We've built the Forem moderation tooling to support the needs of DEV — a community focused on inclusion and constructive conversations. We're really happy to have been able to "scratch our own itch" as we grew, and we're excited that future Forem leaders will be able to leverage these tools to keep their communities healthy.
That said, one thing we've never done a good job is settling on the language for when we need to occasionally suspend or remove users.
Current language and interface
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Bana user to prevent them from taking actions on the platform -
Banisha user to prevent them from taking actions on the platform (and additionally destroys their content)
Right now, we exclusively use Banish for cases of obvious spam, and we have plenty of warning and alerts before it's actually used. We don't want a Hawaii missile alert situation:
Proposed language
Clearly Ban and Banish are too similar, and we need to make some changes to avoid potential confusion.
The word "Ban" fits within the vernacular of internet forums, and the meaning is fairly intuitive, but I wonder if it implies too much permanence.
I prefer "Suspend" as it allows us a Forem Admin to hand out both temporary and permanent suspensions. It also makes it clear that it's non-destructive.
I'd propose renaming "Banish" to something extremely explicit. Potentially, "Expunge" or even "Expunge as Spam" (given that this tool should only be used in cases of obvious spam).
Thoughts?
Latest comments (6)
I like
suspendandbanishfor the currently functionality that we have. I think these are good one-word descriptors.I also think we could change the warning copy for banish, swapping out the first sentence "This is not a new user." for "This action is used to permanently remove spam accounts."
We may be able to change it up even more, but I like for the first sentence to clearly state what the action is meant to be used for.
I like
suspendandexpunge? I was looking at synonyms for expunge but they sound too extreme spoken out loudI feel like expunge isn't really part of my normal vocabulary so I'm wondering if that would possibly be overly complicated of a word?
Yeah, after a night of sleep on this I'm feeling like
suspendandbanishis probably the right approach.banishseems to intuitively indicate "cast out and don't let back in" and is a much more common word. We also have plenty of warnings involved in that process around the destructive aspects.expungeis not only less common, but it can also be used in more positive circumstances. "They stayed out of trouble until they turned 18 so their juvenile disciplinary record was expunged, ensuring future employers wouldn't need to see evidence of their childish misdeeds."That's an oddly specific example, is there something we should know @peter ? 😉
I feel like we've talked enough about this to go with "suspend" for non-distructive and "banish" for distructive.
IMO the biggest thing is probably documenting it and changing the language (at least in the UI, and in code comments).
Docs:
docs.forem.com/design/language/