Excuse me if this is an inappropiate question-- I can’t always keep up with the rules surrounding banned members. I thought there was a policy of mods explaining any time someone is banned but I did a search for “neveronsunday” and it returned zero results.
The reason I am asking is because the poster only made two posts, neither of which I found even remotely ban-worthy.
One was totally tame; asking if peeing on toilet seats was the kind of thing that we all talk about here. In his other post, he asserted that Christianity is a cult. That may be an unpopular notion to some, but certainly a viable comment in the thread he posted in (Do you accept Jesus Christ as your personal savior?).
I happen to believe there is some merit to his assertion. If that is a bannable offence, I’d like to know.
If that wasn’t why he was banned then what was it? The guy only posted twice.
Actually, the policy calls for explanations of bannings of longstanding members. That said, it’s almost certain that the bannee was a returning, prevously banned member.
A few months ago, we adopted a policy of disclosing information about why a particular poster was banned. We said that we had to balance maintaining privacy about the poster and the public right to know, and we had decided to provide information about bannings.
The “recent unpleasantness” calls that policy into question. We are now not permitted to disclose information about a banned member.
I fail to see the connection between not disclosing private information about posters, and pointing out malfeasances which took place on this board and gave rise to a banning. Surely there’s some room for middle ground, because otherwise this smells of administrative petulance.
I have to agree with Case Sensitive. There’s a significant difference between posting someone’s SRO webpage to an off-site journal in an apparent attempt to work around the privacy rules and telling us “He was a sock” or “She had umpteen warnings about being a jerk and that last straw broke the back of our patience.”
I have looked into the whats and wherefores, and I risk policy violation by saying: He/she/it was a “return poster” who had been previously banned.
Our policy does NOT require us to provide information on every spammer, returnee, or commercial advertiser that throws up a single or couple of posts. Moderators have enough to do without having to justify every disappearance of every ad, spam, or troll.
On top of which, “returnees” and trolls get great joy out of seeing themselves discussed. We do not want to encourage this. We do not want to discuss each such circumstance. We ban the creature and we disappear the threads – we don’t want the thread of “returnees” to remain, for obvious reasons.
Petulant? Hell, no, I’m incredulous at some of the crap I’m hearing.
For the record, I completely understanding not posting an explanation for every member, explaining they were a spammer or sock or something, but I do hope the explanations for long-time members will continue. The suggestion that it would violate their privacy to discuss on-board behavior is ridiculous.
It comes across as “Hey you want to accuse us of violating privacy, we’ll go out of our way to make you regret it by messing with completely unrelated board policies, so there”
So, explain it or don’t explain it, but establish and stick to a policy and please don’t act as if you’re doing it out of concern for members’ privacy all of a sudden.
OK. Fair enough, I guess. I can see why the “recent unpleasentness” has made the admins/mods a bit more careful about the info they release.
And I do understand that you can’t take the time to explain every single banning.
I only wanted to check and see if he was banned for calling Christianity a cult. I suppose you could simply say that that was not the reason (if indeed it wasn’t).
I don’t want to cause any trouble here, but I’ll also add that while you can’t bother to explain every single banning of every poster with only one or two posts, perhaps you could explain it (if possible) when another poster specifically asks about it.
Dex– sorry you are tired and all. I do have to agree with one of the other replies in this thread: telling us that “He was a sock” or “She sent an email threatening to infect the board server with a nasty virus” is far, far different then an Admin violating the privacy of a member by outing him as a (former) sexual predator on a board where it is known that many Dopers hang out. No privacy is violated in the former cases because we don’t know the real name of the banned posters. In the latter case, the man’s identity and photograph were released. Very different, IMO.
I don’t want to speak for Dex (and I assume he’s gone to bed anyway) but it amazes me that anyone could hang around here for any length of time, and still post things as dumb as “administrative petulance” and “This reeks of “Are you happy now?!”
It takes some serious denial to not see how hard the admins and moderators of this board work to make it a good place to hang out.
I’m not saying that we have totally agree with every decision, or that there aren’t things that might be done differently given hindsight (or foresight, or sidesight, or something).
But don’t think that they don’t care about the board, or that they’re only in it for the power trip, or that get some kind of kick out of screwing with you. They truly do care, and when things go wrong, it bugs them.
Let me repeat that: They truly do care about the board. They want to it the best place they can. And when things go badly, it hurts.
Disagree if you want. Every community needs discussion to improve.
But you should be ashamed to accuse them of “petulance” and playing games like “Are you happy now?!” Talk about losing the fight against ignorance.
