I was scolded by Dex in Cafe Society. But he called it a “general scolding”, so I didn’t take it personally. I guess no system will be perfect in every way for all involved. With the way it is now, I doubt that many banned people are blindsided by it. And besides, there are avenues of appeal. And people banned over misunderstandings and the like have been reinstated. It really is a pretty good set of mods and admins here. For me, that’s more important than the system that’s put in place.
Some of the reasoning the mods have given seems a might shaky and vague.
They DO have records of warnings, and presumably the reason the warning was issued, as well as the post itself that got the warning. How do they gather that info? I don’t know much about the internal workings of message boards, but I assume it’s similar to a copy & paste operation to a spreadsheet cell, on a mod-access-only version of Userinfo. I’m sure they don’t key it in.
Arnold said the info isn’t useable for automated e-mail, but a user might get the details of the last warning if he spams enough mods. That, I assume, is another C&P from the spreadsheet cell to an e-mail template, if any mod feels like doing it.
Now presumably, they’ve got automated e-mail for some functions, such as announcing when yearly renewal is due, which I never got by the way, hence the absence of “charter” from my marquee…This has to operate on flagged names, since they don’t send e-mail to EVERY user, because not all users are paying members. Thus, there IS a way to flag individual names to be sent automated e-mail.
Assuming everything I’ve said is true, a mod could C&P from the usercell, flag the user for automated e-mail, and bodda bing bodda boom, they’re done. The mods have so far been closemouthed on the details of how the board features work, and understandably so. They don’t want to give any haxx0rs out there any more fuel. But this seems like a case of tossing doubletalk to the boss for CYA purposes, when the real problem is lazyness. Maybe the feature is there, but they just don’t feel like using it.
It’s hard to believe a few e-mail warnings would tax the SDMB servers, but we all know how klunky they are from previous experience. The servers are operating on the best that money can apparently buy from state surplus auctions. Those 486s are trying their best.
But Lynn, you can do better than Hotmail FOR FREE. I’d think that anybody who agrees to be a mod for the SDMB realizes the extra work that’s involved, and it seems like they’d want to better the situation through any means possible, and that includes riding the donkey instead of letting the donkey ride you.
But, but, but… You went out of your way to point out that the only automated e-mail in place failed to work for you. Why would you want to implement it for warnings if you know, from your own experience, that it doesn’t work for subscriptions?
The solution for this is quite easy.
Mods, always use the name of the person being warned.
Users, do a vanity search every so often, specifying that it return results by posts instead of threads.
Ta da.
What if the user is “Eve”?
I can’t. The quote mark in my name screws up everything.
Curse you both! shakes fist
Well, the automated email has been known to work…it just depends on who’s pushing the buttons. Maybe if we had spammed enough mods everybody would have gotten renewal notices. So it’s obviously MY fault.