Block use of **all** emoji reactions on #python general channel

[miwojc]

What policy should be amended, and to what?

On #python-general channel only selected users can use reaction emojis. This feels like some people have more privileges than others. I understand that emoji reactions was abused and it was blocked for 'normal' users. However i don't see any reason the emojis are being used by those people that use them (i think admins), other than showing off that 'i can do stuff you can't'. This doesn't create equal and welcoming community. Therefore i propose to block the use of emojis reactions on #python-general completely, so no one can use them.

Rule number

No response

Why do you think this policy should be amended?

explained above

[mbaruh]

Before anything, I want to say members are welcome to make suggestions, and we're particularly interested in what might be considered pain points for our members. But it seems to me some of the feelings expressed here are misplaced.

Some people do have more privileges than others, that's the basic idea behind most role hierarchies in Discord servers. At least in our server, it's usually either because we only we want a certain permission to be available to members who fulfill a certain role in the community (e.g ban permission to moderators), or because we've seen a permission being misused so we had to limit it to certain roles (most notably speaking permissions in voice channels).

This case matches the latter, and the permission has been restricted from the default role (meaning, no roles) in specifically #python-general and #discord-bots, our two most active and most demaning channels in terms of moderation. Limiting this permission in these two channels was a way for us to aliviate some of the load without actually hurting the ability of members without the right role to converse in those channels.

The people who can currently add reactions in those channels are all staff, not just admins. The simplest and most probable explanation for why a staff member would add a reaction is that they wanted to react to message without creating a separate message (which is what reactions are for), and the mechanic is simply available to them. We bring members to our staff who we think will help us create a better community, and I think they have better things to do than reacting to messages for the purpose of showing off.

Therefore, I'd like to move the conversation away from "if I can't do it, no one should", and towards "can we safely expand the group of members who can use this mechanic", which as stated by another admin in the meta channel is something we'll discuss internally.

[jb3]

We discussed this in our staff meeting and decided that for now we'd be keeping permissions as they are. Most usage of the reaction feature is for Helpers to simply upvote a message or add a wave when someone says hello.

We will look at whether we can open reactions up further in future and mitigate abuses in a way other than disabling reactions for all users, we're currently thinking that a denylist of particularly egregious emotes (e.g. middle finger emote) combined with a ban on external emotes (we have a decent enough selection in the server including emotes for upvoting messages). We'll discuss this internally and raise bot tickets if we decide that this could be something we can implement, we may be constrained by Discord ratelimits which are particularly harsh around reactions, so building anti-spam rules for them is difficult.