join the room and for weeks make sexist remarks that border sexual harassment, racist remarks, and hateful remarks. Telling them they're not welcome members of our community didn't help very much. Upon a third kick a mod flag should be raised and the user should not be able to join the room until a mod has reviewed the flag or for the very least for at least an hour.