Yes, but it would take some script hacking. I doubt if they’d go for that.
And yet someone who tells someone to go kill himself doesn’t get banned.
Well, that was in another forum.
If I’m not mistaken, I believe a new category of user can be created and that user category can be assigned certain priviledges and denied others. Potentially a person can have read only access to GQ or any other forum, depending on what their user classification.
And also not against the rules. 
I think anyone can read anything. You just can’t post if you’re banned.
Yes, new user categories can be created, but I don’t think vB allows them to be imposed on individual forum categories. It’s an all-or-none thing as far as the scripts are concerned. I’ve worked on hacking forum (that is, making them better by improving the coding, not breaking into them) boards similar to this and they all behave the same in that respect.
EasyPhil: I do believe the bit about wishing someone go kill themselves has been expressly prohibited. Give me some time and I’ll see if I can find…er…
So, what are we calling the Words of the Moderators/Admins these days? I was going to type stone tablets but that’s so 20th Century.
Yes, I see the joke in there. That’s why I typed century with a capital c.
p.s. Great username.
Looks like we have another mass banning on the way in the french fries thread in GQ. When will people learn that we are not here to have human conversations!
I guess I can understand the problem the mods had with the posts, though I never would have expected such a mass banning from them. I just figured the first bannings from the “No Politics in GQ” policy would have stemmed from the daily non-sequitur “Bush is an idiot/stole the election/Clinton couldn’t keep it in his pants/lied about everything” genres. Those get really old.
Hey, Phil! You’re right! I obviously misremembered the Administrator’s comment. Here it is from the Moderator Behaviour (not by a newbie) thread in the BBQ Pit:
I’ll use a bit of induction here and decide for myself that if it’s not against the rules in GD to express a desire for a public figure to commit suicide, then it’s not against the rules in the BBQ Pit to issue an imperative for another poster to commit suicide. Of course it’s incredibly tacky, tastless, stupid, petty, childish, and moronic, but not against the rules. It ought to be against the rules, though, IMHO.
Okay, so my question still stands: What’re we going to call them thar words instead of stone tablets.
I can tell you that if I find something like that in MPSIMS, I’m gonna make a stink about it. And I suspect that were it to be found in the Pit, the Pit mods would have something to say, too. It’s a question of who one is wishing death upon. Comments towards public figures are treated differently than comments directed towards members of the boards. Except where U.S. law says it’s illegal to do so, as in the case of the president of the United States.
That’s disingenuous at best, a complete misreprestation at worst. There are forums for “human conversations,” such as MPSIMS, IMHO, Cafe Society, etc. General Questions is intended to serve a very specific purpose, “human conversation” ain’t it. We realize fully that these types of conversations are going to take place no matter what, hence the evolution of MPSIMS (and some other forums). Initially the SDMB consisted entirely of CoCC, GQ and later CoSR; the other forums were established as we saw certain types of converstations as being inevitable. All we ask is that these things are kept to the correct forums; they’re in no way proscripted.
[Pharmacy Tech geek Mode ON]How about enteric coated stone tablets?[/Pharmacy Tech geek Mode OFF]
Then perhaps it would have been a better idea to simply ask the posters in question to keep to the other forums from now on, rather than banning them altogether. It is sad that javaman gets banned after 2058 posts because he didn’t understand the new rule enforcement in GQ.
When was that law passed?
:rolleyes:
I stand corrected re: javaman being a newbie.
Anyway, there’s a long-running problem of people not paying the slightest bit of attention to the rules around here. Yes, we all break them, either by a mistake, or because it’s a flexible rule, but God damn, some people act like they just don’t care about rules or basic working of the SDMB.
How many times are we going to see posts asking why the edit feature doesn’t work? How many people are going to start threads asking which P2P application works best on their OS? Does this sound familiar?
People continue to make zero effort to learn the ways of this board. How far can that go? A line has to be drawn clearly somwehere. Plastering the rules all over the place doesn’t seem to work, so what the hell is a bunch overworked unpaid folks to do?
Reviewing the thread, I think it’s a bummer that javaman was basically in the wrong place at the wrong time. What he did in that thread* has been tolerated for a long time, and he, along with the other bannees, just happened to be standing where the rug was yanked out.
*-OP starts with “Just the facts no debate,” java starts his with “[mounting high horse]”. He didn’t start the hijack, but he did participate.
I’m not wholly worried, because manhattan’s post above implies (“Can they come back? Actually, yeah.”) that they will be welcomed back, assuming they agree to follow the revamped rules. If it looked like they were gone for good, then it’d be a different story.
http://www4.law.cornell.edu/uscode/18/871.html
Title 18, Part 1, Chapter 41, Section 871: Threats against President and successors to the Presidency
I don’t know when exactly it was passed, but I know it dates back to before Bush43, Clinton or Bush41.
Also, subsequent court decisions have ruled that the law also applies to email and messages on the Internet, which includes what get posted at the SDMB.
That was in response to Aslan2, btw.
I just noticed that your profile gives a location of Vancouver. The Chicago Reader and the SDMB, however, are in the US and are subject to its laws.
Ah.
AE (Area Effect, mass) Bannings suck ass. They ruin alot of boards and people are left thinking wtf did I get banned for?