(Copied over from the Canny board)

The process and effects of banning vs. removing a member are now slightly better coordinated than they were before (e.g., banning a member now also adds them to the "past members" list, which was formerly not the case).

However, the two functions are still severely uncoordinated. This request is to determine exactly what each currently does, and what each should do, in order to better coordinate with the other and to better match expectations. Current problems include

1. Banning a member now adds them to the "past members" list, which is good; but the records do not match in several ways, including notably the "notes" field.

2. Banning a member still does not actually remove them in certain senses. For example, the member's display name ceases to show in their messages when someone has actually left or been removed from a group. However, it still shows when the member has been banned. (They are still not actually removed in this sense.)

3. Clicking on the banned member's display name within their posts brings up their full membership page, as if they are actually still a member of the group. Whereas a "true" removed or "left" member has no such member page any more; they only have the foreshortened record in the "past members" list.

There are undoubtedly more instances of mismatches; I have not done the analysis. I think that intuitively, banning a member should remove them from the group, with all that entails. So that basically, banning includes removing. The removal should be done automatically when the mod bans someone. There is probably more that needs to be considered, given the anomalous way separate records are created for banned members, but this area is still very messy and in some cases results in very nonintuitive effects. It seems that bandaids have been applied? (no pun intended) instead of doing a thorough analysis. The whole thing should be cleaned up.

In addition, sometimes a banned member is described as "banned" in the Past Members list but does not even appear in the Banned list. And on top of that, the date field in the Banned list now shows some date that seems to have no connection with anything that I can see. It is certainly not the banned date. (Mark, if you start on this at some point in the future, let me know and I can send you some details offlist, if they're still findable by then.) By far the worst right now is that the Notes page is always now blank in the Banned list and has to be copied over from the same member from the Past Members list. 
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J

Messages are the sole opinion of the author, especially the fishy ones.
My humanity is bound up in yours, for we can only be human together. - Desmond Tutu

Looking at the GIO help, and GMF wiki, did not provide me with an explanation of what ban/ning/ned means: and I think that a decision on what it does - logically - is the first step.

There seem to me to be two options - is it:

1. A prohibition on a member from participating in the group, temporarily or permanently, with them - some time later - being either unbanned or removed from the group: i.e. they remain a member of the group, but with 'banned' status (so they can't do anything)
2. A 'removal with attitude': i.e. they are deleted from the group, with a 'banned = prevent from rejoining' flag set in their 'past member' record. (Should there be any other difference between a 'banned' and a 'removed' member?)

(The 'banned = prevent from rejoining' flag should also be set/carried into their 'past member' record in (1) if they are subsequently removed).

Jeremy

It removes the member if they are currently a member, it removes the account’s click button to apply to or join the group via the web, and it results in only a log entry (“banned member attempted to join the group”) rather than a pending member notification if attempting to subscribe via email. Banning can be undone by “unbanning” the email address. None of this functionality is in dispute. But the results are inconsistent with the intended functionality, mostly due to implementation issues involving the fact that a separate member record us created for a banned address. 

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J

Messages are the sole opinion of the author, especially the fishy ones.
My humanity is bound up in yours, for we can only be human together. - Desmond Tutu

On Wed, Jan 22, 2020 at 10:59 AM, J_Catlady wrote:

The results are inconsistent with the intended functionality,

You could call it a bug, but it's in that zombie zone between feature and bug, since this has been an ongoing evolution (e.g., banning did not used to remove the member, now it does; display has been changing; banned record used to include history and past record not; now past record contains notes and banned does not; etc). It's more an issue of making the records match in the ways that matter (i.e., what's displayed), what date to display in the banned members page, etc.
 
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J

Messages are the sole opinion of the author, especially the fishy ones.
My humanity is bound up in yours, for we can only be human together. - Desmond Tutu