Marley23 has opened and then locked a thread about Gonzomax being banned for frequent personal insults in threads not in the Pit. I read each of the examples cited and in almost every case it seemed to me that other posters had been ruder and more personally insulting to Gonzomax, and in many cases the other poster was rude or insulting first. I get that Gonzomax had a reputation for bing insulting and tiresome somehow, and I even experienced some of his tendencies to derail threads by insisting on his point of view over and over. But this certainly never, in my mind, approached a banning matter. What did I miss?
I don’t know what he was suspended for last year so perhaps that would shed some light. But in at least one of the threads referenced in the “Gonzomax Banned” thread, another poster said “do you ever post anything you didn’t just pull out of your ass” and was just told to dial it back; then **Gonzomax **was warned for saying something back (“blind lefty” - is that really a warnable personal insult?) I am sure there is more to this than I have seen but it does seem to be a pattern sometimes that a poster gets a reputation which may not even be totally deserved, and then is warned or banned for things which are really fairly minor.
This seems to be happening more and more often. I thought some were wrong to say **Dio **should not have been banned as he was very annoying sometimes and apt to derail threads but now I wonder if that was another example of people being banned just for being annoying. I know the rule is don’t be a jerk but really, is eliminating all annoying people the goal here? At times it seem the overzealous moderation may push some of the annoying types into being more annoying, not less. I have always found the “scroll down past the idiots” method to be a better solution, myself.
So what do you think? Am I missing something? Are we better off without Gonzomax?
I get the impression that sometimes, when a poster is generally unpleasant*, the moderators show months or years of patience with him and then ban him over something which is not quite bannable. Jacquelope was a prime example. He got tiresome real quick and the mods banned him not so much for a particular action but for being a real funny bunny.
Aggressive tone, willful ignorance, general inability to make cogent arguments, relentless axe grinding.
Gonzomax had a recurring problem with personal insults, plus ignoring moderator instructions that he refrain from personal insults.
He was finally suspended for that pattern of misbehavior, and told he was on his last chance when he returned from that suspension. He resumed his pattern of personal insults and ignoring moderator instructions. After extensive discussion among the moderators, we decided that there was no evidence whatsoever that he was going to change that behavior, so, per our warning to him, we banned him.
If you mean me, I assure you I got an official warning in my box for it and was told to dial things back wrt gonzo, which I have tried to do since. He seriously irked me, and managed to push my buttons on numerous occasions, but he’s not here to defend himself so I wont say anything about the banning other than the mods probably had their reasons, which I think they have stated.
I can see your side, but the offenses pointed to in the banning thread were so lame, it’s almost laughable. I’d have just suspended him again, for longer this time. Banning is for jerks, and none of those offenses reached the jerk threshold.
Warnings are intended to get people to change their behavior. If warnings don’t elicit a change, then we resort to a suspension to get their attention. If they continue the behavior after a suspension, then finally a banning may result.
As Marley indicated in the announcement, gonzomax had received fifteen warnings in the past two years; plus a suspension; plus a final notification that the next offense would call for a banning. This doesn’t even include the mod notes where he was cautioned without a formal warning.
There was no indication that the warnings or suspension had any effect on gonzo’s behavior. It would have been completely pointless to give him another suspension. He had more than enough chances to change his behavior, and chose not to take them.
While I can understand the ire of thinking the final reason a poster is banned is lame or whatever it doesnt bother me. IMO once you have been bad enough for long enough that the mods are on your case…well, when they finally get you for jaywalking I don’t care. If the poster HAD NOT been a jerk for so long they wouldn’t have been in that precarious in the first place. Also, I think when someone’s exhibited a particular bad behavior for long enough and often enough that they are on thin ice about it they need to be held to a HIGHER standard for behavior than the average Joe. Lets say I’ve never been warned for insults or generally considered a jerk or otherwise pushed the limit on other bad behavior. Then, on a bad day I call someone an asshole out of the blue. A warning, perhaps even unofficial seems about right. Now, lets same some other poster is always insulting folks. Maybe not even actual insults but damn close. Well, too bad so sad when they finally get the axe for calling someone a poopy head.
For the record though I didn’t think gonomax was that bad.
Without a doubt. I disagree often with many here. Dio, for instance, and I were usually on opposite sides of the issues—and he could gut a bug up his butt and just flatly contradict every rational argument simply citing his own position. But below his at-times impenetrable contrarian outer shell, he was a pretty smart guy. I was a little sad when he was banned, lamenting the loss of the positive things he offered these boards.
There is no similar lamentation concerning gonzomax.
And in some of those instances, the other posters were also warned or mod noted. I agree that gonzomax a history of mixing it up with other posters - xtisme being one of them. But we don’t accept “he started it” as a defense, and even if we did, he had 15 warnings and a suspension in the last two years. A suspension is supposed to be your last chance on its own. I contacted gonzomax a couple of weeks ago to tell him flat-out that he had used up his chances and that he was going to get banned if he got another warning any time soon. Then he got mod noted for a post Sunday night (here) before getting that last warning on Monday. That’s an awful lot of chances by any measure.
I think a couple of people here are drawing a distinction between people who act like jerks - picking fights, for example - and people who just break the rules. I agree that those can be different behaviors and reflect different issues, but we don’t want people doing either one to excess. We’re understanding if people sometimes get into a fight that gets personal or sometimes go over the line and insult people. But 15 warnings in two years is a warning more than every other month, which means it’s happening a lot. He was given a lot of chances and didn’t improve in any kind of consistent way. We’d already suspended him and gotten nothing more than a temporary improvement, and if he couldn’t stay out of trouble after being told point-blank that he was going to get banned next time, how could anybody believe he was going to stop breaking the rules?
Seems to me you could have waited for an instance where he had gone your invisible lines of comportment without being baited. I mean, if he was impervious to warnings and suspensions as you insist he was, then he would have crossed that line sooner or later, and no one would be expressing sympathy for the guy now. What was the big rush?–“Ooh, ooh, Gonzomax has exceeded our numerical limit!!! Let’s ban him NOW!!! Nevermind that someone was poking him with a stick, and nevermind that his insult wasn’t such a big one, let’s ban the asshole immediately–this might really draw some sympathy for him and we may never get the chance again!!”
There are some posters who you can just tell have reached a point of no return and banning is both imminent and inevitable.
Much as I frequently agreed with gonzo, of late he had definitely been pushing the envelope. I don’t know whether he couldn’t control himself or was deliberately going for suicide-by-mod but there was no sign that he was going to rein in the worst of his behavior. The actual final straw is largely irrelevant within that context; if you wait for one big breach rather than getting the person on the 15th time they poke a toe across the line you end up condoning a lot of toepoking. He had his chances. Time to pull the plug.
Which is not to excuse the various other jerks, malcontents and provocateurs who baited him, but ultimately we are responsible for our own posts.
What’s so bad about that? I’d prefer a clear case that people can agree on to threads like these. When you get threads like these, I’d argue for patience and forbearance and tolerance, three qualities I don’t find a lot of in SD mods.
If you make the line so soft and blurry, it becomes meaningless and only gives other people a basis to claim that they should not be warned, suspended or banned.
Last chance is last change. You walk over the line, you’re done, doesn’t matter what it was for. Hell, I had a much liked co-worker get fired a couple of weeks back because he had been absent or late so many times that he was flat out told that if he was as much as 1 minute late again, he’d be fired. Then his car broke down and he was 2 hours late, and that was that. Oh sure, his car broke down, that seems like a reasonable excuse. But one of his roommates who rode in with him managed to take the bus and make it to work on time, so basically rather than doing that, he chose to be late. He made that choice, he got fired for it, I don’t have a lot of sympathy.
Likewise here. And endless stream of warnings and a suspension and then a final notice. If a man (or woman) cannot stop himself from walking across that line again, then he needs to be gone because he won’t stop walking across that line in the future either. Especially if the line becomes squishy and indistinct.
Seriously, what’s this “baiting” bullshit? Are we 10-year-olds? This banning was overdue. All the guy ever did was spew bile at his political adversaries, and insult them whenever possible.