Considering Self-Ban and Self-Ban Discussion

[Cheetory6]

When I wanted a break that was hard to get around (granted I was considering never coming back) I scrambled my passwords and changed my email to something I couldn't access and then asked for a reset when I ended up wanting to come back.
Still probably kind of annoying for moderators but maybe less so than asking for a ban?

[Cheetory6]

(it is easier for someone to successfully impersonate you over a break than it is for someone to crack a strong four thousand years of guesses password on your email or account)

I had to confirm my identity over discord when I wanted to reactivate (but yeah maybe that is some extra overhead for mods to have to deal with that's kind of annoying so fair enough on that front). I just don't really understand how someone could functionally impersonate you without having access to the email? Are they going to guess that you've done this and won't check your email?

Like this just seems like an imagined problem that would almost certainly never actually happen?

[Cheetory6]

if someone gained access to my current email associated with this account while I had left the site I would probably also not notice it too.

maybe that's also irresponsible I guess, but I'm guessing a large number of users who registered accounts on the site X number of years ago probably used emails that they don't even look at anymore and uniquely wringing your hands about someone scrambling their stuff over a six month period without telling anyone is what seems like worrying about an incredibly unlikely occurrence, not that it could ever functionally happen to any account in existence.

[Cheetory6]

I'm going to not be a dick.

As someone who has had really bad addiction problems on this site that have actually severely negatively impacted my personal life (while also just generally dealing with other mental health stuff at the time), being able to get away from the site for a few months was actually really good for me. I understand that it might be annoying for mods, but it maybe is worth just like a little bit of extra sympathy for people who are probably struggling with other things on top of self control with the site. If you want it to not be policy because staff doesn't have the resources to spend 5 minutes updating a password/email/confirming with some extra steps every so often then that's fine.

I just personally find the condescension on top of that really fucking frustrating.

[Cheetory6]

I have been studying Cheetory and his movements for quite some time now, I think I could pull off a good real life Cheetory disguise.

maybe, but I sincerely doubt you could impersonate Gorkington.

[Cheetory6]

I think constantly shutting down any path to a solution and painting people as just hassling the mods is pretty condescending when you're coming from a position of authority representing the site.
If you just bring these up as potential issues and say "hey this could be an issue, do you think there's a way around this that we could do this?" then that would be a totally different and much less antagonistic approach.

[Cheetory6]

Is it the inability to request only a mafia-side ban

When I've wanted to leave, it's been access to any aspect of the entire site that's the problem.

the 1-year minimum

The year long period has a sense of finality that may discourage people from using it as an option even if they feel like it's something that they really should do.
I also just don't really think that I would feel as comfortable reaching out to a moderator to ask them to set something like that up for me as I would be in just deciding and doing something myself.

And to be clear, I feel like the current policy is like generally probably fine.
I just personally was really upset by this repeated sense of it being some judgment on my character for having done anything like this before.

[Cheetory6]

I think there are valid points of concern on complications with what I did.
I disagree with the notion that there's some exceptional security risk where you may be putting everyone on the site at danger. To me that feels like just an impossible scenario where the modteam would have to make a terrible call by giving someone access to an account without being able to actually verify the person's identity. I agree that the worst case scenario is probably that you may lose access to your account because there's no way for the mod team to properly verify your identity.

I wasn't really arguing from a perspective of "hey this is less admin work" but rather "hey this is less emotionally taxing for someone who is probably already in a bad place".
Personally, I don't know what the back-end is for banning/unbanning or changing email/password information, but the implication that it's so much work that someone asking for help with that after 2-3 months rather than a year is like an unstoppable addition to the responsibility of the modteam just seems ridiculous to me, particularly when, it seems really likely to me that a lot of people who need space from the site are dealing with a lot of stuff and it's not just like a trivial reason that they may be asking to get off the site.

Like, if it's to the point where that's the case maybe there should be a role on the site that handles purely administrative stuff without any of the other authority/responsibilities of the moderation team.

If a one-year mafia-only or discussion-only ban were an option, how many people would use that?

I could imagine some people wanting to do partial sitewide bans, but I don't really think either would be applicable to my experiences.