At some point while working on the “about” page for Write House yesterday, and continuing to think about developing its code of conduct, it suddenly occurred to me that WriteFreely currently does not have any user management tools to handle suspending someone who violates such a code of conduct.
User management tools are coming, according to the development roadmap, including options to “suspend account entirely” or “disable ‘Public’ blog setting for the user”, but it’s unclear to me how these actions would be communicated to the user, or how the user could respond if they want to challenge the suspension or address whatever prompted it.
WriteFreely as a platform has a privacy focus, as can be seen from the default privacy policy on WriteFreely Host installs such as this one.
It retains as little data about you as possible, not even requiring an email address to sign up. However, if you do give us your email address, it is stored encrypted in our database. We salt and hash your account’s password.
Without requiring an email address to sign up, there’s no way for an admin to contact a user who has violated their instance’s code of conduct. Will a suspension result in a message to the user when they access the site, informing them of the suspension, the reason(s) for it, and how to contact the admin if they wish to discuss the matter?
Absent that approach, I’m not sure what one would do. Certainly, I cannot launch Write House until and unless such a process exists.