This guy, a poster for almost a year, was banned without it being announced in this forum. Has policy changed?
I don’t know if the announcement policy has changed, but he was suspended a couple months ago, and that suspension was announced. It was made very clear that if, upon his return, he continued the behavior which got him supended he would be banned. He did, and he was. Perhaps they felt the reason was so obvious in this case that it didn’t need an announcement.
He was suspended in late December of last year, and seems to have come back on Jan 27 of this year. He pretty much picked up where he had left off, and was banned on Feb 9.
He flamed out very fast. I am embarrassed as I defending him right before he started his final thread that got him banned.
Jim
Thanks guys. I am not questioning why he was banned, but whether bannings are no longer announced. IIRC, his suspension was not announced, either.
There doesn’t seem to have been an official announcement in ATMB, but it was announced at the end of this thread
The guy announced his own coming banning in each post he made, writ large between the lines.
The sentence, “I wonder why andrewdt85 was banned” is akin to Chomsky’s “Colorless green ideas sleep furiously”: it’s a perfectly well-constructed sentence, just one that would never occur in English discourse.
Is it possible that he was more well-behaved in some fora than others? I never noticed anything particularly bad about his posts, but it may just be that I was only seeing the innocuous ones. Of course, I also don’t remember anything particularly good about his posts, either.
And isn’t part of the idea of putting these announcements in ATMB that not everyone might have read the thread where the last straw occured?
You should know, as you are the first one to introduce it. I am not wondering why he was banned, just why it was not announced. Let’s take andrew out of it and concentrate on whether board policy has changed.
No, board policy has not changed. Circumstances do arise, however, when posting an announcement is a lower priority than other things. Especially when, for instance, there was a prior announcement relative to a suspension, and the behavior was pretty obvious. Basically, the mod/admin doing the banning should be putting up an announcement, but now and again we’re busy and forget.
Please don’t read “policy change” in what was merely a case of prioritizing.
And, of course, remember that we usually do NOT announce banning of obvious spammers, one-shot trolls, returnees, and similar – we just want to scrape them off our shoes and not make a big to-do.
It may seem obvious to someone you read the thread or multiple threads in question. I for one never seem to be involved in the various melt downs on the board. I just seem to be looking elsewhere. If posterX has a meltdown in the pit and banned appears under his name in CS I would like to see the announcement. Of course if it is an eight post sock it’s not needed. It may be obvious to you why a particular member was banned but maybe not to the rest of us.
That’s a good point. What was the last straw?
It was glaringly obvious to anyone who read any of that boy’s postings that he was not long for this site.
If you didn’t see what an annoyance he was to to begin with, well, you got lucky, I guess.
If you missed both go-rounds, then you are doubly blessed.
Why do you have suspicions of our motives? Do you think we just randomly pick out people to remove from the board 'cause that’s how we get our kicks?
It’s a pain in the patoot to put someone off the board, we don’t make extra work for ourselves, we have enough to begin with just taking care of what needs to be done every blinking day.
We gave the poster in question every opportunity to shape up and it didn’t happen.
Was that worth publishing about separately? I said no simply because it was so obvious. Sorry you didn’t get the memo that day.
And while we’re on the subject, it would be really helpful if second-guessing and jumping to conclusions would stop being Olympic sports around here. Use a little common sense. We’re all about growing this place, it’s a great community, we want it to be bigger and better. Would we throw anyone out just for the heck of it? We didn’t do that when it was free and we certainly don’t do it now that we’re asking for money.
You want to know why we threw someone off the board? Go read some posts. Anyone with a posting history also has a public history of warnings for bad behavior.
If they don’t have posts, we caught someone who was either a spammer of some sort or a returning banned poster; we get those in about equal measure. We remove privileges from the screen name and all posts we can. Just taking out the trash.
TubaDiva
What’s with the pissy attitude? No one was giving you or any of the staff a hard time about it or questioning anyone’s motives; they were just curious. Even Chronos, a former mod, was unaware of the situation. Not everyone has the time or inclination to keep up with everything that goes on around here or to go searching posts to figure out what happened; asking directly is often the easiest way, so why don’t you put the cross away and dial it back a bit, alright? Geeze.
Sheesh, Tuba, overreact much? No one questioned your motive in this thread or said anything even remotely defensive about Andrew. All anyone said was that they hadn’t happened to have seen the relevant posts. I read GQ mostly, and I pay very little attention to people’s personalities on the board. If someone gets angry or emotional in a thread I’m interested in, I just skim over it, usually without even noticing who it was. Even in MPSIMS and the Pit, I skim for content (amusing anecdotes, pithy observations, funny quips) and ignore the rest. The first time I noticed BANNED under Andrew’s name it was in a perfectly bland post probably in GQ. It didn’t take long to look through his past posts and see what the problem was (and that I wasn’t interested in reading more), but I have no idea if I read any of his inflammatory posts before I went looking for them.
Having an announcement in ATMB would have saved me the minor trouble of looking up his other posts, but you had other things to do, so no big deal. I like the banning announcements, but they’re pretty far down my list of priorities, too. If you did stop doing them, I wouldn’t blink. Nevertheless, like the OP, I did pause for half a second to wonder if the policy had been changed.
No one could reasonably infer from that that I thought the banning was less than just or that your motives were less than pure, and anyone who did infer such would seem to be well qualified for a spot on the Olympic conclusion-jumping team herself. 
Sorry, Q.E.D’s post wasn’t there when I started typing. Not trying to gang up anyone here!
Not one person questioned the reasons for the supension just why it wasn’t announced. You were the ones who changed your policy and started putting up explainations. It was perfectly reasonable to ask why it wasn’t done in this case and if that meant you went back to the old policy. It’s not unreasonable to request some customer service when you are a customer. Part of customer service is to put up with questions you might find annoying or repetative. It is unreasonable to request that everyone read every post and tough luck if you don’t. If you don’t want the banning discussed then make it a closed thread. We will be informed and it will drop off the front page in a day or two.
Andrew’s final posts: I don’t which was the very last straw but these are the 2 likeliest candidates.
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?p=7088226#post7088226
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?p=7085224#post7085224
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?p=7043159#post7043159
There was one more but it wasn’t started by Andrew. I can’t locate it.
I would say enjoy, but there is no enjoyment, just a clinical study in meltdowns.
{Tuba, I don’t think any of us were objecting or complaining, just asking}
Jim
Just as a suggestion, if the staff member responsible for the banning has the time, a pre-locked thread in this forum might be a good idea for these kind of announcements, to avoid the inevitable two pages of gloating that follow when a widely disliked poster {and yeah, I’ve been guilty of kicking people when they’re down too} is banned or suspended: if anyone wants to take it further, they can go to the Pit.
I can’t be bothered with the links, since they are too numerous and depressing, but he was suspended for 30 days back in December and warned to cool his jets: he celebrated his return by going on a toot and starting 15 threads in a day, including a Pit thread calling out the Mods. That turned into a pile-on, in which he eventually demanded {and was given} extensive constructive criticism on how to mend his ways. He then announced that he’d be laying low for a while to rethink his ways and asked that all his extant threads be locked, but returned 10 days or so later in a Cafe Society thread which rather abusively demanded that people turn on their TV’s at 4 am to confirm what he was watching, and complained when no-one complied. Dex locked the thread and told him not be so rude and silly, I subsequently pitted andrewdt85 for it, and then he flamed out with a Pit thread excoriating Dex: the rest is silence.