If I understand correctly, any active member of the board can PM a moderator and ask why someone was banned, and that moderator will give you the complete why’s and wherefores. So it doesn’t exactly sound like it’s state secrets we’re talking about. Why not just answer the goddamned question in a thread? It’s not like anybody who’s *not *supposed to have that information is going to get it.
Or is it really that horrible that some poor non-member is going to happen upon the thread see how we treat the riff-raff around here?
Or … oh shit, it just dawned on me … to the moderators get extra coffee cups if they meet a PM quota?
What’s wrong with just answering the question in acceptable detail, then closing the thread to prevent any further discussion/bashing of the BANNED MEMBER in ATMB?
Ok. There’s no rule saying you can’t talk about people who are banned. There is a rule that says you should ask the mods about unexplained bans instead of starting threads, and the general reason is that we don’t want to give extra attention to socks and trolls.
I think you should have read to the end of that post. We’re trying to reduce the attention as a way of removing their incentive to come back, which some of them do on a regular basis for long periods of time. I can’t prove that dealing with the information this way makes it less likely they’ll come back, but I think the principle is sound and the inconvenience is minimal, so this is how we handle it.
But then the troll would only have one thread about them instead of two.
I’ve always thought Sicks Ate idea was good. One thread, one post saying why, like it is down with long term posters, and then closed, instead of two threads like we have now for Ol’ Moony and possibly the mods answering hundreds of PMs asking why.*
*Hey, you never know. A troll might become really popular like Ol’ Umkay.
Most people who have been posting here any length of time can figure out why a troll was banned, and also are aware of the rule to PM a moderator. We don’t get that many questions in ATMB about disappeared trolls compared to the number we ban. I don’t know if other moderators get questions by PM, but I have gotten very few myself.
[QUOTE=MeanOldLady]
How’s this working out for ya?
[/QUOTE]
I think it works pretty well. Although we have a small number of persistent trolls who keep coming back (and who are probably mentally ill), most trolls seem to be one-shots.
I’m sorry, we would have one official locked thread… and at least one other asking the exact same questions, or debating the conclusions in the official thread, or reminiscing about the troll. How do you propose to prevent that?
As far as I can tell, current SOP is at least as effective as any other proposal, with the unlikely but not impossible outcome of a troll just quietly vanishing in the night and no one notices.
That’s actually not an unlikely outcome, but in my experience the most frequent one. Many blatant trolls are banned after one or a few posts, and no one asks about them in either ATMB or by PM.
Clarify? Do you mean trolls who keep posting trollish posts despite multiple warnings, until you finally ban them? Or do you mean trolls who, once banned, keep coming back as socks?
Fantastic; great. But maybe I’ve only seen a couple of the BANNED person’s posts? What if the times I came across their posts they seemed legitimate? Perhaps I’m not the only one who doesn’t 1) want to take the time to search all of the BANNED poster’s activity to decide why they were banned, or 2) doesn’t want to PM anybody, mods included, about much of anything.
Would it freaking kill you guys to just say ‘Well, they were banned for XXXXX.’ Fuck I’ve even seen instances of ‘So-and-so was banned for X, and here, here, and here are examples.’
I don’t propose to prevent that, and you actually make my point for me. There would be ONE thread that answers why the person was banned. I think that could actually prevent speculation threads. Take our most recent example, or some other noteworthy ones; it’s not as if they were BANNED and then, magically, nobody talked about them.
Nobody gives a shit about spammers or idiots who sign up and are booted after a day and a half. A poster who has a been around and has a recognizable name, if not reputation, is another story.
It’s unreasonable to ask the mods to explain why HotPu$$y68+1 was banned after starting a thread about gerbiling. It’s not unreasonable to have a public explanation why a poster with a little bit of a history was banned.
With most trolls, we also cause all their past posts to disappear. It’s all part of “do not feed the trolls.” We frankly have very little clue what turns these jerks on, but it’s usually attention-mongering. And the persistent one keep returning as socks, which get banned. We’re hoping that not giving them any attention at all will discourage them and they’ll go away and leave us alone. Seeing their name in print (OK, in pixel), regardless of context, seems to give them great glee.
We’re not hiding the information; we’ll happily tell you in private. We just don’t want them to have publicity. If we started one thread that listed the names of trolls who were banned, there would be more incentive for them to irritate us (“Oooh, oooh, if this name gets banned, it’ll be announced as number 100 on the list!!”).
And generally, if the poster does have some history, we do provide explanation. But when such a person has been banned and then comes back with five different socks, we don’t think we need to provide five more explanations.
