Please fix auto-silence

[Mirasol-mannoroth (Mirasol)]

@Swipecatrake-illidan

Silences have begun to trigger automated seven day suspensions to players, because they use the language filter as a report.

That is NOT automated at all.

Silences are applied by a GM. A suspension is applied if the GM feels the Silence is not enough of a penalty for the offense, or the account has a long history of offenses. That takes a human reviewing it first. Not saying humans don’t make mistakes, but that is how the system works.

The Suspension for chat has always been on the table, but they recently went back to using it more often because people were not getting the point with just a Silence. It again, points out that Silence still exists, and the system is not automatic.

This post in CS has some info on why they use Suspensions again.

10 Day Suspension for Abusive Chat

Harassment, especially on-going harassment definitely includes a stiffer penalty if we’ve gotten that far. To answer the original question, as Moonchylde mentioned, penalties do escalate. We try to provide warnings and ample opportunity to correct the offending behavior so often the first penalty for chat violations would normally be a short silence. The second tends to increase the duration of that silence, and so on. It is important to understand that we want to do what we can to ensure tha…

@Swipecatrake-illidan

This change from silence to suspension… was the real problem.

Silence came into existence as a penalty in 2016. Prior to that, the penalty for spamming, profanity, harassment, etc - was a Suspension. Silence was an attempt to be nice and remove social features for people who did not use them appropriately. Suspension is the original penalty … being nice with just a Silence was not having the desired impact on changing behavior.