That doesn’t work either. I just tried it out. (You can set an expiry time for custom infractions.) Expired warnings remain visible on your User CP, so you and mods can still see that you received them.
Not accurate. If a warning is reversed, it shows as a single message in the infractions bar, but with the word “reversed” in the column for expiry date.
Actually, I checked and that’s not correct. The original warning just is shown as “reversed” (but it still remains visible in the User CP).
Beat me to it.
I moderate a vB message board. We do set a date for expiration of warnings. 3 months, 9 months, one year. The warnings don’t disappear on expiration. They remain, but with an “expired” label. So it still does show that the user received a warning, we just don’t treat it with the same weight as current warnings.
Which is to say that at cochrane’s board the vB software is supplying some weak “forcing” towards considering those “expired” warnings as (mostly) irrelevant when mods are debating a new warning or other adverse action.
Whereas here at SDMB the mods do the relevancy adjustment manually.
In either case all the warning history is fully visible to the mods and the warnee.
Seems like “six of one; half-dozen of the other” to me.
Ok, but at least we’d see “expired” which is some consolation. 3 years is pretty reasonable.
Yeah, it’s the “never” expiry bit that I think needs adjusting. Dial it back to 1d3 years would be a fair compromise, I think.
I concur.
No “gotcha” here, just genuine curiosity. My flow for reading the 'Dope is to look at the forum listings for the forums I’m interested in (mostly GQ and CS). In doing so, I both find the new threads that I’ll find interesting, and the old ones that I’ve already looked at, and I can recognize at a glance the ones that I’ve already looked at because my browser gives them the “followed link” color.
I just sort of assumed that everyone did it that way, and never really thought much about how others might use the board.
Well this is something different than I understood the original observation.
[ul]
[li]I had thought the complaint was seeing the warning(s) in the CP. But instead it turns out you can make it so those are not seen. [/li][li]Then I thought it was the blue bar, but that seems not to be the case.[/li][li]Then, it was thought that expiring the warnings after some time period would work, but it turns out they are still visible.[/li][li]Now, it seems like the visibility isn’t an issue at all, but the idea that they are “expired”, even though that functionally does nothing.[/li][/ul]
All actions are taken as judgment calls by the moderation team. We have all universally stated that older warnings are weighted less, and very old warnings hardly at all. I didn’t even know until recently how to find pre-2009 warnings. I can tell you they don’t come up virtually at all.
So imagine we expired the warnings, what functionally would be different? I’m not getting the nature of the complaint if it’s not the visibility. With the visibility I could understand it even though I disagree that it’s substantively meaningful. Now I don’t even know.
Expiration is not important to me. In my ideal world, it would be possible to hide the whole infractions tab or have it be a side menu item but that’s the same world where I’m dating Tom Ellis and chocolate is a key component of weight loss.
Pretty much the only time I look at those threads is when people ask about their old warnings like in this thread.