Again, I don’t know the details. Maybe message boards have some kind of “common carrier” protections – like a phone company that has no liability just because someone issues a threat during a phone call. Or maybe, if we didn’t use pseudonyms and we all spoke with the knowedge of each other’s “real” identities, the lawsuits would have shut down the place years ago.
But my point was (if there was one) that a board dedicated to fighting ignorance while maintaining some degree of civility, should not be banning people for dicussing legal and socially acceptable activities, like filing lawsuits. However, I don’t dispute it’s legal right to do so.
We don’t ban people for “discussing legal and socially acceptable activities, like filing lawsuits.” But we see a difference between discussing filing lawsuits and threatening to sue us.
This discussion of defamation law and general board banning policy, while fascinating, has nothing to do with the OP, which is about the banning of a specific poster. Let’s all pitch in and see if we can get it back on track.
Sorry – I think I was probably the one being whooshed. I was seeing snideness where none was, apparently, intended.
Yeah, I really don’t see any reason that gratuitous insults should be tolerated, regardless of how new or old a poster is – and any argument about “well, this was in forum X,” or “of course, compared to website Y, that’s nothing” or whatever – bullshit. There’s no reason to be obnoxious to each other, and since WeirdDave was, regularly and despite numerous warnings to stop doing it, I’m okay with his being banned.
Often in these threads most of the focus is on the “rights” of the bannee, and how he or she is being done an injustice. What is overlooked is the rights of all the other posters on this board to have a reasonably pleasant posting environment. People really shouldn’t have to be subjected to gratuitous insults outside the Pit. If we take these kind of actions, it is in the interest of maintaining a good experience for the vast majority of posters who never feel the compulsion to insult anyone.
Not bloody likely. She’s happily married to someone else. Satan has been back here a bunch of times under other names, and usually found out and banned.
Didn’t we have that at one point? Isn’t that why we had to have a temp board-we banned a particularly heinous troll, and then the board was hacked?
And Sapo-I think that would be WAAAAY too much of a headache for the admin. We’re better off with the warning system-especially since there are fairly minor mistakes made occassionally.
Its done on larger, more active boards, and not always for reasons mods here would consider tossing out so much as a warning. I popped over to the South Park message boards when Isaac Hayes died, to see what the general reaction was. As you can expect, folks opened a number of threads about it, in all the various forums. After about five threads were started, the mods merged several of them, and began banning folks for 30 days if they opened one. It would be like the mods here handing out suspensions if someone opened a GQ thread about an item in the news, when there were threads about it in the other forums. Kind of bizarre, IMHO.
A smaller board I’m on gives out warnings and graduated bannings. It mostly works. (There’s some differences in the rules there, so it can’t be directly compared.)
Still, we all know how changes to the board that the posters want are generally met with distain by management, whilst they’ll happily make whatever changes they want, even when they’ve told us that making similiar changes in the past was “impossible” or “too difficult.”
As for Weirddave, well, I’d noticed a change in his posting style some time back. It seemed to me that he stopped being respectful of the beliefs/opinions of those who disagreed with him at some point. It sucks that he got banned, but had any of us made a similar comment against DtC or another poster in GD, we would have suffered the same fate, I’m sure.
I would have no problem with it if there were a rule about not being obnoxious to each other. There is not. I try not to be obnoxious and I think I mostly succeed but there are plenty of obnoxious people here that don’t get banned. I never butted heads with Dave. I am only going by the evidence given, the threads that were linked. I see mostly weak justification.
The trouble with being obnoxious is that generally it’s non productive. Someone rants; his target rants back; trainwreck ensues. It’s gets to be like asking fractious children to stop being unreasonable: reason is drowned out by the shouting. But then, I guess some people enjoy that - or feel compelled to behave like that. Eventually tolerance is worn away and the transgressor is banished.
He wasn’t banned for being obnoxious. He was banned for breaking rules again and again after receiving several warnings and multiple “final chances.” For fuck’s sake, at some point you have to pull the trigger on a poster who shows he doesn’t think he has to follow the rules or respect the moderation.
