This place is a message board on the internet, and though it may be a special place for many, being tossed off the board for misbehavior after repeatedly being warned is not life threatening. The operators of the board make it reasonably clear how they expect the participants to behave.
I’m not sure I see what all the fuss is about. This place is a free resource moderated by volunteers. If the participants can’t follow some simple rules of the board, their banning is appropriate. If we were all paying for a valuable resource I might hold a different opinion, but you do have to craft your expectations to meet what you are paying for.
There have been a lot of bannings here. Zombie threads with half of the posters banned are an ugly clue. I’ve had the feeling for a long time that if you have much of a personality at all it’s just a matter of time before it’s your turn in the barrel.
The functional equivalents of speeding tickets shouldn’t get you shot.
It is my considered opinion (I’ve been posting long enough to have a “considered opinion, " haven’t I, and not just an opinion?) that a useful exercise might be reversing the treatment of errant posters and errant Mods, purely to see the virtues of what I mean by “patience” and tolerance.”
If a Mod fucks up, typically other Mods rush to defend (in public, anyway) their poor behavior or judgment. Commonly referred to as “circling the wagons,” the Mod community seeks to ignore the mishavior, or minimize it, or excuse it, or bend over triple-backwards to justify it. But what if instead they tried to demonstrate their self-policing discipline by coming down hard with a stern “warning,” and then suspension of Modly duties and rank for later offenses, culminating in permanent removal of said Mod?
I’ll tell you what would happen: y’all would go nuts, attacking this system as draconian, unreasonable, unduly punitive–which I agree it would be. And if you did the same with posters, if the Mods would come to the defense of any poster who violated SD rules seventy times seven times, minimizing, excuse-making, justifying bad behavior by posters while complaints about their rudeness, cluelessness, etc. went unheeded, you’d likewise see this place go mad.
I’d like to see some tiny fraction of the forbearance mods show to other mods for their inappropriate actions apply to us common peons. A quarter. No, I’ll settle for a tenth. Do I hear one-twentieth?
I agree with this. Minor infractions should be like parking tickets. You just keep getting more of them, paying them, and moving on. You can never get so many parking tickets that you end up on death row.
It’s unfortunate, but you see this at work a lot. When an employee is on his last “you screw up one more time and you’re gone” warning, there is no way he can win. He is under a microscope that even the best employees can’t live up to. You might as well fire(ban) him right then.
I’d like to see a zombie thread with half the posters banned. And if “parking ticket” warnings have no consequences, then those warnings are meaningless.
Minor infractions ARE like parking tickets. You get them, you pay them, you go on your way.
It’s when you accumulate an 80mph in a 55mph zone, then you get a “failure to yield the right of way” and finally you get a “failure to control” for causing an accident, all within a year or so. If you got these while driving in the US, you don’t end up on death row, but you certainly don’t keep driving.
They don’t. Repeated speeding tickets get your driver’s license taken away: you no longer get the opportunity to break the rule.
FWIW, I think the mods are far too lenient. I’d much rather have a process like this:
You say something insulting. A mod steps in and says, “That’s not how we do things around here. Take some time to cool off, and don’t do it again.”
You do it again, at any point. A mod bans you.
I just don’t see the advantage in letting assholes remain around the board. There are people in this thread who regularly make the boards worse; I’d ban them in a heartbeat if I could.
If you’re unable to keep your typing civil, find somewhere else to be.
Perfect example of the attitude that, IMO, destroys the concept of ‘tolerance" around here. Your concept of “civil” is 1) probably different from some others’ concepts of civil and 2) maybe sufficient to get you banned, under your guidlelines. After all, you just referred to some unnnamed posters as “assholes.” Shouldn’t that get YOU banned by someone a little prissier than you? Someone earlier in this thread, I believe, actually claimed himself as the nastiest poster he felt should be tolerated around ,which struck me as unusually imperceptive. Yes, that’s how ALL of us feel–when I act like a jerk, THAT’s my definition of tolerable behavior–anything further than that should be banned–which is a pretty good working definition of intolerance.
Whatever, then, fine, I’m intolerant, who gives a crap? If my concept of civil is sufficiently different from this board’s mods’, then I’ll take today to be thankful that there are about two gazillion other boards out there.
As I said in the other thread,
You’ve just manifested the only negative I can imagine of a stricter policy, and I still feel pretty good.
I think this is a very compelling idea, not so much as another stop on the ban train, but more as another tool in the toolbox. (When the only tool you have is a ban hammer…)
Unfortunately, I can see it leading to some potentially explosive flame-outs in the Pit or ATMB; essentially giving a banee-to-be a venue and an audience.
If the idea is to take the rules on insults and being a jerk seriously though, it could offer a level of punishment that is more appropriate to DIAF threats and you’re-a-poopie insults.
I’m not sure what the overhead in technical terms would be, but if I were a mod, I think lifetime bans from specific threads would be a great tool.
“You like this thread?” “You want to make your point or show-up your opponent?” “Follow the rules or go complete another list in the game room!”
Thread specific or forum specific bans could come with or without a warning, and the usual banning process could go on as it is now. Starting another thread with a nearly identical title or taking a GD argument into ATMB would be warnable offenses.
After corresponding with Czarcasm, I now realise that I omitted to mention that the guy’s claim was a lie, and was exposed right away. Apologies to anyone else who, like Czarcasm, was confused by the omission.
All of these suggestions make tons more work for the moderators here, who have enough to do as it is.
Instead of making it easier for people to be annoyances for longer periods of time how about people just not be jerks in the first place? Or … here’s a tough one … how about people pay attention to their first or second or third warnings and modify their jerky behavior? Then we wouldn’t need to do any of this at all, people could stay on the board, and life would be a dream, shboom.