I brought this issue up in the Pit thread where milroyj’s banning is being discussed and debated, but i realise that Mods or Admins may not see my posts there, so i decided to open a new thread here.
In Lynn’s thread announcing milroyj’s banning, she says that he has accumulated five warnings, and gives a link to each one. The one i am interested in is the third one, where his offence, according to Lynn, was “Insults traded with another poster in the thread, which is in IMHO.” Fair enough. We know that we’re not meant to trade insults outside the Pit.
But, as the other poster in question in this particular instance, i have a couple of comments and questions. My comments don’t relate to whether or not my behavior in that thread was or was not out of line—i clearly broke the rules, by saying (in a somewhat round-about way) that milroyj was stupid, and then accusing him of practicing ignorance. What concerns me most about this is that the incident was used as one of the “warnings” that contributed to milroyj’s banning.
Now, i have always been under the impression that serious warnings, of the type that are recorded and that might contribute to a banning, were clearly identified as such, either in the thread itself or in an email from a Mod/Admin to the poster in question. I’m thinking of instances like this, where Mod samclem says:
or like this:
Compare these warnings with the Moderator intervention in the thread where milroyj and i were arguing:
There was no mention of a formal warning, and in fact the intervention itself was much more in the “Cool it” type of vein. I’ve seen literally dozens of these offhand warnings, cautions, and admonitions given to various posters over my years on the Boards, and i was not aware that such interventions in rather innocuous little spats like the one that milroyj and i were having could be trotted out later as examples of formal warnings. I received no email telling me that my behavior had been bad enough to warrant a warning, and i can only assume that milroyj did not either.
Note that i’m not trying to argue here that my behavior was acceptable, or that i didn’t deserve a warning. I’m just pointing out what seems to me to be a rather inconsistent way of giving warnings in the first place. I think that when someone does something bad enough to be recorded and kept as evidence for future use against that person, then the person should be told very explicitly that this has been done. The very fact that the words “formal warning” are sometimes used by Moderators and Admins suggests that the distinction between informal interventions and formal warnings does, in fact, exist in the minds of at least some SDMB staff. I’d just like for the whole thing to be consistent.
As TVeblen said only about a month ago:
Well, i submit that if warnings are indeed “intended just as much to help posters survive and thrive on the board as they are to crack down,” then if a warning is serious enough to be stored away for future reference, this should be noted at the time, and the poster in question should be informed.
I am now curious, after learning that our exchange was one of the reasons behind milroyj’s banning, to know whether the exchange was also recorded against my name. I’m also curious, having been told (i think) on a couple of other occasions to cool down a bit, as to how many other black marks there are that i don’t even know about. Is it possible that i’m one slip away from being banned, without ever seeing a “Consider this a formal warning” warning?
This is really just a question transparency. A lot of us get a little more heated and personal than we should on some occasions, and it seems to me that there is—or should be—a distinction between relatively minor infractions that draw an admonition but are not record, and more serious problems that require a formal warning. I think milroyj (and perhaps, by extension, other people in the past or future) got the short end of the stick on a couple of those “warnings.”
