EDIT (2023-04-22): The community says we either shouldn't or that we should only do it in extreme cases. The Limited User role has been removed from all users who had it, and going forward we will either remove the role entirely or only apply it rarely and less harshly.
Been a grip since we've had a classic Samsara Site Thread, huh?
To quickly explain for those not in the know, we have a role called Limited User. Giving a user this role prevents them from being able to submit TASes while leaving their account otherwise untouched. Historically, this role has been handed out for a variety of reasons: Some of those reasons, like
genuine spam submissions, make perfect sense, i.e we see actual abuse of the submission system and we aim to prevent it. Other reasons, however, include "submitting suboptimal movies a little too often", and I've spent a lot of time thinking about those in particular. Is it really necessary for us to keep doing that?
Currently, we have 23 people with the Limited User role, and I believe only two of them are still active. Most of these limited users were limited purely based on the TASes they were submitting. There was no malice behind their submissions whatsoever. Given how the site has been progressing over the past couple years, and how we want it to keep progressing moving into the future, why should we be punishing users for literally doing what the site is designed for? Especially now that we're moving more towards collaboration and teamwork, telling people they're not "good enough" to submit is maybe the farthest we get from encouraging that sort of collaboration and teamwork. Allowing suboptimal submissions to make it to the workbench at all means more people get to see them, and that could inspire improvements. Every submission is a boon in that way. If we want people to get better, allowing them to submit gives them the best chance at inviting feedback, doesn't it?
As a general rule, I only want to prevent people from submitting if they're being malicious with it. Actual spam like I linked above, troll posting, malicious links and/or repeated rule violations, toxic behavior... But in considering what we want to limit, it led me to consider the question in the thread title. Everything that I'd consider worthy of limiting users for, I'd also consider worthy of banning users for. If someone is abusing the submission system, why should we continue to allow them to have the opportunity to take their abusive behavior elsewhere on the site? Preventing submissions is one thing, but they still have forum access, PM access, even wiki access in some cases, so it makes sense to restrict those as well if there's a possibility that they'll be abused.
I'd like to hear some community opinions on this, particularly because it affects y'all far more than it affects us. There may be a good reason to limit but not ban that I'm not thinking of, or maybe I'm alone in thinking we need to stop limiting altogether, so give your thoughts.
Regardless of the decision we reach here, I'd like to re-evaluate all of the Limited Users very soon, maybe even within the next day or two if this thread reaches a consensus quickly.
