I really dislike how a lot of codes of conduct are written. It often feels like someone is trying to exhaustively enumerate bad behaviours, and it makes me wonder what purpose they think the CoC is supposed to serve.

Is it meant to serve as a legislative document, as a hammer to hit people with, to say "look, you violated rule X in the CoC"? Because that doesn't work, and just invites rule-lawyering (which makes things *worse*, because now there are 'legal' forms of abuse).

Is it meant to inform problematic participants which of their behaviours are not accepted? Because enumerating a bunch of -isms will not help; they very likely already *know* that their behaviour is not okay, they just don't care.

Is it meant to explain to unintentionally-abrasive-or-bigoted participants what they are doing wrong? Because it doesn't do that - it won't contain anywhere near enough detail to usefully learn from it.

Is it meant to keep the vibe in the community good? Because for that, you'll need to talk about the more subtly toxic things that virtually no CoC ever mentions, like debate culture and boundary violations.

Now to be clear, I think a code of conduct is *in and of itself* a good idea - and I think that it can serve legitimate purposes, like signalling to vulnerable folks what they can expect in terms of moderation, or addressing problems like debate culture.

But for deity's sake, you do actually need to think about your goals and write your CoC so that it *actually does that*, and most that I've seen just... don't. There's so much room for improvement here.

(This includes the ready-to-use CoC templates, none of which seem to have a well-defined objective that they actually meet)