It's interesting for me to see this discussion about nuance in our CoC -- when this community first got started, there was quite a bit of vocal opposition to having a CoC at all (those folks in opposition nearly all moved on ages ago), and in several communities where I tried to introduce CoCs later on, there was a lot of pushback. The Admin team has tried hard not to "legislate" too heavily and mostly the community has been pretty self-policing. As several of the Admin team have said above, we don't really want to have hard-and-fast, cut-and-dried rules that have to be applied to the letter of the law in all cases -- but we do want the CoC to be clear enough in its intent that folks feel comfortable with it. If someone got a DM about work from Colin and escalated it to the Admin team, we'd want to talk to both parties and smooth it out -- I'm assuming Colin wouldn't be DM'ing a complete stranger who would be unaware of who Colin is and the work he's doing. If someone got a DM about work from a stranger, a recruiter, and escalated it, that's a different matter. That's hard to write into a rule. Some communities require asking permission in a channel before DM'ing someone but I'm not sure we want to go that far here?

While we're garnering feedback about the CoC, maybe it would also be helpful to garner feedback on the Welcome Message that new members get these days when they join this Slack? Hello and welcome to the Clojurians Slack! We want this to be a friendly and helpful space for everyone and the Admin team here tries to be very active as moderators, to keep things that way. • If you are new to Slack and need help navigating around, ask in #slack-help • If you encounter spam or any kind of harassment, please report it in #community-development (or, if you do not feel comfortable posting about it in public, reach out via direct message to any of the Admins who are online -- the list of Admins can be found in the Code of Conduct document: see below). There are really only two rules: • Jobs openings may be posted only in the dedicated channels: #jobs and #remote-jobs -- recruiters take note! • We have a zero tolerance policy for spam and unsolicited direct messages of a commercial nature (especially about things like Upwork) -- violators will have their accounts deactivated! As a reminder, Clojure communities try to follow these guidelines for general conduct -- https://www.clojure.org/community/etiquette -- and this Slack also has a specific Code of Conduct: https://github.com/clojurians/community-development/blob/master/Code-of-Conduct.md

It probably wouldn't hurt to clarify how enforcement is generally handled -- the CTFCircle CoC is pretty close to how we try to handle it so we could add something similar to ours. Thanks, @corasaurus-hex for highlighting that!

The LGBTQ in Tech Slack is extremely strict on their CoC -- my account there was terminated for an unintentional violation, where then I realized what I'd done wrong, immediately apologized, and went to the Admin team to own it and ask forgiveness. But the next morning I was locked out (I don't know if they sent me any DMs first -- those would have come in overnight, I guess). The Admin team here will terminate some violators immediately (the Upwork crowd, primarily) but mostly we reach out to the offender via DM and explain why their behavior is inappropriate and give them 24 hours to respond. Mostly, they don't respond and we terminate their account the next day. Sometimes they apologize and we never have a problem with them again. Occasionally they get abusive toward the Admin team and then they get deactivated immediately. Temporary bans are rare here but they have occasionally happened, when we feel someone needs a "cooling off" period instead of an outright ban. Luckily, Slackbot can help us remember to reactivate such accounts after a certain number of days.