RFC 9245 states that inappropriate postings to [email protected] include:
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Advertising and other unsolicited bulk e-mail
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Discussion of subjects unrelated to IETF policy, meetings, activities, or technical topics
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Uncivil commentary, regardless of the general subject, per the IETF NOTE-WELL
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Announcements of conferences, events, or activities that are not sponsored or endorsed by the IETF, IRTF, IAB, or the Internet Society.
"Uncivil commentary" is not further described in RFC 9245. For [email protected] to be a more functional list, the term requires further description, which is what this document seeks to do.
Judgments about what is considered Uncivil commentary will necessarily always be subjective. The boundary between appropriate and inappropriate list conduct will never be a bright line. Human behavior and communication do not lend themselves to the same precision that protocol engineering does.
The current Moderators team considers the following types of language to be uncivil commentary:
Threats of violence
This includes incitement of violence toward any individual, including encouraging a person to commit self-harm. This also includes posting or threatening to post other people’s personally identifying information (“doxxing”) online.
Attacks
Attacks can come in several forms. They include personally attacking people for their opinions, beliefs, or ideas rather than criticizing the opinions, beliefs, and ideas themselves. They include name-calling, insulting, demeaning, and belittling people. They also include criticizing an idea in an insulting or excessively hostile manner.
Derogatory language
This includes hurtful language related to the race, gender, gender identity and expression, sexual orientation, disability, physical appearance, body size, age, marital status, religion, ethnicity, national origin, or ancestry of others.
See the Standard Operating Procedures to understand how the Moderators team handles uncivil commentary and other inappropriate postings.
In some cases a particular post in itself may not be uncivil commentary but may be part of a pattern of postings that are disruptive to the consensus-driven process (see RFC 3934 and the IESG Statement on Disruptive Posting). The Moderators team would consider this as inappropriate and follow the escalation ladder for handling postings containing uncivil commentary as per Standard Operating Procedures.
The content of this document was influenced by the Contributor Covenant, the Django Code of Conduct, the Mozilla Community Participation Guidelines and How to Respond to Code of Conduct Reports.