🚫 Banning + blocking

An important question when it comes to social networking is regarding what can result in a user being banned. On this page we'll try to give you a simple understanding as to how we handle user banning and the idea of blocking – concerning the blocking of users from other pods or even entire pods.

Contents.

• Banning users
• Blocking users from other pods
• Can I appeal a decision to ban or block my account?

Banning users

There are a few different ways a user could get banned from Pluspora. If you read through this website, taking into account acceptable usage of Pluspora, you can easily see how someone who rejects these principles and rules could find themselves banned. We try our best to handle bans based on context.

Here's how we handle certain types of users:

• Spam or bot accounts. We instantly ban spam or bot accounts on Pluspora.
• Catfishing accounts. We instantly ban catfishing accounts.
• The typical user. A typical user would be someone who is an active user in the community. They make posts, engage in other posts, and so on. If we find they are breaking the rules we have in place, we like to give them three chances to change before resulting in a ban. Those three chances or strikes are measured by lock outs. If we receive a large amount of faithful reports on a person, it can result in a 72-hour lock out of their account. We message the user and inform them of this disciplinary action. If this process repeats a second time, we inform them they have one strike left when messaging them about the second lock out. If the process repeats a third and final time, their account will be removed, and the user banned. We do not take this decision lightly. We try to give users a chance and reach out to them to make sure they know where they have faulted the rules of the pod, so they have a chance to change their social behavior. The ball is in their court routinely but if they are not willing, we will ban.

What if people are reporting my posts and comments, but I've not broken any rules? We can tell when someone is trolling or trying to abuse a fellow member. We will not have comments or posts removed, because of a bad actor. Furthermore, such behavior could result in a ban of the abuser. We do not tolerate personal attacks or trolling on Pluspora. But, again, we will follow the procedure outlined above.

Blocking users from other pods

Users in other pods may be guided by Diaspora principles, but their podmins may have different rules than Pluspora. As before, with users within Pluspora, we try to take context into account. We don't take blocking users from other pods lightly.

We do try to hold them by the same standard though, and follow the same procedure as outlined above. This helps us to give users a chance and provides for us a trail of documentation for our decision.

How does blocking a user work? Pluspora can block a user's posts and comments from appearing to Pluspora users. This means their posts will not surface in the public stream.