Wall of Shame

On a board I post on, they have a “Wall of Shame” listing banned members. Does anyone think this is a good idea?

Nope. Certain malcontents will compete to see how many socks they can get on it.

It would be easy to just not list socks, since it’s really the same person getting banned.

But I still don’t see the upside in the OP’s suggestion. I have no interest in gloating.

I’m wondering why we’d want to give trolls even more attention after they’re banned.
Just not a good idea.

I could see a formal Wall of the Fallen, listing and maybe memorializing deceased 'dopers…but I think a Wall of Shame is a bad idea for the reasons already given, namely that it would just encourage trolls and such.

-XT

We already have a memorial thread:

In Memoriam - Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share - Straight Dope Message Board

Not a good idea.

Maybe we could list members who haven’t been banned but should be.

Oh, wait…

Now that’s an idea I can get behind!

First name on the list: John Mace.

No, I keed, I keed. I joke with you.

Maybe they could form a tribute band.

Unless you limit such a list to those people who were “regular posters” for some span of time before getting banned, the list would run into the thousands! We fail to praise the work of the Mods in this regard. They must be banning dozens of one-timers (socks, spammers, trolls and garden variety shit) every day.

A recent thread dealing with “active users” prompted ntucker to create a file back in November last year that had the vital statistics on every UserID. There were thousands of people who had posted less than twice who had been banned. I propose we don’t need that! On the other hand, there were in the range of a hundred or more who had posted more than a few dozen times who were later banned. That might be a fun list to keep handy for those who don’t learn from mere warnings. I posted such a list in a recent thread. I’ll try to locate that post for you. :slight_smile:

ETA: here you go: http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showpost.php?p=15079944&postcount=85

This is not something we would ever want to consider. What would be the point? Trolls seek negative attention and would deliberately seek to get on the list. For other legitimate members who were banned for inappropriate behavior, it would just serve to embarrass them pointlessly since they are unable to respond.

We don’t want to glorify bad behavior, nor to shame people pointlessly and indefinitely. This is a really, really bad idea.

ETA: As Zeldar says, I’m sure the total number of banned spammers and socks runs into the tens of thousands by now.

This is just a bad idea. It comes off as an encouragement to people who don’t mind trolling and mocking people who got banned for unintentionally breaking the rules, and we don’t want to do either of those things. And the control panel says we have banned almost 20,000 accounts since (I think) 2004.

Briefly, there were over 133,000 banned accounts. :smiley:

I agree. He should fall somewhere in the middle.

People keep saying this, but I don’t believe it. Has that ever actually happened? Or is this just a theoretical concern?

(Which is not to say that I want a list of banned posters, because I couldn’t care less.)

Not only would they compete, we’d start seeing an influx of guests with names like 0000000001_aaaaachen and stuff. Chaos!

Yep, I was aware of that thread. I was thinking of something a bit more formal, perhaps with some tribute links to memorable, funny or poignant posts (and perhaps pictures if available) by and of those fallen 'dopers. Just a thought…certainly I could get behind that more than a Wall of Shame (now, if we wanted to put those 'dopers in a CONE of Shame…yeah, that would work).

-XT

Thanks all! I had no position on the issue.