I’ve noticed several times in recent years MB editors making new accounts to skirt editing bans on their main accounts. It should be common sense that this is unacceptable, but there is nothing in the Code of Conduct saying this cannot or should not be done. It’s beyond time we do something about this. I filed the ticket under MEB because 1) we don’t have a general MusicBrainz tag and 2) this is likely to occur/have occurred on other MetaBrainz projects. I’m making this thread because I’m not entirely sure how to word such an amendment/what to put in it. Suggestions welcome.
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As I said in the ticket, I don’t see a reason to make any changes or additions to wordings.
If Person X breaks the CoC with Account A, gets their editing privileges revoked (or account deleted) and then create Account B to circumvent this, they’re still Person X and they’re still a persona non grata. Person X still broke the CoC. Sure, you could say the policy could then be that they broke the CoC even more(!), but what change would you suggest that that would have in practice?
That said, I’d suggest that maybe the MusicBrainz CoC could be expanded/changed, from:
Creating additional accounts solely for the purpose of voting is an abuse of the system and completely unacceptable.
to:
Creating additional accounts solely for the purpose of voting, editing, boosting ratings, or in other ways “gaming the system” is an abuse of the system and completely unacceptable.
This could also maybe be extracted/reworded and moved to the MetaBrainz CoC to apply globally (e.g., it not being acceptable to have multiple accounts for the purpose of upvoting reviews on CB or having “listenbots” for ListenBrainz etc.).
However, this seems different from (but related to) what you’re proposing, so I’ll make a new ticket about this if people echo this. I still disagree with a specific “ban evasion” clause.
10 Likes
That’s actually a better idea than what I had in mind. Do you think we should add a warning about what will happen if they try to evade a ban, or would that be showing too much of our hand?
My experience is to never make specific threats. Simply making it known that there will be consequences is generally sufficient (and allows for some flexibility).
8 Likes