Publicly identify certain uses of the service as less than ideal

[RichardTaylor]

This could take the form of:

• A "yellow card" (football style warning) which could be placed next to requests, follow-ups or annotations.
• Warning "stickers", noting eg. requests containing lots of extraneous material,

A similar suggestion was raised by a blogger who wrote:

Give a visible yellow card to users who have been the subject of complaints. Allow us to see who’s been complained about, so if they’re misbehaving, users have the opportunity to keep an eye on them.

It might not be appropriate to publicise all complaints, but if the admin team agreed with the concern then it could be publicly flagged.

This could work by enabling users to flag requests, and if a request got sufficient flags/reports for certain types of behaviour then that could be noted publicly.

This is the inverse of "Badges / awards for great uses of the site" https://github.com/mysociety/alaveteli/issues/6253

[garethrees]

I love this.

[RichardTaylor]

Noting that adding "(Account suspended)" to the username of a suspended user is a key way we already do this.

We don't make public when users have been warned about their conduct though, a user specific, rather than request/annotation specific yellow card could be an option. Such a card could expire after a period, at WDTK we "forget" most warnings after two years as that's the retention period on the support mailbox.

[RichardTaylor]

We already have the ~"getting long, keep your request focused" warning when requests are being drafted. A version of this, noting a request is long, and pointing to our advice on keeping things focused, could be shown publicly.

Some lengthy requests are good, and the threshold for the "getting long" warning might not be quite right either, but there might be a way to do this.

[RichardTaylor]

A request could be given multiple yellow cards. Shown as number eg. x100 next to a yellow card icon.

[RichardTaylor]

Warning "stickers", noting eg. requests containing lots of extraneous material,

Another potential topic for a "warning sticker": "Correspondence seeking a comment rather than the release of recorded information".

Warning stickers could be linked to advice on making effective and responsible requests.

[RichardTaylor]

I think we might be able to do this now using tag based notes, perhaps with a note including an image, or graphical element.

We could have tags eg.

yellow_card_user yellow_card_body yellow_card_request

and maybe a

keep_it_focused tag

[garethrees]

Noting that Twitter has just been called out for doing something along similar lines (also linking to https://github.com/mysociety/alaveteli/issues/6616 here), though the main issue I think is that they applied these privately without user knowledge.

[garethrees]

• The "card" / badge itself could be prominenceable to give us more options in who sees it.
• This could generate a requester_only Note (#7564) or Comment (#5423), with some brief details of why it's being received. This could get attached to the "Card" rather than the Request / User.
  • Applying one of these could backpage a request. Backpage might be a good visibility level for things we don't think should be removed, but don't want to "promote" by letting users find in search.

[RichardTaylor]

Backpage might be a good visibility level for things we don't think should be removed

Our backpage is similar to what others call "only with the link" or "unlisted", it's not something to impose on a thread lightly.

[garethrees]

Our backpage is similar to what others call "only with the link" or "unlisted", it's not something to impose on a thread lightly.

Exactly. It enables the core service to be provided, without us giving extra prominence to content that we don't think is particularly good/valuable. It would puts that responsibility on the requester to promote it on their own platform. Not saying we'd want to do this in all cases, but a threshold we should consider. This view probably warrants revisiting in the context of WDTK, though.

For Alaveteli and this issue, if we decided to reduce prominence on application of a warning, we could make it configurable (Warning::YellowCard.reduce_prominence_to = "backpage" or whatever is appropriate for the given site).