Banning a paying member for good cause is an administrative action, which I’ve always considered justifiable on the same logic as getting bounced out of a nightclub. The management isn’t obligated to allow you to remain there in ALL possible circumstances, and you don’t get your cover charge back if you are in fact bounced out. In my (completely non-lawyer’s) humble opinion, a mob banning seems harder to uphold legally.
This is to say nothing of the administrative headaches involved with a voting system. How would it be done? Presumably there’d be a poll of some kind where the prospective bannee could watch the progress of his or her “trial”, and presumably offer a defense.
The analogy that occurs to me is black-balling someone from a private club. Or “so-and-so is a PitA so I am kicking her off my softball team”. Banning someone because the mods think he is a jerk is not significantly different, IMO, from banning him because some percentage of the members think he is a jerk.
Some forums have point systems. I suppose people would be banned once they got enough points.
Post reports go only to the mods for that forum. As to why they didn’t respond, I don’t know, but it is a fact that all of us on staff are volunteers who have lives and obligations outside the Dope, and none of us is around here 24/7.
Wouldn’t it be cool if there was a way that all the mods could check the reports for each forum? An idea that occurred to me is to create an email address that all the mods have access to, and set that address up for every forum. They wouldn’t use it to send anything, but just to see reports if the forum mods aren’t present.
Even better would be if it could redirect to a hidden forum that the on duty mod could check every once in a while.
Is there some kind of rota for mods, to ensure that there is always a mod or two around at any given time? If so, Big T’s idea seems like a very good one.
There is no such thing. We do try to keep each other informed if we know we’re going to be offline for a lengthy for any reason, but otherwise, we don’t have any such formal schedule.
I think we would be flooded by that. A single spam post in GQ can generate 20 reports, especially if none of the forum mods can get to it immediately. If I was getting reports from all forums, I guarantee that I wouldn’t be able to pay much attention to reports from outside my own. Sometimes I’m too busy even to attend to reports from GQ; but that’s why we have four mods for the forum.
We do try to let each other know if we are going to be away for a while, and if an absence is prolonged someone else will be assigned to receive reports from that forum. However, I think members have to understand that this place is run by volunteers, who have real lives (or something like it;), and who can’t be on duty 24/7. Try to be patient.
It’s possible. And it does happen. This is one of the reasons why the SDMB moderators are all technically supermoderators. Not just for the warm fuzzy feeling that such a title might bring, but because a supermoderator can moderate in ANY forum, not just his/her assigned forum. If a GQ mod sees spam in MPSIMS, then s/he can take care of it. USUALLY, mods stick to their own forums, and if they see something in another forum, give a heads up via the “report this post” button to the regular forum mods. Anyone who sees a spammer is supposed to take immediate action, though.
If you (as a poster) see a spam post, yeah, go ahead and report it, and note in the thread that you’ve reported it. I remember that when I got email notifications, I’d get a couple of dozen spam reports on the same post. We do appreciate people reporting spam, and we appreciate it even more when they note in the thread that they’ve reported it.
Yeah, I didn’t think about the fact that you tend to get more than one report per bad post. But I could imagine a system that would just show you that a post has been reported X times, so you know to check it out. It would include both the actual post and a link to the thread, and let you moderate from it if you wanted. And it wouldn’t be something you’d have to use all the time.
And, yes, I understand that you guys aren’t on all the time. I just was thinking pie-in-the-sky stuff. That’s why I put it “wouldn’t it be cool” form instead of a serious suggestion.