A new rule maybe???

I’ve thought long and hard about whether I should post this in the Pit or here.

I’ve decided to post it here because it is not a challenge to, or criticism of, moderating or administration decisions made to date.

I’m wondering if - without making hugely additional workloads for the mods/admins - we could introduce a general rule (not enforceable via the software and pretty much along the lines of the “don’t be a jerk” rule) which puts a 24 hour to 48 hour embargo on the public discussion of suspensions/bans.

While some people might cry “censorship” at this proposal, I’m looking at it from the perspective of the time within which people who have transgressed the rules of the board might have an unimpeded opportunity to talk to the mods and admins, without having to satisfy the current demand of the membership for a martyr or general entertainment.

I know personally, that because of timezone differences, it can be up to 24 hours between my making an ill-advised post and being able to contact a mod/admin to rectify the problem I’ve created. I’m not suggesting that this rule be applied in the case of obvious SP which can be confirmed by IP, but rather in the case of posters who seem to have suddenly “crossed the line” without any obvious explanation.

Maybe, just maybe, there’s some merit in considering a “suspend immediatiately awaiting clarification” rule.

When do the 24 hours start? From the first warning email (‘You’re out of line, pack it in’), the final warning or from the time of banning? Do oblique references count? Could banning in general be considered off limits immediately afterwards? Unworkable IMHO.

I understand your point Andy about where the 24 hours rule would start from - I guess from my viewpoint it would start from a statement of “poster X has had their posting privileges suspended and anyone who wants to start a Pit thread about this decision whilst we allow poster X 24/48 (or however many hours) to respond will be regarded as not giving either the administration of this board or poster X a fair chance to resolve any legitimate problems, and will therefore regarded as ‘being a jerk’”.

24 hours was a figure I plucked from the air - the point I really wanted to make was about how in many cases which I have witnessed, there has been little opportunity given to either the individual poster involved or the administrators of this board to step back and re-eavulate. We live in the age of instant gratification and within minutes of a member being censured, often a Pit thread is started criticising either the behaviour of that member or the actions taken by the admins. Maybe, just maybe, there’s some kind of rule which could allow for the resolution of transgressions - and maybe that possibility does not exist.

I still consider the topic a worthy one for discussion and would be especially inteerested in hearing from the admins about any additional workload this might create for them.

I think this is a pretty good idea. The only problem I can see is that high profile bannings are comparatively rare (not sockpuppets with <10 posts). There have only been two or three in the nearly half year I’ve been a member. There will be too many people who would forget or not even know about this rule.

Still, it’s worth thinking about. Maybe banned posters’ posts could still say “member” for a day or a week after their posting privileges have been suspended to keep things quiet for a bit (but even then, they could get word out through IRC, email, etc). This might be preferable to having an actual rule with its attendant punishments for those who inadvertently transgress.

I was thinking of proposing a procedural change for the Admins that they change a member’s status to “WARNED” when (s)he’s gotten down to their last chance. That way, there will be no confusion among the Teeming Millions as to who the trouble-makers (if I may use that term so loosely) are and the trouble-makers themselves won’t be able to claim that they’ve been put on double-secret probation or anything.

Don’t get me wrong, I’ve seen people get warned and if it had ever happened to me, it would be enough to straighten me right up. But some people are just dense.

This would have the advantage of giving everybody who interacts with said trouble-maker the chance to see that perhaps they should be given a wide berth. If more of us know ahead of time who has been warned and who has not, then maybe bannings will more clearly be cases of someone having hung themselves on all the slack they’ve been cut.

After a suitable period of such public censure, perhaps the “WARNED” poster could petition the admins to be changed back to a “MEMBER.”

It’s a thought.

It’s not a bad idea, but one problem would be where the mods would post “Santa Claus has been banned and there will be no discussion of it until Christmas.”

Not all of us can get into all the forums all the time and read all the threads, hence we are frequently out of the loop vis-a-vis who’s been banned, who’s been suspended, who’s been warned, who is “full count with bases loaded”, etc. So say somebody who’s out of the loop logs on and discovers to her astonishment that a long-time poster has been banned, and instead of quietly e-mailing a mod, she posts a “hey, what happened?” thread. Where would be the place she should have looked to find out “who’s been banned since the last time I was here, and how soon can we talk about it?”

You’d have to have a separate forum for that, or use the Announcements function. And if they did use the Announcements function, wouldn’t that be tantamount to “nasty finger pointing”? “Santa Claus has been banned in <this> thread, and there will be no discussion of it until Christmas”, so immediately everybody races over to the train wreck and starts snapping photos, and composing pithy posts and obituaries, all set for when the starting gun goes off and it’s okay to discuss “The Banning of Santa Claus”.

In other words, I don’t see a practical way to make this work.

When we throw someone out, it for good reason and there’s no reason to delay it . . . in fact, to do so simply gives the offending poster more time and space to dump more stuff.

Do we really want that? No.

If an offensive poster been warned and they can’t pay attention to what that warning means, the administration really has no choices left.

your humble TubaDiva
Administrator

In general, though, there’s little need to post threads about banned posters, anyway. There’s no point in saying “I really hate Santa Clause, and I wish they would ban him”, if he’s already banned.

We have, on occasion, banned a person without changing their status line, but the usual result is the afore-mentioned cries of “censorship!” via e-mail to half the board. Something along the lines of “Those evil Nazi moderators banned me, but they don’t want anyone to know that, because they know that if folks find out that I, the selfless defender of the American Way, got banned, then there’ll be an armed revolution against their tyrannical will!”.

No matter how you slice it, when there’s bannings, there’s some problems. We just try to minimize the damage.