Why do you have to twist yourselves into pretzels trying to find a “legitimate” reason, when you have a perfectly good one as your number one rule? Frankly, it sums up one of the biggest issues many people have with the modding here.
It’s not that it’s arbitrary–all modding is subjective. It’s the stupid pretense that it’s not. You (not you in particular Sam) want to ban someone for being a dick, then just do it! Don’t look for a microscopic excuse or make up a rule out of thin air–that’s what I find frustrating.
PS–unless his old socks were troublemakers, IIRC a number of other posters who’ve come clean and said “I had ancient socks back in the day” and gotten off.
Eh, he was one of the more prolific serial socks, but he pales in comparison to the massively parallel ones. There was one that was referred to as the Bay Area Troll (or BAT for short), who would literally make dozens of new accounts per day.
Both of those were pretty early in the board’s history, though. I expect that both of them have been surpassed in the more than a decade since then.
One of his accounts was banned for its behavior. The second, apparently, he chose to abandon because he didn’t want it associated with him.
So it’s not as though the general rules here would recommend he be allowed to return.
But, of course, he has redeemed himself with his weird, halfway psychotic attacks on me, so when he comes back, he will be welcome.
[QUOTE=samclem]
I would suggest that we’ve banned someone just because they had an old inactive account about less than 1% of all banned posters(not counting spammers).
[/QUOTE]
The question, though, is about people whose misbehavior was such that they earned a banning under their original account. Isn’t it? What are the circumstances that have earned him another chance after being enough of a jerk to get banned before?
He had a short history in the early days of being a jerk and he got banned for it.
He had nine years of good behavior … even as he was committing another offense of being here after being banned.
Yeah, that’s bad. But I think the nine years of good behavior – nine years with not one single infraction, not even a note – that counts for something. Or should, anyway.
You can choose to think otherwise … that bad is bad and no one should get another bite of the apple. But do you really want us to be that hardass on everything all the time?
I’m not that hung-up on the specifics, I just am surprised that there’s not a bit of selectivity involved in deciding who deserves another chance to earn a banning.
Well, it’s not so black and white, some things. We tend to look at little deeper, delve into the situations.
Wasn’t always so discerning – for example, we used to be so tough that anyone that collected three warnings was automatically banned. “Three strikes and you’re out!” we would say. Aren’t you glad we don’t do that anymore?
I first joined using my real name as my user name but soon decided maybe that was not a good idea after all and then did the Siam Sam account. Dunno what tipped them off, but after a while I was denied access to the Board. Banned, I guess you could call it. When I e-mailed Admin to ask why, I was told they’d found my earlier account. After explaining the situation, they let me back in, changing my original posts to the Siam Sam name. So multiple accounts do happen for innocent reasons and are dealt with reasonably.
FFS, even judges in the criminal system are allowed discretion. I don’t understand why having a flexible approach to situations is seen as such a negative by so many on this board and I really hope TPTB don’t start imposing mandatory minimums. There are enough rules already.
That would be ironic, since it was Otto’s creation of a sock account to protest his banning that kept it from being downgraded to a suspension. He’s a good example of how the past rules against sock puppeteering were sometimes applied a bit too inflexibly. Relaxing said rules as circumstances warrant makes more sense, and is a good move by the mods, IMO.