which you said you would be happy to discuss. Then someone got the urge to lock that thread before you could reply.
I would like to hear the reasoning behind the banning of our latest head-to-wall collision machine. He was obviously not terribly smart and not terribly inclined to follow directions, I will give you that. I don’t see how you (collective you) went from that to banning, though. Ignorance should not be a banning offense in a site meant to fight it. Care to share with us what went on?
Sorry I didn’t respond in the other thread. I haven’t read ATMB in a couple of days, so I missed it.
As you can see from the thread where jessesheeran was banned, I originally just gave him a warning, but then upgraded it to a banning after reading my email and catching the mod discussion on him. Basically, the consensus was that he was bringing nothing to the table but idiocy or trolling (maybe both) and showed no signs that that would change any time soon so why not just save everyone’s time and toss him now? I couldn’t really disagree with that, so I tossed him.
Pragmatism, pure and simple. People who want to be posters here don’t make entrances like that. And it doesn’t take many illiterate dingbats to make the board less enjoyable for everyone else.
I won’t argue the idiocy charges. Were the any salient cases of trolling or was it just a general feeling and “we call them as we see them”? I am not really challenging the decision, I just wasn’t really paying much attention to him and I am curious.
I’m not Giraffe, but he simply provided no benefit to the boards. None at all. There was more meaning in the phrase “skdjskdjk kkabbubns skmdxks” than in his posts.
I think it was more of a “no one can really be that dumb, can they?” feeling. (Read through his last two Pit threads.) But, to give him the benefit of the doubt, I tried to leave open the possibility that he was in fact just dumb.
Er, I just did “see all thread started by”. I agree I don’t see how that could be salvaged into a useful voice to have around. Too dumb to know any answers is fine, too dumb to make any questions, not so much. Thanks for taking the time to respond. Now back to your regular programming.
Eh. I still disagree with the banning. He DID actually start some interesting threads. Yes, a lot of what he posted seemed incoherent, but I think it’s kind of like John Noble’s character on The Fringe; sooner or later it would start to make sense.
I suspect the real reason for the banning was that a bunch of people were reporting his threads and getting their panties up in a bunch over him, and the mods basically thought; “we can try to endure this and spend time explaining to people why he isn’t banned, or we can just ban him and make a bunch of people happy and not have to explain it to anyone.”
Although Marley suggests this is not the case, I am sure that even if only at a subconscious level the mods (not as an organized flame but as a random flock) weigh the cost/benefit of a member and that influences a member’s ability to survive. A little trolling creates pageviews, too much trolling outweighs that in mod sweat. The first is welcome, the second is not.
Champion as I am of customer service blablablah, there are customers not worth serving.
We don’t really frame our discussions in terms of pageviews, but we do give value to the feelings of the readership. People want a chance to bat the guy around in the Pit before everything’s shut down, and since we shut down threads at the expense of banned posters, we usually try to let people have their fun for at least a little while. This concurrently gives us a chance to observe the person further and see what they have to offer, while also giving the staff time to discuss the issue.
We don’t really want to be the kind of forum where you post one dumb OP and get kicked. New people get a few chances, but there comes a point where we have to assume someone is either a troll or too massively stupid to be able to do anything but be a disruption.