I wish message boards had the capability to set the maximum number of daily posts a person could make. I think this would help deal with situations where people get warnings or get banned. Quite often, I think the troublesome posters can be valuable members, but sometimes they take things a little too far. But if they could only post a certain number of times per day, they may take more care with their posts. The cap could also be reduced if they continued to be troublesome. So they could have their limit of posts per day be something like 10, then 5, then 2, then 1, then banned.
What got me thinking about this is how when a zombie thread gets revived, it’s common to see many of the old posters with the banned tag. Many of those posters I remember as being very interesting and I wish they were still around. If instead they could have had some restrictions put on their posts, they might not have gotten to the point of being banned.
I don’t think the SDMB can do this, but I just wanted to toss it out there in case any message board designers happen to be out there.
I’ve seen board software that allows administrators to enforce a minimum amount of time between posts for specific members. You could, for example, restrict a member to one post per 7200 seconds, which works out to 12 posts per day. It’s not a daily counter, though; they would simply not be able to post if less than two hours had elapsed since their most recent post. So not quite the same thing as what you’re suggesting.
I think that would also be a good way to handle the situation. By having a time limit between posts, the person has to think if they want to burn their slot by posting something, and it limits how much they can participate in a flame war.
I doubt this. It would take longer for posters to be suspended or banned, but some posters are bound to get in trouble, anyway, and it will happen eventually. A better solution would be to create a box forum, where problematic posters would be restricted to that forum only, before being allowed back into the other forums.
I think the socks problem exists no matter what is done–ban, warning, timeout forum, post limited, etc. Someone can create a sock at anytime.
I’m not sure that it would be a lot of extra work for the mods. They already have to deal with warnings. Having some sort of post limit seems like it would a similar amount of work. When the mods are addressing a reported post, they can up the time limit just like they would have given a warning. The subsequent warnings would continue to add time.
The jail forum could also be good, but that seems like it would actually be more work. Presumably, there would need to be some decision made about when to let them out of jail. Maybe that could be automated, where the person is sent for 1 week or something.
I have seen on other forums where bans can be for different lengths of time, but then the person comes back, they often still exhibit many of the same behaviors. But regardless, I don’t necessarily think that they should be completely banned. Some people can be very passionate and can get a little to heated or overbearing depending on the topic. However, that doesn’t mean they are problematic all the time. Often, they can provide valuable content. Having something that slows them down would likely mean they would not get to that level.
No, some people are intent on being shit disturbers. They accumulate like 12 warnings and month-long suspensions. Do you think those people should be allowed to stay? I don’t, and good riddance. Some people just don’t have good intentions.
There could still be bans for worthless posters. I’m not saying those should go away. I see these limitation proposals as a way of a kind of probation to encourage the person to behave. If someone gets enough warnings that their post delay gets up to 1 post a week or 1 post a month, they are essentially banned anyway. If they want to use that one post to earn themselves an actual ban, great!
There really aren’t many posters I can think of who ended up getting banned because they “posted too much.” A few people get so worked up in heated discussions that they forget themselves and insult people. But there’s lots of relatively unprolific posters who get banned mainly because, well, they’re jerks.
I think the current system where we leave it up to the mods to decide when a ban is worthy actually works.
There’s no rule about the number of warnings, etc. that results in a ban, it is left to the subjectivity of the mods, and they consider the type of poster, how long they’ve been here, does the poster seem like something abnormal is going on with them, is this behavior uncharacteristic of them.
Just because you think they have had some really good contribution to subjects in the past, I don’t think the mods are willy nilly just banning people because of one instance.
