Considering that **Dio **posts on Giraffeboards, what would be the point of modding the Dope so that it looks like Giraffeboards?
Read the links TubaDiva posted - he wasn’t banned for being unbelievably stubborn, but for insulting other posters outside the Pit, and refusing to comply with mod warnings, pointing out that his conduct breached the rules of the place.
Yeah, but you saw nothing wrong with badchad either.
The entire rationale for GB, as I understand it (probably we need Giraffe hisself to make my point, or to argue against it) is to have a board modded by self-effacing, sometime wittily self-effacing people who have the authority to discourage excessively cheeky posters like Dio but only rarely the authority to ban them. IMO, bannings are far too often resorted to around here, and largely in support of bolstering the SD Mods’ self-esteem. GB’s attitude seems to be “We Mods are here to enable posting, not to flex our muscles and order people around and make up a zillion self-contradictory rules and be the final court that interprets those rules and tell people when they’re being jerks and to be jerks ourselves if we feel like it and to support each other at all costs and to close threads when we feel a bug crawling up our butts and to revel in how HAAAAAARD our (unpaid, under-appreciated, time-consuming) jobs are, but simply to allow people to post. If we catch some grief from time to time, we shrug it off–people like to bitch about Modding, and we don’t take that personally.” This would be a better, cooler, more fun place with more emotionally secure Mods.
The mods have been clear about the rule infractions that led to Dio’s banning, but some of the opinions stated in this thread seem disingenuous. The tasteless poll that was closed was incomplete anyway, as the choices should have been divided between Christian, and non-, in order to provide a more accurate reflection of member’s feelings.
I read far more than I post, and therefore don’t have an opinion worth counting, but I appreciated Dio’s input and I’ll frankly be bored to death with any religious topics going forward. I’m not a believer, and I didn’t feel that Dio’s style of discussion was abrasive or tiresome. These 7 pages of damn’s and hallelujah’s should be taken with a grain of salt, as few posters have admitted whether or not their personal beliefs clashed with Dio’s. That can certainly influence one’s feelings about another person, fairly or not.
That’s right, but there are posters whom I dislike intensely, and whose departure I wouldn’t protest very strongly, but **Dio **and **Badchad **are not among those.
Whine, whine, whine. I like Dio, but he did it to himself. Nobody hunted him down and forced him to continually flaunt the rules. Nobody held his kids for ransom and demanded that he insult people in every single forum of the board. He did this on his own, the Mods bent over backwards to get him to change his behavior, and when he proved that he had no intention of ever doing so, banned him. To blame the Mods for this is asinine.
Wait, what? Am I the troll, or is Eddie Haskell the troll?
Being wrong is NOT against board rules.
Being stubborn is NOT against board rules.
Being wrong AND being stubborn about it is not against board rules.
Being disliked by many posters is not against board rules.
Holding off-the-wall or out-of-the-box opinions is not against board rules.
Deliberately insulting other posters, on a repeated basis, IS against board rules.
And if one feels that they MUST be deliberately insulting to other posters, we offer a forum where that is allowed. I don’t see that it’s any great hardship: if you feel that you can’t carry on discussion without name-calling, go to the Pit.
We allow a huge range of latitude here, but we require civil behavior (outside the Pit.) The goal on our boards is to allow discussion on almost any topic, exchange of ideas, and flow of information – in a reasonably polite environment.
Does this mean that we lose some colorful posters? Perhaps. I think it mostly means that we lose posters who are unable to have a polite discussion with those who disagree with them. And, frankly, the internet is full of message boards for “colorful” posters who can’t get along.
The argument that “only 10 of so-and-so’s 10,000 posts were offensive” doesn’t hold water. “I only went through 10 stop signs out of the thousands that I stopped at” isn’t much of a defense.
Our process here is that, after repeated warnings, we put a person on suspension for a limited time. In short, we offer people many opportunities to behave, to abide by our rules. Banning is our last recourse, when all else has failed. We don’t WANT to lose people, but we don’t want to lose our desired environment, either.
Banning is the last recourse? Dex, you threatened me with a night with the female Mods!
Seriously, he is causing as much mayhem by being banned as being active (and I know it is ironical that my post is encouraging this).
And Dex in particular is ensuring we treat him with some dignity as he can’t answer. Which is far more than he ever did to others on these boards.
I think you have hit the nail on the head.
There is a considerable amount of opinion in religious scholarship. Dio was just as absolutist in his opinions on religion as he was about everything else. On a board where few know much about a topic, it is (as you say) easy to set yourself up as an expert.
FWIW, I spent two years in a Lutheran seminary, and studied Koine Greek and various schools of biblical criticism. That doesn’t make me any more of an expert than Dio, but it doesn’t make me any less of one either.
I’ve said it before when a previous poster was banned even though “he added so much to the boards”. The true expert has no need to display his expertise by putting other people down.
Regards,
Shodan
I will respectfully disagree with this, Dex. You DO want to lose posters, you accept it as a cost of doing business YOUR WAY. There are several models of good moderation in dealing with difficult posters around, including the GB model, that you affirmatively reject, primarily (IMO) because it detracts from the mods’ authority. This is a very poor reason for clinging to a policy, but cling to it, you do. I can only conclude that you place the Mods’ sense of self-esteem much higher on a scale of virtues than I would, and than some other functioning boards do. That’s your decision, of course, but please don’t tell me it’s the only way to run a board, because it isn’t.
I’m a bit confused why you object to Dio’s banning because you just described him to a T.
If you seriously saw nothing wrong with the way either of them posted, then your Jerkometer needs to be re-calibrated.
He was a fixture of this board, but not in a good way. More in the way that hazing and alcohol poisoning were fixtures of Rush Week before people started trying to clean things up a bit. Like those efforts, there will be some amount of wailing and gnashing of teeth by a handful of people but on the whole it will make things much better for pretty much everybody involved.
I, for one, will be glad to be able to open a 5 page thread and know that 3-4 pages of it are not Dio pulling his “did not, did too” bullshit.
I actually kind of like the model of “condescension and education” myself. I think I’ve seen that around here somewheres.
Since it doesn’t look like anyone responded to this:
If someone sneaks back as a sock, he or she is banned.
To the best of my knowledge, only one person has been reinstated after a ban: lissener. It was not a successful experiment and I doubt it would be repeated – esp. not for Dio, who has proven his inability to follow the rules of civility outside the Pit, despite our efforts to get him to do so.
It’s safe to say that even most of his critics have not described his posting style as mindless or as content-free ad hominem. His posting was in fact the opposite of that, mean but full of novel content.
No it doesn’t.
You’re kidding, right?
Has someone been warned about the continued insults and creepy comments about his family and home life and I just missed it?