If you’re talking about Wimbeldon, that level of rules fidelity is important. If it’s you and three friend playing doubles at the Y on a Saturday afternoon? “Eh, close enough,” is a much better standard, because you’re not competing to be the best tennis player on the planet, you’re just having fun with friends. The SDMB, in general, leans more towards the latter than the former.
Traffic cops are actually a pretty good analogy for what we do, I’ve always found. I’ve been pulled over for speeding three times in my life. The first time, I was thirty miles over the limit. According to the cop who pulled me over, that’s an automatic suspended license. But I was young, and the cop saw that it was my first offense, so he gave me a break, and wrote on the ticket that I was only 20 over. The second time, I got busted on a Monday on the way to work, and the cop gave me a warning and let me go on my way. The third time, I got exactly the ticket I deserved.
The experience wasn’t arbitrary - there’s a system of clearly defined laws in place, and I’d broken it all three times. But the system also allows for the discretion of the enforcing officer in issuing a citation. And that’s more or less how the board works. We have rules - don’t insult other posters, for example - but the actual enforcement is left to our discretion. We can take context and personal circumstances into account. We don’t have to treat the guy who says, “Fuck you,” to someone for criticizing their favorite superhero movie the same way as we treat the guy who says, “Fuck you,” to someone who’s criticizing how they’re caring for their dying spouse, and I think that’s very much to the board’s benefit.
I certainly do. And I am not sure why you of all people are arguing for hard and fast rules. If we had such in place, considering the number of warnings you have you would have been banned years ago. It’s mainly that we think that you do make some positive contributions, and because you’ve changed your behavior, that you’re still around. So you can thank our arbitrariness for the fact you haven’t been banned.
You’ve got it back to front. I’ve made a particular point, and instead of addressing that point YOU decide to nit-pick the definition of a particular word.
The moderators don’t have a fixed rule that they follow. It’s a matter of their own judgement in a particular case, and frequently is inconsistent from case to case.
So you don’t like the word “Arbitrary” and you don’t agree with the dictionary? Fine. Suggest a word you do like, and I’ll use that. It doesn’t change the facts.
YOU are the one arguing about the meaning of words. To me, it’s a trivial point, and I’m not going to argue it any further.
You seem to be arguing that we are arbitrarily harsh. Actually, as Miller indicates, when we make a judgement call we are more likely to be lenient.
Taking your analogy of the speed limit, if I enforced the letter of the law in GQ I would be handing out at least 10 times more warnings than I do now. We would have a lot more bannings. I don’t think this is what you really want.
Yes, it’s better. Real life is a lot more complicated than tennis, and the rules have to be much more nuanced. In the real world, someone who is convicted or pleads guilty to a crime may face penalties potentially ranging from an unconditional discharge to years in prison. It all depends on the circumstances, and such wide discretion is usually central to how the justice system operates in civilized countries.
Your speeding example undermines your own argument. If speeding was enforced according to strict rules, as in the tennis example, everyone would constantly be pulled over – not only because 1 mph over the limit is technically illegal, but also because in many places going too slow is also a violation. Without reasonable discretion in enforcement it would be impossible to drive at all. Not only do police officers exercise discretion as a matter of real-world practicality in such matters, but in many jurisdictions “driving too fast for the conditions” is a legitimate charge, even if the speed was well under the speed limit – if the roads are icy, if there is heavy fog, etc.
Yes I can. My cite is any native English speaker in the world, who will recognize the distinction between “arbitrary” and “discretionary”, as I just noted above. The term “arbitrary” in such a context is a derogatory implication that discretion was exercised capriciously and unfairly, without due regard for the circumstances.
Seriously? You want one person to get away with driving at 60, another charged for driving at 50, and this decided on the whim of cops who don’t have any specific rule to follow?
Those warnings were bullshit. There are people who post deliberate lies on certain subjects. I have tackled those liars head on and called them on their bullshit. It’s called Fighting Ignorance.
Certain moderators have chosen to ignore multiple rule violations by those liars. They ignore blatant trolling, personal insults, threadshitting, etc. And then they pounce on me if I actually directly call a liar a liar.
My behaviour has always been good. You have banned me from mentioning a certain thing, and I have followed that order. That’s all that has changed.
As for my positive contributions, my tackling the liars could have been the most positive of all if only certain moderators hadn’t supported the liars.
I think “hard & fast” rules are not a good thing when you’re considering different people, situations, and context. It’s kinda like how Three Strikes, You’re Out laws are so bad. It doesn’t fully allow judges take mitigating (and aggravating) circumstances into account
So you want a specific amount of warnings in a certain amount of time to be a guaranteed banning unless, of course, the warnings are “bullshit” in which case they don’t count. But you also don’t want anything arbitrary in the rules. Am I missing anything?
But the rules are just as arbitrary. I mean, it’s not like they’d come down from the mountain etched into stone tables; they’d be decided upon during ‘endless mod loop discussion’. So you’d just offload some discussion to past discussion; it’d perhaps net you a degree of specification, but at the cost of a lot of flexibility. And in the end, you’d still have to discuss whether something is in the spirit of the rules, even if they’re obeyed to the letter, and so on.
All this would serve is to move the discussion back a level. Warnings, instead of suspensions or bannings, would be subject to endless discussion in the mod loop. So rather than in-depth mod loop discussions about a banning once in a blue moon, we’d have endless discussion about every warning. Plus the arguing and appealing each warning, since warnings would now become high stakes.
That would not be a tenable situation.
We have plenty of rules as a framework for how we want the board to run. Allowing mods to use judgement about the implementation of those rules only makes sense. We are dealing with human behavior, and that requires taking into account context, precedent, individual history, etc. To remove our ability to do that would make this board less flexible, and would be a lot less fun.
Suspensions and bannings are not arbitrary, despite the dictionary definition strategy. They are based on existing rules, subject to debate, and take into account severity, history and board precedent. Very few rules in the world are enforced as black and white as a tennis match, and that’s actually a very good thing.
I’m not seeing a lot of remorse, there. But I am seeing behavior modification in the face of sanction. If that’s not showing that the system works, I don’t know what does.
Uh-huh. Said everybody arrested for fighting ever. I think I see where your problem with the rules lies. You think we should have taken into account the behavior of the other poster, not just your own. In other words, not adhered to a hard and fast rule. :dubious:
The place where the analogy with speed limits fails is that offenses cannot be assigned a simple numerical value, and that the number of offenses is not the only thing that decides a penalty. Take for example a kid who’s been arrested for shoplifting. In assigning how to deal with it, the judge may take into account his age, the value of the item stolen, whether he’s done it before and how frequently, whether he’s also been arrested for graffiti, and whether he tortures small animals. Taking all factors into account when reaching a decision is the opposite of arbitrary.
To what extent are regular posters involved in the mod-loop, via the report box? I mean, if there is a transgression that goes unreported, and no mod happens into the thread, the transgressor will “get away with it”, because no one cares enough to complain (probably pretty rare); on the other hand, if a post generates scores of eloquent reports, I would think it would be more likely to result in stern moderation. The mods may be tyrants, but I suspect an element of democracy at play.
We do take into account what people are reporting, and it’s not uncommon for a discussion to start with one mod forwarding a report e-mail to the others. But we don’t keep the original reporter updated on what we’re talking about (at least, not more than anyone else on the board).
And yes, if something happens in a thread that no mod happened to read, and nobody reported it, we wouldn’t do anything about it. We can’t read everything.
It’s true that blatant, obvious, or severe violations will usually result in more reports than minor ones. But we don’t mod on the basis of how many reports we get, but our own evaluation of the offense. As Chronos says, we may send a report from our own forum around to see what the other mods think.
I generally don’t reply to thread reports, because we can’t reply to them directly, but have to do it through an extra email or PM. However, if the report was based on a poster’s misunderstanding of a rule, or because I don’t regard it as a serious offense, I may send him a PM to inform him of why I haven’t taken action.
If something isn’t reported, or for other reasons a mod doesn’t happen to see it, it won’t be acted on. If something isn’t reported for several days after a post was made, especially if a thread is no longer active, I may leave it be in order to avoid disrupting the thread. Sometimes you escape getting a ticket because the cop wasn’t looking.
