Scans_Daily

To be clear, I am fine with the status quo - the ban function exists, and everyone can use it as they please. It's not my preferred situation, but I'm fine with it.

My concern is expecting the mods to prevent people from "circumventing" these bans. Because as it is, as tools, the bans don't do all that much. You voiced the concern of someone banning another person to have the last word. As we have seen with cyberghostface and cricharddavies, the result is: nothing happens, they keep sniping back and forth like usual, the ban doesn't do shit.

So it would be almost entirely on the mods to design and implement and enforce a policy of "users are allowed to select other users that they don't want to interact with". This is something that should be built into the code of the site. I don't believe it is reasonable to expect a team of human mods to have to babysit and intervene to keep any given pair of people from even interacting. I don't believe the current mod team is even remotely inclined to try such a thing, given that their announcement consists of: "the ban function exists, you can use it, we can't stop you, but try to keep it at a minimum, ok?"

I think it makes more sense to design policy completely independent of the ban function. If two users routinely get into toxic arguments, then ... just sanction them for their toxicity. (ex: this certainly is not the first time cricharddavies has talked to people this way, why was something not done earlier, there has to be a better solution than individual users putting them on a ban list). Trying to build a policy around a half-baked ban function that anyone can use for any reason strikes me as a bad idea.