I think jsgoddess’ analogy was flawed, too - it’s more like, “You’ve broken the traffic laws on this road X number of times; we’re kicking you off this road. Go drive somewhere else.”
I agree with everyone else regarding the OP; it isn’t all that hard to not get banned from here, even with some personality. The personal insults outside of the Pit is what seems to get most people banned, and it isn’t that hard to limit your insults to one forum.
Don’t make me turn this message board around.
Warnings are instant notifications/acknowledgement of a rule violation. So you’re saying that we start dropping suspensions with our Warnings? That would be an increase in board strictness. We already get bitch parties for handing out Mod Notes, for Pete’s sake, and you’re suggesting dropping suspensions? :dubious: Mod notes themselves are a leniency, when in many cases they are actually pointing out rules violations rather than instructions that prevent sliding into rules violations. Yet we get whine parties for handing out Warnings instead of Mod Notes for actual rules violations. This is pathetic to me.
So you’re hoping a couple instances of “can’t respond” will have more impact than just one round? Perhaps. But it takes so much to get to the first round, is this something we really want?
Isn’t there already a rule in the registration agreement that the board reserves the right to ban people at any time for any reason? That sounds like an asterisk to me.
For someone who posts multiple posts daily, a one month hit is a big hit. If one month doesn’t get their attention, six months won’t be significantly better. Either they already learned their lesson, they gave up on the board, or they come back just to get their final slam in.
I would be happy to see a policy where a banned poster had a one on one with an admin, and was allowed to return after 3 to 6 months. I realize it’s extra work, but in many ways, some recent bans have hurt our family more than safeguarded it…IMHO. It’s not like the admins aren’t well paid for what they do here. I’ve heard those coffee cups are sterling silver.
Sometimes we do hear from someone who has been banned and wants to come back. And we do give it some thought.
The problem is, usually the banned person had plenty of warnings, and at least one suspension before the ban. If someone gets a dozen warnings for the same behavior, and a banning, why should we think that this person will miraculously start abiding by the board rules now that s/he’s been banned?
We’ve occasionally allowed someone who has been banned to return. It has almost never worked out. I won’t say that we will never again allow it, but I don’t think that we’ll do it as a matter of course.
Oh, and MY cup is 24 karat gold. This is a problem when I drink hot liquids from it, as gold is an excellent conductor of heat.
Allow me to paraphrase something I said in the semi-parallel thread (link), since it seems more appropriate here than there.
We keep hearing that mod notes and warnings are learning tools, devices by which behaviors are to be modified. But neither notes nor warnings entail actual consequences, other than bringing one invisibly closer to whatever line across which lies suspension/ban. So the suspension is the first actual consequence a transgressing poster ever gets. And he can get it only once (with the rare exception) before banishment.
In a Utopian world perhaps people should indeed modify their behaviors based upon cues from their society, without a need for actual punishment. And indeed, most members of our community here can do exactly that. But some here, as in society as a whole, apparently require a bit more structure. Without that structure they can be pathological to society, but given an assurance of actual consequences, they (or at least many of them) can modify their behaviors and function as valuable and contributing members of that society.
I think successive suspensions, not necessarily of graduated duration but simply immediate actions, could provide that kind of structure. So you accumulate your batch of warnings (whatever that batch is, under present practice) and you get a 2 month suspension. You come back and either immediately or some time later transgress again, you are immediately suspended for another two months. The worst you could do before getting popped again will be to insult somebody or shit in someone’s thread. I suspect our people are strong enough to survive such a horror. If your future transgressions are really egregious (you return only to insult all and sundry and make a jerk of yourself), or the duration of your “good” periods becomes shorter and shorter, the ban hammer is justified. But if you get along pretty well for several months or longer at a stretch after your little “time away”, and get suspended again whenever you backslide, maybe you can stay around.
I know it isn’t the purpose of this Board to provide behavior modification as a social engineering tool. And I know that the present system has produced a community that I am pleased to be a part of. But that doesn’t mean we couldn’t improve our systems. After all, I think this and similar threads demonstrate that our “bad boyz” add a bit of spicy flavor to our cuisine here. I wouldn’t mind being occasionally annoyed or affronted (if I even could be, which I doubt) if we kept a few of them around. Nor do I mind asking TPTB for a bit of extra effort, if by so doing we might keep this place as diverse, interesting, entertaining, and yes even as controversial, as it is. I think that repetitive suspensions could, in many cases, be just the kind of short leash certain people need.
I still contend that some infractions should be like parking tickets. An insult of a “blind righty” (I think that was the final insult) should be a parking ticket. Get a mod note/warning/week suspension and it never gets higher than that.
If you keep calling someone a fucking dickhead in GD, then those should be speeding tickets. Increased tickets eventually get your license revoked.
I have no doubt some sort of incremental suspension system would be
BUT because it would also be
it is unlikely to be instituted.
(1) is true, technically speaking.
(2) is totally false, I am convinced. The complaints in ATMB are largely confined to a small subset of the SDMB’s posters and there’s not a doubt in my mind they would continue complaining. Of the folks who only occasionbally enter ATMB when something is really off there’s nothing about an “icnredmental suspension system” that would cause fewer complaints; if anything, it’d cause more, since there would by definition be more moderator interference, not less.
(3) There is nothing unfair about the current system. You might not like it, but it’s as fair as one could ask for; the rules are pretty clear and they’re enforced as uniformly as one could expect.
(4) I don’t buy this for an instant.
Seriously, the “incremental suspension system” is a solution in search of a problem. Most posters are never warned, and of those that are more are not warned more than once in a blue moon. Suspensions are very rare, banning equally rare, and the evidence is clear; a person who is suspended once is extremely unlikely to modify their behaviour. You’re suggesting a system that would quite likely have no benefit at all.
The problem I’m addressing is simply that the SD has banned way too many posters over the years who didn’t warrant banning. Take me, for example–I’ve been warned several times, suspended once, and I’m sure despite my best intentions, I’ll be banned someday, and will no longer be able to contribute whatever it is that I do contribute, permanently. But If I’d been suspended for a few weeks, then a few months, and maybe now serving a two-year (let’s say) suspension, I probably wouldn’t have gotten to make any more objectionable (to you) posts than I had anyway, but there’s a chance I might have re-thought my bad posting habits. Maybe I would have decided that religion threads are unsafe for me in general, or politics, or interacting with certain posters. Instead, it’s just a matter of time until I venture too close to the edge, and then I’m banned permanently.
The trouble with your post is (unwittingly, I think) contained in the modfiers in this key phrase: “the rules are pretty clear and they’re enforced as uniformly as one could expect.” Yes, the rules are “pretty” clear, but by design not crystal clear, and they work far better for those who avoid controversy and heated, sensitive subjects, which is why some people like me enjoy discussing these subjects. For me, the “pretty clear” rules are pretty murky: basically, it comes down “Piss off a mod and you’re history.” If I wanted to be perfectly safe, I’d only post in safe subjects and I’d think very carefully before I posted anything remotely controversial or critical. And as far as the rules being “enforced as uniformly as one could expect,” I don’t have very high expectations–the mods are human, and some of them (not you, that I’ve seen, and not a few others) are petulant, prideful, vindictive, small-minded, lazy, vain, and prone to errors, as humans are, so I don’t expect much by way of uniform enforcement, nor do I see much.
Thanks for your support on issue #7, though.
I believe an incremental suspension system would also taste great, have fewer calories, increase our energy efficiency 22%, and stay crunchy in milk. I’m not sure if any of those things really benefit a message board, but I have no doubt they’re true!
We moderate from the assumption that Straight Dope posters are intelligent and reasonable adults who can follow a rule that is broad and may be vague, but which can be applied to most situations (“Don’t be a jerk”). From that assumption stems the idea that when someone does break the rules, they won’t require more than a reminder (a mod note or warning) to correct their behavior. You know what they say: a word to the wise is sufficient. We’re willing to remind people more than once, and sometimes pretty often, as long as we think they’re trying and want to improve. When we get the sense they don’t care or can’t help themselves, we look at more severe responses, meaning suspensions or bans. It’s not perfect but it’s worked pretty well to this point and I think it’s a decent system. People don’t always get the specifics of how we interpret the rules in a given situation but the basics are well understood.
All of which is verbose way of saying that if you can’t understand the general kind of behavior we except around here (“Don’t be a jerk”) and haven’t corrected your behavior based on multiple mod notes, warnings, and even a suspension, the problem isn’t the system of reward and punshiment, imperfect as that system might be. pseudotriton ruber ruber, you’re telling us at the same time that you understand the rules well enough to be confident that you’ll be banned, but that if we’d only punished you more severely and more often, you’d have stopped doing the stuff you know we don’t want you to do. But since we haven’t done that, you know you won’t be able to avoid breaking the rules in the future. None of that makes me think something is wrong with the system.
Like I said, I don’t expect any changes. Ever.
Except maybe for the worse.
Can’t get any vaguer than “Don’t be a jerk” and that’s way you like it. Might as well say “We’ll ban whomever we please, whenever we like, and put it down to our perception that the person being banned has, in our totally subjective and unappealable opinion, been a jerk, once too often.” That would be more honest. It has cost you some good posters in the past, and will continue to cost you some good posters going forward. You don’t care a damn about that.
That’s a totally fine way to put it, AFAIAC. If you know what the rules are and you haven’t been sufficiently spanked in order to be arsed to follow them, I think you should be banned. Not later, not when you step over the line one last time, but right now.
That’s almost vindictive enough of you, LHOD, to qualify you for immediate Mod-ship. Have you considered applying? I think you’d be quite welcome.
Nah. We want mods who are W-A-Y more vindictive than that. We’re, after all, the modern day personification of Nazi’s. We don’t merely want to ban you, we want to eat your children also. We want to pull the gold teeth out of your grandmother’s head before we gas her.
The funny thing, of course, is that you consider that an insult. It’d be like me accusing you of being pedantic enough to be a professor at an ivy league school–if I were a chronic class-auditor at an ivy league school.
I have very few problems with the moderation hereabouts. If I had lots of problems with it, I’d leave. Similarly, if I were a mod, I’d ban people who had nothing better to do than to complain about the moderation all day long.
And yet, you are still here.
You appear to be mistaken and your post is my cite.
Finish your sentence. Nazi’s… what?
Gaudere analysis complete. No issue’s found.
pseudotriton ruber ruber is entitled to his considered opinion. I would like to distance mine from his. For example, I have no problem with having the final offense be a mild one: sometimes quantity has a quality all its own.
There are a tiny sliver of all posters who get banned. None of them have been subjected to injustice in my view. But a tiny sliver of that tiny sliver made solid contributions in the fight against ignorance. Losing them was unfortunate. Admittedly I can tabulate them on a single hand.
The jackboots clamor for stronger measures: electronic shocks delivered via the mouse, death rays administered from LED lights, etc. Luckily the membership has mozilla plugins to block such attacks, so the very worst TPTB can manage is indefinite suspension of posting privileges on a single message board.[sup]1[/sup]
Some are not a good fit for the board. Others make valuable contributions… but still are not a good fit for the board. But there’s another subset of problem members that just spends too much time here. They need to post less, which implies spending more time in other parts of the internet or (heaven forbid) RL.
Again, I’m not claiming injustice. But in the interests of effective problem prevention, it might make sense to hand out a 60 or 75+ day suspension. Thirty days isn’t long enough to build new habits. 75 days makes rejoining the board part of the indefinite future. If suspension is supposed to be the last stop on the ban train (sort of, subject to adjustments) maybe it should be a long stop.
Sure there’s nothing stopping them from that. But if someone has contrasting behavior in different flora, maybe, possibly he’s just a bad fit in one of them. Now I don’t know whether this is likely or not: I would prefer to leave that to moderator discretion. I’m just saying that if all the warnings are in one forum and the moderators in another forum observe solid contributions, then a deal might be struck, during the extended “Work with” period. I am even (naively?) suggesting that it could be done with the consent of the offender. Make it for an extended time, say 4+ months or so, to provide a chance for new habits to sink in.