It’s just kind of funny how we are often told that moderators have lives and that they can’t read every thread and that they rely on people to report bad posts, but here we have a team effort researching somebody’s off board activity to evaluate whether he should be/ was right to be banned, after he makes one very innocuous post. Quite bizarre.
Seems to me you could have saved yourselves a lot of effort by just waiting for him to do something ban-worthy here and let someone report it to you. Would have been tonnes more proper as well.
He made his “innocuous” post at 3:53AM on a Saturday morning, Eastern Daylight Time in the US.
His post was reported to the moderators in MPSIMS. Sometime later that morning, when spectre read it, he banned the guy. It was a Saturday morning. I worked all that day until about 5PM, EDT.
Chefguy had started a thread a few hours before I got home, 3:51PM on Sat to be precise. I also read that thread when I got home and read emails and the Board.
I was probably the point guy. I did some work on the poster that night, but I think I did most of my work the next morning. It was Sunday, I didn’t have to work, so I could do what I wanted. I determined, sometime on Sunday, that the banning was correct.
Since you’re so concerned, why don’t you cruise over to Giraffe Board and read all of thrustin’s posts, and read Giraffe’s post where he let’s our boy out of the Box, with restrictions.
That someone who has a history of being a bad poster can’t be a good poster. That behavior on other boards is now somehow grounds for banning.
Can you really not understand why people are upset, despite the fact that you did what you think was right? A spammer is usually thought of as being either a bot, or a shill. Not someone self-promoting. When evidence arrived that it was really a person, who was apparently upset, that pissed some people off.
And, of course, trollery on other boards, as far as I know, has never been a bannable offense, so that’s irrelevant.
I’m not saying you made the wrong decision. But you do need to address the underlying problem, and not just what rationale went into your decision.
Both halves of that post (i.e. not just the part you quoted) are important. You seem to have missed that the point was not so much that moderators worked together, but rather that the amount of time and effort spent on this relatively benign post seemed to be excessive in light of the fact that
And now we know that that time and effort was doubled. So…good job?
a.) Actually waited for him to engage in nothing but self-promotion;
b.) Restricted him but did not ban him when he did;
c.) Made it clear to him what he was doing wrong; and
d.) Allowed him the opportunity to fix his behavior and become a member of the community.
If you can’t see how that’s completely different and 100% better than what was done here, you shouldn’t be moderating.
Exactly.
Except I would have spelled it “tons.” USA! USA! USA!
Giraffe Boards has quite a different policy about posters such as thrustin. They let anyone post until the point that he/she/it posts in a trollish or other manner that doesn’t fit in with board policy/etiquette. That’s actually an interesting idea but I doubt the SDMB will adopt it, and I"m not suggesting we should. I think you have to be a truly evil poster to get banned over there.
thrustin was allowed to post openly there for a number of days before he got put into the box. If the Giraffe Board hadn’t adopted the “box,” I have little doubt they would have banned him. Again, the idea that we’ll institute a “box” at the SDMB is doubtful.
And, yep, he recently got let out of the box. Hope he follows instructions well and survives.
It really is just a matter of style in which you run your board.
I’m only speaking for myself and not the rest of the staff over there but I think that we would have formally warned him once before resorting to banning. We’ve only ever totally banned one user (plus his sock) in a year and a half not including spambots.
Isn’t that how it’s supposed to work here, too? I mean, that’s kind of the *point *of having policies in place for when people are banned–so that everyone isn’t living in perpetual fear of being shut out just because some mod was in a bad mood. And yes, the SDMB staff *can *ban anybody at any time for any reason, but that doesn’t mean they should.
I feel like I’m getting called a crazy person for saying that people shouldn’t be banned *until *they break a rule.
If we’re just straight-off banning anybody who isn’t going to contribute anything worthwhile, or at least is going to spend the majority of the time repeating the same tired shit, I can think of a few posters who deserve to get the ban-hammer right-fucking-now.
ETA:
And I think you should also look at hajario’s point about giving warnings. Unless someone is being actively destructive, there’s no reason, ESPECIALLY WITH A NEW USER, *not *to say, “You’re breaking Rule X; if you don’t stop, then we’ll ban you.”
And as I’m sure I’ve mentioned before, I’m not saying this as just some poster–I’m saying it as a person who has been in your shoes, someone who’s moderated on a community *much *larger than this one (500k+ users). I can’t ever imagine banning someone just for making an OP like that.