No, I had no thought at all about making them more private. I think the warnings should be public. I think there should be an email notice in addition.
The public warning in the thread is not solely for the benefit of the poster being warned. It’s for anybody reading the thread, to let them know what is inappropriate behavior at the message board.
Having the warning only in a warning thread in a separate location would not serve the purpose. If a poster doesn’t check the threads in which s/he has posted, it seems even less likely to me that they will bother to check a warning thread every time they visit the message board.
The other option would be to post the warning twice each time, once in the thread, once in the warning thread. Too much work, too little benefit.
Some posters (not the OP currently) don’t have their e-mail address listed. My interpretation is that people that don’t have an e-mail address listed don’t want to received e-mails related to the message board.
Currently, when a poster gets so many warnings that it’s becoming a problem, before banning them immediately, we email the poster to let them know that they’re getting close to the invisible line. I’m OK with that system. It would probably be nice to send an e-mail along with a warning but, especially for posters that don’t have an e-mail listed, it requires a few extra steps that I don’t think are really necessary, since we have the “warning e-mail before being banned”. I assume that in the meantime a poster will at least see some of the warnings they have been given.
P.S. That’s my opinion, not official policy.
You should see casual Fridays here. Imperial Rome had nothing on us, baby!
I misunderstood. Sorry for putting words into your mouth.
Casey - from the OP it seemed clear to me that the poster in question was saying that he was concerned that he might not get the warning if it was only posted. I get that directly from the language of the OP, as I already quoted to you :
my position is that there is a valid reason to notify the board that action is taken “this behavior gets Poster B a warning” also suggests that replicating the behavior on my part would also get a warning. (understanding the Reeder & handy codiciles). It is important also, though that the individual poster being warned gets the message, wouldn’t you agree?
In my experience, there’s quite a few times I"ve noted “warnings” to posters quite a while after they posted. and not infrequently the type of post that gets a warning is a drive by type of bs, which pretty much by definition means the poster involved isn’t coming back to the thread. and again, from my own posting history, the percentage of threads I’ve posted to that I check back on is substantially less than 100%, which means to me that there’s reason to believe that some percentage of warnings never actually get read by the poster warned. this seems counter productive.
re: how much work it is etc:
how many warnings get issued? I hang out in the pit and most threads don’t contain any. back in my GD days, I didn’t see that many either. If we’re talking 100 warnings a day sure, that would be quite a number. but 20? not so much. besides, they actually tell us they prefer to answer certain questions via email, right?
and naturally, several others posted while I was composing that last one, so, if I seemed harsh to you Casey re: the interpretation of the OP, sorry. wasn’t intentional. re: **Arnold’s ** post, if they don’t have it listed in their profile, I’d assume they don’t want their email available to the members at large. if you subscribe to threads, youget the email, even if you don’t have your email posted in your profile. and there’s an implicite assumption by the sticky “keep a vaild email address” from the administration that suggests that the board administration may have need to contact you from time to time, IMHO.
I think it would be a good thing if a poster could arbitrarily check his/her status. I have no real idea what warnings I’ve accumulated. I can’t think of a good low-effort way to implemenent that though, with my limited knowledge of the VB software.
I believe that even mods themselves have said that they failed to see a request for closure or whatever because they had left a thread and didn’t return. There are lots of reasons not to return to a thread other than laziness. And not just for mods.
Related question:
Do the Mods maintain a database for member warnings?
If so, could you check your status by emailing a Mod?
We keep a list of warnings. It is not in a form that could be queried by message board members. vbulletin doesn’t have any facility for keeping track of message board warnings.
You can always e-mail a moderator or administrator to ask what your latest warnings have been. Be sure to e-mail more than one person, because we never guarantee that any one staff member will be available and reading e-mails.
It appears that there have been some attempts at adding one. And that’s just what I found in 10 seconds with google.
I agree that an email should be sent out automatically with a warning, but there’s no need for it to require duplicate effort on the part of a mod; it could be built into the board.
ok. let me get this straight. to have the single moderator issuing the exact number of warnings also issue an email is “too much work” but having a policy that if any of the thousands of posters here wonder if they’ve missed warnings in the past, have each of them email several moderators asking if they’ve had warnings, and this is the preferred, (less work?) method?
Those are third-party hacks and modifications; they aren’t supported by Jelsoft, the makers of vBulletin.
So, theoretically, how much would one have to pay in order to have their voice heard when they make requests or give suggestions to the administration?
While I will totally cop to being melodramatic here, I fail to see how making the observation that the default setting around here is to treat any suggestion of how things might be handled better as some sort of an attack makes me a douchebag.
Am I wrong? Have I missed all of those threads?
For fuck’s sake, Binarydrone. Reread every one of your posts up until the point where I called you a douchebag. You preemptively announced that the sky was falling, since the mods and admins of this board care only about taking your money but otherwise don’t give two shits about you. As an unpaid volunteer (who has now seen how much work the other mostly unpaid volunteers do to try to make this board a good place to be), I found your attitude annoying and called you a name. Get over it already. You’re welcome to post suggestions and complaints, but you don’t have to be a total asshole about it.
I agree that Lynn Bodoni’s only post in the thread was rude, unhelpful, and flippant. But others (Arnold Winkelreid, Skipmagic, Giraffe) have come in and given reasons why the suggestion won’t become SDMB policy. So, it’s pretty clear that the administration does listen, and that not all of them take suggestions as attacks. “Listening” to suggestions doesn’t mean that they’ll actually implement the suggestions. I don’t agree with their reasons given–I think that, if a Member is given a warning, a courtesy email should be sent, perhaps with just a link to the post with the warning–but they are listening.
(OK, Giraffe did call you a douchebag. But you were really hamming up the melodrama beyond all reason.)
When those requests are phrased like an adult would phrase them? Dunno. Probably $14.95. When phrased like a whiney four year old (“Thank you for your input; we will give it the consideration that we feel that it deserves. Go back to sleep. Nothing needs to change. Everything is fine here. As it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be. Amen. Go back to sleep, little posters, with dreams of the just and the favored dancing in your heads. Go back to sleep.”)? You couldn’t pay me enough.
I guess I’m having trouble understanding why you’re making such a big, dramatic deal out of this. As Giraffe pointed out, people being oblivious to their warning status has not traditionally been a problem. By the time you’ve amassed enough bad will from the moderators to get your ass booted, you’d have to be amazingly oblivous not to know that you’ve been flouting the “Don’t be a jerk.” rule. (All the other posters calling you a “jerk” would be a good clue.) And if you’re that oblivious to the subtle nuances of human relationships, why would we want you around?
In practice is probably is. Obviously if thousands of posters actually emailed the mods to ask about their warnings, it would be way too much work for them to handle. But I doubt that actually happens. Maybe this thread will result in a few dozen people emailing to ask, and then next week? I’d bet it drops down to zero queries or close to it.
If they were getting overwhelmed with emails about how many warnings posters have, I assume they’d implement another method or at least consider other ideas to try and decrease the work load. But my guess is that they get very few emails about the issue except when some thread momentarily gets people in a tizzy about it, so it is the method that requires the least amount of work.
I guess that there are a few things at play here. One is that, and this is just an overall feeling that I have, my take is that there is a serious lag on the part of the administration in the perception of the members here as paying customers (as opposed to freeloaders). Also, whenever someone brings something up it seems to me that for the most part it is dealt with in a dismissive and belittling way and then inevitably when we complain about that we are reminded that the moderators are unpaid. So I guess that you could say that this has been a low-grade annoyance for quite a while now.
It is not that I don’t get that moderating this place is probably a lot of hard work. I do get that and, for those that seem to take it seriously, thank them for their efforts. The thing is, though, I really don’t care that they don’t get paid. The administration can either have people that do this for a hobby and enjoy it, or they can develop a business model that will support them being able to pay people to do a job.
What really kind of pushed my buttons, though, was Lynn’s reply which I really read as nothing more than her saying don’t bother us with this, and by the way I can’t really load the board on my 28.8 connection and email is iffy at best.
Finally, I am still pretty pissed over the whole gum thing, and am probably nursing that a bit.
So, to wrap up: sorry to have douchbagged anyone.
I know you probably don’t give a shit what I think, Binarydrone, but for what it’s worth, I thought your posts were funny. I didn’t catch the vibe that you were being melodramatic, rather, that you were attempting to make your point with a little sarcastic humor. Even if no one else did, I giggled. 