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Well, in general you can also ignore people on IRC, you can ban people from channels, and some IRCds support restricted DM permissions which require a user to s

Well, in general you can also ignore people on IRC, you can ban people from channels, and some IRCds support restricted DM permissions which require a user to share channels with you and be _validated_ to message you. We don't have these sorts of controls in Slack because it's built to support companies with Human Resource departments. Communities like ours don't give the Slack shareholders value. So in some ways it's worse than IRC.

minikites 7y ago
>you can ban people from channels Why not ban them completely and have a private appeal process? How often are people a nuisance in one channel yet valuable in another?
- TheSwordsman 7y ago
  More than you'd imagine. Someone may be strongly against a feature, library, or tool and their presence in a channel focused on that thing may not be ideal.
- ytjohn 7y ago
  I see your point and it does make sense. But from an IRC perspective, most people/groups only care about a handful of channels. So you might have the #community or #support channel, and someone starts acting up. A channel operator can ban them from that channel directly. Alternatively, a lot of IRC "teams" maintain a bot to manage the channel. The bot can give someone a temporary channel ban (a timeout) based on keywords, or a mod in the channel might type something like "!ban userx because of rule 12" and that bot might ban that user from a list of managed channels. That user is then still on the server, they can make their own channels or message admins directly. There might be an #ops channel where they can go and plead their case. If they annoy the admins or someone else that reports them to the admins, then they might get a server-wide ban. A lot of this comes behavior from public irc servers. Channel operators can manage their channel however they desire, and if the users don't like it, they can start their own channel. But for an organization ran IRC server, a server wide ban is more possible. But in the case of say, Mozilla, there are all sorts of different groups running their own channel. So a group working on a mozilla labs project might just start a channel for that project, but not actually have server-ban privileges. So they can moderate their channel and perhaps request a server ban on someone, but that server ban might take hours to approve, or the bad actor might just go away.
- ori_b 7y ago
  Generally, channels are independently moderated. The moderation is done by someone in the channel, often just the person who started the channel. The distributed moderation works well with large networks, because the people doing the moderation are in the channel reading it and keeping up with the conversation. However, because the bar for becoming a channel operator is low, it's not a good idea to give full ban access to them.

minikites 7y ago

>you can ban people from channels Why not ban them completely and have a private appeal process? How often are people a nuisance in one channel yet valuable in another?

TheSwordsman 7y ago
More than you'd imagine. Someone may be strongly against a feature, library, or tool and their presence in a channel focused on that thing may not be ideal.
ytjohn 7y ago
I see your point and it does make sense. But from an IRC perspective, most people/groups only care about a handful of channels. So you might have the #community or #support channel, and someone starts acting up. A channel operator can ban them from that channel directly. Alternatively, a lot of IRC "teams" maintain a bot to manage the channel. The bot can give someone a temporary channel ban (a timeout) based on keywords, or a mod in the channel might type something like "!ban userx because of rule 12" and that bot might ban that user from a list of managed channels. That user is then still on the server, they can make their own channels or message admins directly. There might be an #ops channel where they can go and plead their case. If they annoy the admins or someone else that reports them to the admins, then they might get a server-wide ban. A lot of this comes behavior from public irc servers. Channel operators can manage their channel however they desire, and if the users don't like it, they can start their own channel. But for an organization ran IRC server, a server wide ban is more possible. But in the case of say, Mozilla, there are all sorts of different groups running their own channel. So a group working on a mozilla labs project might just start a channel for that project, but not actually have server-ban privileges. So they can moderate their channel and perhaps request a server ban on someone, but that server ban might take hours to approve, or the bad actor might just go away.
ori_b 7y ago
Generally, channels are independently moderated. The moderation is done by someone in the channel, often just the person who started the channel. The distributed moderation works well with large networks, because the people doing the moderation are in the channel reading it and keeping up with the conversation. However, because the bar for becoming a channel operator is low, it's not a good idea to give full ban access to them.