Entrapment Rule

Posted on January 20, 2004 in IRC/Chat

It seems harmless enough. People who show up at an IRC channel are banned from putting ops on /ignore. This seems all right. After all, you shouldn’t ignore an op should you? They have to give commands and warnings, after all. If you don’t hear them, then how are you to respond?

Consider this situation: A chatter and an op argue over a political issue. It gets mean. The chatter decides that he wants to disengage from the discussion and cool down. So he sets the op on /ignore, telling him so.

The op sees his chance. “Are you ignoring me?” he asks the chatter, who has gone on to have a pleasant discussion about roses with someone else. “ARE YOU IGNORING ME?” the op repeats, violating the channel rule against typing in capitals (but then he is an op after all and they can break the rules all they want.) “IF YOU DON’T RESPOND IN SIXTY SECONDS I AM GOING TO KICK AND BAN YOU.” Of course the chatter doesn’t hear. And gets kicked right as he and the other members of his circle are getting into the down and dirty about Miracle-Gro.

You may blame it on the chatter. “Why if he hadn’t put the op on ignore….” But the chatter was seeking to avoid a fight. The op clearly had no intention of ending it there. So to avoid being seen as a complete callous and unquestionable bully, he fell back on this Catch 22 to get even. The last time Catch 22 is defined in Joseph Heller’s novel, a group of military police say “Catch 22 means we can do anything you can’t stop us from doing.”

Ops think that this gives this more authority. The sad truth is that it undermines their credibility and creates the same kind of peace on a channel that is created by genocide.

But what about the danger of ignoring other, valid warnings from an op? That’s a chance that a chatter has to take. If in the situation I had mentioned above the chatter hadn’t steered away from the conflict but had, instead, started into a stream of ad hominems against the op, then the op would have the chatter nailed with the blessings of the rest of the channel.

Ops should avoid imposing rules that don’t serve for anything other than a means to bully people. This creates a false harmony, false peace of mind, and a loss of authority and respect for those who run the channel. They are better off using their energies to take a deep breath and cool down.