I’be been reading the SDMB for a while. not intensely but regularly. I don’t read or post anywhere else so I am a serious newbie to board etiqutte. I’ve just read the discussions about Handy being banned. I’ve seen the “A EVIL MONKEY…” posts and I noticed that he/she/it has BANNED under his/her/it name. But I don’t really understand how people get banned, and how, if they ARE banned, they can keep posting as Evil Monkey clearly has.
In essence, my question is “how do you get banned and how can you avoid being banned”
Shoot. Should have previewed. I misspelled curious.
Anyway, I’ve read the rules of all of the forums (well, not all that closely. There sure are a lot of words in some of them) but the banning thing isn’t explicitly parsed out. What do MOST folks who get banned get banned FOR?
Damn, Scylla - I was going to say misspelled words and posting to the wrong forum. However, you have summarized it best.
The rules, by the way, are on the SDMB front page, wonder9, and I hope you get out a bit more! If you have to ask how to get banned, I would imagine it’s not a event you have to worry about.
It seems to me that the most common form of banning is for being a “sock puppet.”
A lot of times somebody has been a real problem and broken the rules and been banned.
They can’t quite deal with it, so they make up a new account and come back. Chances are though, that they are still posting from the same computer, internet provider and IP address.
If a new poster has the same IP as someone banned they know it’s the same person, and ban them again.
So the same people come back, get banned, come back, get banned, over and over again.
Some people who get banned return with a new screnname. These “socks” hopefully are furreted out by our mods and admins. This was A EVIL MONKEY’s problem.
Ummm…sock puppet? Am I correct that a sock is like a mask and people get different masks if the one they were using was banned?
And how can EVIL MONKEY post then? He/she/it has posted several times in several forums and in each the word BANNED appears under his ‘name’.
Is this the wrong place to ask these questions? I did in fact read all of the forum rules as well as the rules on the home page and didn’t find an answer. I’m not trying to be dim (some would same it comes naturally) but I want to understand what is objectionable in a virtual world.
When they banned him, the banned got placed retroactively on all his posts. If I were to be banned, all 9,483 of my posts would have “banned” next to them even though I wrote them before I was banned.
Well, it seems pretty arbitrary and capricious to me. I got warned for posting an opinion in a very callous and pretty unflattering way. I had read the rules and the rules don’t say you have to be nice or “contribute.”
So, IMO, the mods are enforcing rules that aren’t posted.
wonder, he posted several times before he got caught. As noted by Berkut, once he was banned, every post he ever made had the word “Member” replaced by “BANNED”. Your status (Member, Moderator, Administrator, BANNED) is read by vBulletin every time someone opens a page – this means that once it’s changed, it appears everywhere. For another example, note manhattan’s status says “Member” now and on all his old posts, even though he used to be a moderator.
Not so, county. The rules state “Don’t be a jerk”. That leaves a lot of leeway.
If the rules stated, for instance, that you “cannot post on the full moon in the first week of every month”, someone in the Southern Hemisphere would say that the moon wasn’t full where they were. The jerk rule is an intentionally vague rule so that they can interpret things according to their judgment, rather than having some wiseacre always trying to play fast and loose with rules that are more stringent.
wonder9, I’m sure you really don’t have anything to worry about. But here’s a couple more thoughts…
The “don’t be a jerk” policy would include things like hate speech, intentionally calling someone out (bad names, being rude, etc.) in GD, not specifically following a direct reprimand from the mods.
As to being a sock, it IS like having a mask and the reason someone like that monkey fellow posted all over the place while banned, is because of what Berkut said; it’s retroactive. So once he was banned (IIRC, for having been a poster that basically spammed the board a lot with a bunch of nonsense despite repeated mod warnings, then re-registering under other names and coming back for more – but like Scylla explained, very apparent to the administration because they have the same IP address), all his post retroactively show as BANNED. Therefore, it looks like he’s still all over the place, but you’ll see if you search his post that there’s nothing after a certain time and further efforts will probably (but I’m not sure on this) unearth where some mod lowered the boom, thus combining with his final posting.
I hope that helps.
Oh, and questions specifically about how the board works are usually best suited to the ATMB forum.
Well, at the top of the board is a thread titled “Pit Rules” and it says nothing about “Don’t be a jerk” - if there are some more rules I guess I messed them. Where do I find that rule?
Me, I am the soul of discretion in General Questions but I was really surprised to be warned for posting an opinion (however callously and unpleasantly I posted it) in the Pit - I thought this was the place where you don’t have to be PC or even civil.
Thanks for the general info but I’m still lacking specific info. If I take pains NOT to be a jerk (please define, BTW) then what does cause a poster to be banned?
And what’s the point of banning someone if their posts still appear? I saw several EVIL MONKEY posts today and they all had BANNED on them. Why not just pull all of those posts?
And really, I’m just curious. I need another hobby, I know.