First you are warned. Then you are suspended. Then you are banned. Should we add additional intermediate steps? I perceive no injustice under the status quo, but I do question whether we could improve the board incrementally. Needscoffee suggests that we permit multiple suspensions, in a rinse and repeat cycle.
I would say that the 2nd suspension might be for 3 months. Some people might benefit from an extended breather.
Giraffe suggests forum-specific bannings: maybe some people are just bad matches for certain forums.
I’m not asking for an official statement from TPTB: I’m hoping for a discussion. I recognize that the track record with repeated trials for problem posters isn’t that great. I still prefer the single-suspension policy over what preceded it, if only because it’s reassuring to those who haven’t followed the particular drama in detail. But I wonder whether adding additional steps might help incrementally, without putting an undue burden on the staff.
Like most threads in ATMB, GQ, GD, IMHO…, this one is unlikely to settle anything. But it might at least succeed in outlining some of the main issues. For reference, here’s a partial list of recently banned posters. And here are some of my arguments against such a change.
I wouldnt oppose something like warnings, then eventually a few month suspension, then something like 6 months to a year for the next suspension, then perhaps 3 years for the next one. Then a final banning. Though I’d certainly want a very strict enforcement of the posters proper behavior after the 6 month suspension. Such a system would probably only “save” a very low number of problem posters that with great time can change their behavior though.
I think it’s always a bit of a shock when a well known poster is banned, even if youve seen that person get warnings and mod spankings (damn iPad spell checker) for months or years. It seems, well, wrong somehow, even if you never really liked the poster in question and even thought they were an idiot (when I get banned, someone link to this post and smile, kk?:p). You expect newbies, especially one off drive by types to get banned, and spammer idiot who come in with some YouTube video we all really must see, but when it’s someone you’ve ‘known’ and fought with, or even been on their side in a debate, well…you almost have a relationship with that person, and inside you hate to see them go. Even if they were an idiot, or an asshole.
Specifically, IMHO the mods bend over backwards for the older, more well known posters. They give them plenty of chances to change. And assuming my personal experience with them is any indication, they send plenty of private messages and emails to give additional weight to what they are trying to say…namely to back off and straighten up, that you are on thin ice.
So, I don’t think we need more strikes, personally. Them mods just need to do what they are doing, and use the ban hammer of doom judiciously, and only after due consideration. Jmho…mmv…
Unless you are a spammer it’s a long road to banning.
The idea about warnings in the first place is that the user being warned will change their behavior. And mostly people DO listen, and learn, and change.
In fact it’s a tiny percentage of our users who get warned in the first place. And the overwhelming majority of those users, they get that one warning and they change their behavior, and that’s the end of it, and we never have problems with them again. Problem solved.
Then we have people who don’t listen, and don’t learn, or don’t care to, or can’t help themselves, or whatever. And we try to get their attention, and they just keep going.
It takes a while to get to the suspension place – and that’s the next to the last stop. If the user is not going to change after all that, nothing else is going to make them change.
And so that’s the end of it. There’s no reason to subject the good users of this site to more of the same from those who don’t want to follow the rules or are incapable of following the rules. You deserve a better experience than to have to put up with that.
It also saddens me to read that some of you think banning is inevitable. I can’t imagine why you would think that way.
Note: In the instance I was quoted about in the OP, I suggested suspending again largely because the last suspension was described as being early last year, over a year and a half ago. I don’t hang out in GD where most of the offenses occurred, though, and have little knowledge of his history other than what Marley23 linked to in his banning notice.
The exchange that got gonzomax banned was not worthy of a banning, it wasn’t worthy of any moderation, imo. This staff stunt blatantly emphasizes how subjectively this board is run, a harmless exchange can mean the difference between being able to post here and losing that privilege altogether.
When longtime contributing, harmless posters are being banned, how can this kind of strict subjective policing be a good thing for place?
Horseshit. You don’t get banned out of the blue. Gonzo didn’t just suddenly get banned for innocuous posts. He had a history of butting heads and not following mod warnings and not changing his posting style. I’ll save the other things I think about him and his posting style for the pit or to myself since he’s gone now, but to try and say his banning was in any way random is just bullshit and revisionist history. Same for Dio. I liked DtC, even if I rarely agreed with him, but it was militantly unsurprising when he got banned.
Sometimes the final offense is something that perhaps we would counsel someone else for. But when it’s part of an overall pattern of bad behavior, enough is too much. There’s negative consequences to cumulative bad behavior and to give someone with a longstanding pattern of misbehavior the same consideration we would to a first-time offender is no way to run things.
You haven’t read anything the mods said, it seems tlc; it is clear that they gave Gonzo plenty of rope, and he just used it to hang himself (i.e. it wasn’t just this “one” instance). It’s pretty obvious to me that some people’s posting styles are compulsive, and in such cases they rarely change their spots, and deserve their final reward.
So Gonzomax responds with this. http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showpost.php?p=14376507&postcount=501 Hardly anything to consider misbehavior on a message board, yet gonzomax gets a warning. The comment “if you think it is meaningless, you do not know baseball”, in the context of the discussion doesn’t seem out of line. Yet someone thought it was. On the other hand “…your clueless parroting of phrases” was not deemed out of line. This is the kind of subjectivity I am talking about.
I think the system we have now is pretty good, although I want to point out that it’s informal and I don’t see a lot of upside in formalizing it. For people who have been here a while, we almost always suspend them before we ban. Even though a suspension is officially supposed to be your last chance, people who are back from suspension usually get multiple warnings before they’re banned because we don’t want to rush to pull the plug on people. We give people a lot of chances to show they’re improving. I don’t think adding extra steps is necessary and I don’t see it doing much good.
Very long suspensions are pretty much de facto bans anyway. Whether you say the poster is banned forever or suspended for a year, the underlying fact is that the poster is evidently unable to follow the rules here. And if you have a poster who does stick around after that many suspensions, I think that system gives them chance after chance to act up - something they have already done many times - while making it tougher for us to ban them once it’s clear things are not working out.
Say we have a poster who’s been warned many times and is suspended for a month. He comes back and gets warned again, which means he could be disrupting a thread or goading someone into insulting him. Then he gets suspended for three months and comes back and does the same thing. That’s another thread thrown off track and another possible warning to another poster. Then he gets a six-month suspension, and after that…
What is the SDMB gaining from this? Additional threads get derailed, multiple people may get warned, and all of that for someone who has been warned 10 or 20 times, which is more than enough times to know they’re not a good fit for the board.
As far as subjectivity goes, yes, moderating is subjective. There are a lot of judgment calls, and I don’t think anybody has said otherwise. It’s possible that some of gonzomax’s warnings could have been mod notes instead, although if you go down that road I think you have to acknowledge that some of the many mod notes he received could have been warnings instead. As it is, some of his warnings were not exactly borderline:
Well if I ever do that, assume it’s an attempt at hilarity. I guess I should say explicitly that I personally don’t have a problem with the gonzo banning.
DtC’s ~3 page post-ban requiem was full of complaints about the guy – but nobody claimed that he insulted people too much, which is what he got banned for. The things that people did complain about were, “Putting things in the worst possible way” - and other nonbannable/nonwarnable offenses.[sup]1[/sup] All that said, there’s no outrage here, as he was given adequate opportunities to straighten up and fly right. The suspension technique provides that sort of demonstration.
So if there’s no injustice, we’re in the land of cost/benefit analysis and applied criminology. They say that speed and certainty of punishment matter more than severity. I wonder whether a greater use of the proverbial penalty box vis a vis Giraffe’s recommendation for forum suspension would improve the climate here, or whether it would just piss people off. Ah, who am I kidding? All changes to board policy piss people off… That said, we don’t have to use the Multiple Warning/Final Suspension Warning/You’re Out! system. We could hand out 1 week suspensions like candy (though that would tend to disrupt conversations). We could try the rinse and repeat method for posters with both demonstrably good behavior and demonstrably bad behavior. There are options.
Ookay, on preview:
Well I was thinking of 3-4 month bans, followed by 6 months, followed by 8 month, etc. I imagined that some might wander away on their own or sharply reduce their posting level if given 4 months of cold turkey.
“…once it’s clear things are not working out.”
If bannings only occur under circumstances where the consensus is that there’s no way the poster is going to straighten up… well frankly I trust mod discretion at this board. Giraffe thought there might be scope for a wider pallet of punishment but, but then he would, wouldn’t he? BWHAHAHAAH… (I kid.)
If somebody is terrible in IMHO but well behaved in GD and GQ, might there be an obvious solution, jointly agreed to by poster and mod? Admittedly, this situation might be a nonexistent one. And for many or most problem posters we should anticipate the possibility of migrating bad behavior.
Thank you Tuba and Marley for your comments. I would hope that if you do spot deficiencies in the current system that you consider alternatives, which I readily admit are far from obvious or easily implemented without drama.
[sup]1[/sup]That’s not true. Yes it is. No it isn’t. Yes it is.
Exactly. You get plenty of mod notes, you get quite a few official warnings, you get a suspension, and then you get some more warnings. What’s so hard about avoiding the final blow, if you actually have any intention of following the rules in the first place?
It would show understanding, both of the subjective nature of most warnings and of the power to mete them out, to institute an incremental length of suspensions, the final one being a virtual banning (i.e., three or five years). First one is a day, next one is a week, one after that three weeks, after that, two months, after that five months, etc., with a generous provision for appealing each warning. That way, few people could claim that it was being done out of pique, or on a personal basis, or anything of that sort. Now it just seems like a kangaroo court to me…
IMO, that’s a silly and counterproductive proposal. It’s not a court of law, or nursery school. If it gets to suspension you’re on your last leg; it doesn’t need to be more complex than that.
Yes, heaven forbid the mods do work. This principle, “the mods’ convenience before all other considerations,” seems pretty well entrenched around here, I’ll concede that.