Yeah, I wouldn’t support that change if my fellow mods proposed it.
I think one of the strengths of the SDMB is that feedback - polite feedback - is allowed in terms of protesting and discussing moderation decisions and policies. And sometimes things to get changed and policies remade. It’s not often but it does happen.
I’ve seen other fora where moderation is both draconian and non-appealable. That’s really not something we want to encourage. I’d prefer to have the back-and-forth - even if it’s sometimes testy - and see those gains and refinements happen over time.
When I joined, just before the turn of the century, the Pit was the designated forum for complaints and questions about specific moderator actions. One problem with that arrangement was that other posters could just pile on against the OP if they were feeling particularly snarky, because the Pit tends to foster that kind of behavior.
IMHO moving moderation-related discussions to ATMB was the right thing to do, and it’s a good reason we can even have such conversations, unlike most other message boards.
When I was still new around here I innocently questioned the closure of a thread I had started. I really wanted to know, and what I also didn’t really know yet was the way things work around here. Some Other Poster, who I don’t think is around anymore, jumped in with such insulting and aggressive language that I felt like I’d stepped on a rake.
How would anyone know? The mod wouldn’t admit that’s what they were doing. They might not even realize it themselves. There would be no proof.
Plus I’ve never in my history of posting seen a mod who was fired because posters complained about them. And I am aware of mods being fired, even though they always say they are “stepping down.” You can tell the difference.
I could see proposing that those who contest disingenuouly get moderated, as I suggested before. On the other hand, I know that it’s easy to be biased towards thinking that everyone is disingenuous. (I’ve even been accused of such, and everyone knows I do not lie.) So it’s better that the mods err on the side of not punishing them.
Being able to contest Warnings is a good thing. You don’t want a chilling effect where people would be afraid to contest even when they have a good reason.
The penalty for denied protests and general whining should be an insulting smilie that appears next to your username for a designated period.
And moderators should be allowed to have an appropriate number of scalps or similar smilies next to their usernames to designate how many posters they’ve banned. Sort of like fighter pilots had for the number of enemy planes they shot down.
engineer_comp_geek is the current banmeister with at least 11,763 spammers (actually many more, since some of the posts document multiple spammers), 223 socks, and 118 others. So you would need a 60-page thread just to list them all.
And beyond that - there is an existing solution for this problem if it were ever deemed to be a problem. If (say) somebody is warned for trolling, and then starts and ATMB thread that is a thinly-veiled excuse for continuing that trolling, there’s no reason the mods can’t issue another warning for the ATMB thread.
