Aren’t RO’s usually against one side? Like, if I get a restraining order against my ex being withing X feet of me, then isn’t it up to them to avoid me, not the other way around? By that logic, I would assume that it’s up to the person the order is issued against to avoid communicating with the other person.
Plus, can’t you bring up the potential contact on the board when the request for the restraining order is made? I know that there was a restraining order against someone at my college, despite both parties having classes together. So they made a special arrangement that they had to just stay as far away from each other as possible. Seems like something similar could be done here, like saying out of threads where that person has participated or something.
I’m not a lawyer but does a restraining order put any obligation on third parties? I don’t believe it does.
So if Smith has a restraining order against Jones, telling Jones to stay away from Smith, nobody else has to get involved (with the obvious exception of law enforcement). If you’re a message board or a science-fiction convention or a business, you have no duty to enforce a restraint order. Even if Smith shows you the restraining order, you don’t have to throw Jones out. If Smith wants Jones removed, Smith has to call the police and they will arrest Jones for violating the order.
Corollary question: Can moderators/administrators forcefully put a Doper on someone else’s ignore list? I would imagine that the part in the code that prohibits a mod being placed on ignore could be utilized to prohibit communication between two regular posters, no matter how unlikely the scenario I mentioned may be.
I’m a mod on another vB forum, and no, we can’t do that. Use of the ignore list is strictly voluntary. Not allowing a member to ignore a moderator is in the basic code. Changing it would probably require a hack, something which ain’t gonna happen on the SDMB.
With root-level access, you could do something like that through direct editing of the database, but the only guy with that level of access to the board is some guy at the Chicago Reader or their parent-company-du-jour that you’ve never heard of, and nobody ever wants to make direct edits to the database, because it’s tedious, annoying, and can go spectacularly wrong if you screw it up. And why isn’t the poster managing their own ignore list, anyway?
Isn’t there a feature called something like Tachy goes to Coventry that hides a user’s posts from everyone else on the board? That’s sort of like forcefully adding someone to an ignore list, except it’s everyone’s ignore list.
That could be a problem if this was done to a paying member without her/his knowledge, once it was found out. I know I would be rather pissed if I found out that I wasn’t actually fully participating if I had paid for that privilege.
There is a feature in our version of vBulletin called Tachy goes to Coventry. In vBulletin 4 and later, the feature was renamed to Global Ignore.
We do not use that feature here.
Being sent to Coventry is a British phrase that basically means to be ostracized. I have no idea who Tachy is, and apparently neither does anyone else except the developer of the feature in vBulletin and his closest friends.
IANAL but it seems to me that SDMB isn’t involved in the RO (unless specifically stated that she is) … maybe it’s fair to compare this to some coffee shop across town where two parties having mutual RO’s on each other walk in … how is the coffee shop responsible? … if the two parties simply drink their coffee and move on without incident, then the coffee shop may not even know there’s an RO … the two obeyed the coffee shops rules … no harm, no foul … I think it’s strictly up to the offended party to contact the police and have them enforce the RO … the coffee shop, or SDMB, has no role in that …
Of course if the two parties come here and break the rules, that’s a different issue … not even the Endangered Species Act can protect an individual poster here if they break the rules …
Idle Thoughts asked the question way back at the end of 2005. I suppose it could be used to really really annoy banned people – they can type all they want and no one would be the wiser. (Can you be on your own ignore list and not see your own posts?)
Not sure of the meaning of “Tachy” but what that function does/did is that someone can post as much as they like … and the system will accept that posting … but only the OP sees them.
We tried it a couple of times, mostly in cases where people really needed a little time out. We thought it would be a good tool to use to help keep the peace and when whoever we put in there had calmed down, we could take them out. Figured it might work on trolls too.
All it did was make angry people madder because we had blocked their voice on the board.
It did nothing for trolls; they’d just discard that name and get another one.
They usually figured out pretty quick we had done something and raised cain in other ways or through other people or new registrations, so counterproductive, really.
I think my day pass is expiring, so back to the farm …
So Doper wife who has suffered years of abuse at the hands of her (also a) Doper husband finally gets the courage to leave the abusive relationship, gets a restraining order, and for her courage, the SDMB treats her to a banning?!?
I don’t have a solution either, but that seems a bit harsh.
Birds of a feather!