Administrative Curricular 01/2022
Regarding Disruptive Immaturity on Official Wintreath Platforms
The Office of the Founder
Like many other NationStates-based communities, over the last several years Wintreath has received a wave of members who were less mature than we were once used to receiving. This created a struggle to reconcile our ideals of an open and compassionate community that allows people to grow with our responsibility to provide a space that more mature members would be comfortable opening up to and participating in. Because these members are usually younger, our response to behaviour that has disrupcted the community has often been to issue warnings and brief platform bans in the hopes that they would learn from the experience and grow. Sometimes this has happened, but more often it has not.
What can't be denied is the damage caused by our well-meaning but flawed tolerance of this behaviour. Evidence of this can be seen as early as 2019, when private Discord servers began popping up to give select members a more relaxed environment away from others they weren't comfortable around, which usually included the group of less mature members. It directly lead to the creation of the #beforedark safe for work adult channel after members indicated they didn't feel comfortable talking about their lives or certain safe for work topics around less mature members. It forced administration to cater to the least mature denominator, which led to the removal of channels such as #spam and #media which were often abused by less mature members.
Wintreath is a community for adults and teenagers who are capable of the respectful, considerate, measured, and socially responsible behaviour that's directly referenced in our rules. Wintreath is not a babysitting service, and is not suitable for those who have yet to mature into those behaviours. It's clear that we need to re-evaluate how we handle immature behaviour that's disruptive to our community, especially in cases where it's repeated by the same member.
This document seeks to serve as a guide for Wintreath administrators to strike a better balance. However, no guide can predict every circumstance that may unfold in the future, and for that reason it should be noted that these are guidelines. Alternative responses and punishments may be substituted as circumstances call for at the descretion of the administrator, although bans of Citizens or long-time active members lasting longer than two weeks should be approved by trader or Wintermoot.
1) Mature behaviour is defined in Section 2 of the current Wintreath rules and guidelines. Behaviour that does not fit this criteria AND causes a disruption to the community should be considered actionable immature behaviour. This may include but isn't limited to flamebaiting, gaslighting, shitposting, edgelording, and other similar behaviours.
2) Administrators are defined in Article IV of the Fundamental Laws of Wintreath, and include but aren't limited to Discord operators, forum administrators, and NationStates regional officers with border control and post suppression authorities.
3) The suggested punishments in this guide take ONLY general immature behaviour into account. If the behaviour also breaks other spacific rules, the administrator should determine the punishment for each rule and apply them consecutively (for example, a one week ban for immaturity plus a two week ban for flaming).
4) The first instance of immature behaviour by a member within the previous six months should be met with an official warning. In communicating with the member, the administrator should refer to the exact behaviour that's resulting in the warning, explain why it's considered immature, and provide advice on how to avoid repeating the behaviour if it seems applicable to do so.
5) The second instance of immature behaviour within the previous six months should be met with a temporary ban on the platform where the action took place of no more than two weeks.
6) The third instance of immature behaviour within the previous six months should be met with a ban of no less than one year on the platform on which it took place.
7) If a member is serving a year-long or longer ban on one platform and continues immature behaviour on other platforms, the ban can be extended to all platforms.
8) If a member has returned from a year-long or longer ban and continues immature behaviour within six months of returning, they may be banned indefinitely from all platforms.
9) Persuant to Article IV Section 4 of the Fundamental Laws of Wintreath, administrative actions supersede the Declaration of Rights. All administrative actions (suggested here or otherwise) can be applied to Citizens as well as residents and non-Citizen members.
