No, I don’t think you did. See post #7
That’s really all there is to it. Last summer we briefly talked about changing the rule for the reasons you’ve given. There just weren’t a lot of strong feelings one way or the other, so things stayed as they are.
And you’ve still missed the point.
Why have two threads for a banning when you could have just one?
My apologies – I wasn’t deliberately hijacking your thread; I was responding to what I thought was the topic, but was in fact a point raised by other people after the OP. (This can happen when you enter threads via “view first unread,” which is what I did.)
Why lock the banning announcement and force the creation of a separate thread for the discussion? I don’t know, but agree that it doesn’t make a huge amount of sense. Let’s see if we can’t get an answer for you on this.
This makes the third time: it’s done to discourage piling on. I’m sorry if you don’t like the answer or don’t think it makes sense as a policy - and I don’t think it makes a lot of difference either -but that’s what the answer is.
I don’t think it’s a hijack – your OP complains about there being two ATMB threads for any banning people want to discuss instead of just one. I can see the mods’ point of not wanting their name on the OP of every banning thread where people may criticize the bannee, but still needing to announce their actions, so I suggested separating announcements and discussion into separate forums.
From your subsequent posts, it’s pretty clear you want announcements to be made in ATMB and left unlocked so people can comment in the same thread. I don’t think it’s a terrible idea, but the mods have stated they’d prefer not to do it that way, so I’m not sure what else there is to discuss there.
Same apology for the same reason.
And again, why not just say “no piling ons on banning threads”?.
Can we pile on on those second threads?
if yes, then why not on the official announcement?
if no, then why would we on the official announcement?
One or other of us is missing something very simple here. Please take me through it step by step.
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Explain to me exactly how “piling on” is prevented in this thread.
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Explain to me how “piling on” might have occurred in this thread, if you had left it open.
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Why doesn’t your answer to question 1 also apply to question 2 ?
I think closing the announcement thread “discourages” pile-ons in that someone has to go to that little extra effort to start a thread to ask, and some people will be too lazy to bother. So that is a useful purpose for separating the announcement thread vs. the discussion thread.
I don’t see any really useful purpose to combining the two threads, so I vote for keeping them separate.
Back in the old days when I was a moderator, I once posted in a thread a list of rule-breaking posts made by the banned poster. I received a private e-mail saying that this was unnecessary, shouldn’t have been done, and was unfair to the banned poster. So in my case, I know of one example of such a complaint.
If it were made to be a general practice, I would be somewhat surprised if absolutely no one complained about it, because it is very rare to find a staff action (relating to board rules/discipline) that has 100% approval.
I seem to recall seeing a few posts worrying about whether warnings would be on public view when in the thread where we discussed the new infraction system. I’m not sure if those are the sort of examples that would satisfy mhendo’s or Giraffe’s inquiries, though.
ETA: Nope. Not in the thread I was thinking of anyway.
To be clear, I was expressing skepticism that the viewpoint of “the evil nasty mods embarrass and humiliate people by making their transgressions public knowledge” would be the expected response to implementing my suggestion and would be significant enough that to proceed anyway would be damaging to the effort of building community.
While I’d expect some people to disagree about the usefulness of recording official warnings in a public subforum, I think it’s fairly ludicrous to imply that posters as a group views the mods in such unwinnable and cartoonish terms, and (IMO) highly counterproductive to offer that as a reason why a suggested course of action can not be taken.
Which is a long-winded way to saying: digging around to find some post where someone said they disapproved of posting people’s warnings is missing the point. Don’t waste your time.
I see your point. Never mind then. 
Another thing to consider then: back in the example I previously mentioned, several posters in the thread (and one of my fellow adminstrators) had the fear that, if I listed all the transgressions for this banned user, people would use that to argue future bannings, saying “why was X banned after 10 warnings and Y was banned after 9 warnings”? It turns out that this didn’t happen after my one time posting of multiple examples of rule-breaking for this particular poster, but it might happen in the future.
Publicly listing all the transgressions might be a good thing. I can see two possible drawbacks:
- In a banning thread, I can see some SDMB historian-types, who love to rehash old events, going over each previous warning and arguing it all over again. I guess this is mostly a drawback from a staff member’s point of view.
- Since moderating has changed over time, some posters might be confused that something was OK back in 2002 but not OK now, or vice-versa.
I’m not trying to go on record against publicly listing the warnings, I really don’t care much one way or another, but I foresee the situation where it would make more work for the staff.
I think it all comes down to how you view the posters as a group. In my experience as a mod here, I found that the overwhelming majority of people here just want fair rules that are stated clearly and applied reasonably consistently. They don’t hate the mods, they aren’t looking for things to complain about, they aren’t going to try to game the rules at every turn. These are the people you should be designing the system around, not the rules lawyers and nitpickers that might hypothetically emerge from the woodwork if you change anything. So (IMO) the question of whether or not to e.g. create a public warnings record should be considered not from the perspective of Joe Rules-Lawyer and how he’ll use it to cause trouble, but from that of Jane Newbie, who just showed up and wants to learn the ropes. I think it could be useful.
Sure, you’ll still have the rules lawyers and nitpickers to contend with, but that’s just part of the moderation gig. And even if a public warnings record may make it easier for them to point out that the mods banned poster A after 4 warnings while poster B got 15, so what? The mods don’t have to pretend at papal infallibility – it’s not the end of the world to admit that poster B got away with more warnings than he probably should have because no one noticed how many he’d racked up. Similarly, there doesn’t have to be a pretense that there’s a mathematical formula for bannings and suspensions – we all know there isn’t. If you get more than a couple of warnings in a short amount of time, the mods might assess your value as a poster and guess at your intentions and you might get suspended/booted.
Ironically, despite all this blah blah, I don’t really care that much about having rules publicly posted, so if my suggestion isn’t taken, no big whoop. I just hate the attitude that we can’t change anything because someone might at some point complain.
In principle this is true. But I will state my own Humble Opinion: I would prefer to have 10 Jane Newbies asking in ATMB “can you explain this to me” than one Joe Rules-lawyer being a PITA. In my experience, all it would take would be a miniscule percentage of posters making it their mission to argue every moderator call ad nauseam to get on my nerves. I would much rather have to answer multiple questions from well-intentioned people making a sincere effort to fit in.
But that’s just it – you’re already getting that in the second thread. It’s NOT being prevented. So what’s the point?
It requires someone to open a new thread. They have to take a step to do so, above and beyond the thread that is necessary when someone is banned. It’s a slightly higher barrier to entry.
We don’t know how many threads are prevented; we can’t count the ones that don’t get started.
We just had a fairly comprehensive discussion of this on the mod loop, and this is the main reason for continuing with the current system:
There are thus no plans to change the way we’re handling it currently.