Show trac gardeners if a profile has been banned.

[peterwilsoncc]

On a users profile page, I believe forum moderators can see whether a user's account has been blocked or banned.

As trac gardeners can't ban users (a good thing) they need to request a user be blocked in the #forums slack channel.

To avoid double up requests, it would be handy if gardeners could see the block status of a user to avoid doubling up requests if a moderator has already blocked the user.

I tried working around this with a bookmarklet to determine if a profile page was noindexed, but this can give false positives if the spam has been deleted as there is no activity in the users stream which also triggers a noindex tag.

[dd32]

The biggest blocker here currently, is that we'd need to add a way for WordPress.org to know who the Bug Gardeners are, as they're currently only defined and tracked within Tracs admin, "WordPress" itself has no idea who has Bug Gardener rights.

Core Committers however do have a PHP definition we could lean on.

I think it makes sense to allow Committers to have more insight here (Bug Gardeners too, but committers is obviously easier).

Maybe relying upon permissions for other sites could help, for example, if they're an editor on make/core or some-such.. Basically something that says "This person is more trusted than most others".. just something that is a higher barrier than "anyone and everyone can see if a user is blocked/modwatched"

[ocean90]

Can’t we just display the blocked status for everyone? It’s not really a secret is it?

[dd32]

I guess we could display it for all logged in users..

The main problem I see is that users are often "banned" temporarily often as a way of forcing them to get in contact with the moderation team to discuss issues before being re-enabled, it's not purely a "never will be seen here again" status.

That does raise the potential that maybe we need to have more of a spam/temporarily-deactivated type situation, but it's never been a problem until now.

[ocean90]

Instead of saying "banned" we could also go with a generic "Account deactivated" message which I think doesn't imply that the account may be blocked forever?

[Clorith]

Until this popped up last week, I thought the information was shown to any logged in user, so would say it makes sense to display it (I do like the idea of better terminology though).

Profiles already remove/hide information if your account is blocked (or was it that they gave a different HTTP status? If someone could double-check that, it'd be great), so it's not doing much more than making the status field visible, instead of an educated guess.

[peterwilsoncc]

I wouldn't feel comfortable showing modwatched to all logged in users. From what I've heard, sometimes people come back from a modwatch to become model contributors so displaying this would be unfair.

A generic deactivated message covering both forced and requested closures I could get behind.

[dd32]

Replying to peterwilsoncc:

I wouldn't feel comfortable showing modwatched to all logged in users

Modwatched is different to blocked/banned/deactivated/whatever :)

My biggest concern with showing deactivated (perhaps temporarily deactivated for the first month?) is that it could unwittingly harm reputation of someone when it's not intended.

As I said in slack in #forums:

My biggest hesitation to “everyone and anyone” is the possibility of someone noticing “Oh an ACME company employee got their account deactivated” and it not being clear publicly why (Especially since we can’t really say why someones account is deactivated, or if it even ever was due to privacy and all that)

There's a big difference between "Banned" and "Penalty box, please contact us" which currently is one and the same status.

I think the middle-ground here is to show the blocked status (NOT modwatched) in profiles to anyone who has any form of extra "trust level" - which we can determine via make.wordpress.org/* roles being > subscriber.
It's relatively safe, let's those who need to see it, see it, and avoids any possible chance of giving the wrong impression to someone who doesn't understand how account moderations happen on WordPress.org.

[dd32]

In [dotorg17824] I've moved ahead with this - but limited it to author/editor/administrator on make.wordpress.org/* to start with.

I've also clarified the flag phrasing and help text on the profile page.

[dd32]

Closing this as fixed for now, we can revisit it if need be (Please just re-open this ticket)