Yup…and I’m 100% behind you for that. Totally righteous warning and frankly you could have suspended him and I would have supported that. Death threats, even non-serious ones have always been one of the major no-nos here.
I would also have been behind you pushing a button that shot a couple of million jolts of electricity into his/her genitals.
My objection is only to the thread being closed. A few posters misbehaving shouldn’t result in a thread closure or you make it too easy to get contentious topics shut down. (And I personally agree that the thread had gotten kinda boring towards the end…but “boring” also isn’t a reason to close threads IMO.)
But doesn’t this solution lead to an equal (or greater)number of protest threads decrying the “unjustified banishment” of said posters, with pages of finger pointing directed at other posters who supposedly “got away with doing the same thing”?
Glad to see you’re available for answering questions in ATMB. There are several unanswered questions waiting for your responses in this thread, when you get around to it.
Yeah, probably–there are always going to be gripes* but I’d suggest that closing the thread pisses off more posters than banishment does.
*And I’ll certainly join in.
I would say there is no official “policy” one way or the other. We don’t close threads just because they don’t go the way the OP wanted them to. On the other hand, there are occasions when we have closed threads at the OP’s request, particularly in MPSIMS. And we frequently close threads, regardless of the when they are judged to have be hijacked or otherwise gone off the rails.
As has been pointed out, that thread had gone on for more than five pages over a couple of days, and many of the initial posts were critical of twickster. Seriously, you can’t really say the thread was closed precipitately just to save her feelings.
While moderators shouldn’t receive special consideration when posting as a poster, I don’t think they should be subject to more stringent rules for no other reason than to avoid people jumping to the conclusion that they are being favored. That thread closing was not out of the ordinary.
I remain hopeful that option will be part of the next upgrade.
I agree and that’s something I’ll keep in mind. I think a lot of the time we lock threads down because it appears the only other option will be handing out a bunch of warnings. Warnings are no big deal on their own but they can add up, and of course, while people are sometimes unhappy with thread closings they’re likely to be even less happy about a warning. Doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try harder to keep some threads open, but I think that should be acknowledged. My reading was that if that thread stayed open, Cheshire Human was going to continue acting like a lunatic, and rather than have to suspend or ban him I figured I could deal with it by removing the stimulus.
OK, I’ll take you at your word for your reasons. Still, it’s a shame that one no0b got the thread closed. It wasn’t technically a hijack since no one else was engaging his later posts.
Maybe but at least the rest of the members wouldn’t be deprived of participating in the thread. That is why we come here, right?
Take it from someone who’s happy to give the mods quite a bit of benefit of the doubt: you personally suck at this. I’m not upset about your decision and I think most of the posters in ATMB these days are just jumping all over every moderator decision because it’s The Thing To Do lately, but if I look at the decision objectively, it wasn’t a good decision, and despite your attempts to justify it, you’ve failed and ended up looking like a mod who makes arbitrary and wrong decisions and then can’t possibly lose face by reconsidering them. It’s disappointing, and it necessarily leads to this endless kvetching about your decisions.
I’m not one of those people who thinks the moderators need to justify their decisions to us, but I do still think the desicions need to be justifiable. I think that when someone demands justification for moderator action, you should tell them to stuff it, but internally, you should actually have one. You’ve made the mistake of explaining yourself here, revealing the sad fact that your reasoning is really crappy. The thread will stay closed because it’s been closed for a week. Brilliantly circular. It will stay closed because there’s “no point” in reopening it. Well guess what, there was no point in closing it in the first place, but that didn’t stop you. And wait a minute, but there would be a point: lots of people are obviously dying to continue discussing that issue.
If nothing else, get better at this so the incessant whining will stop. It might even have the pleasant side effect of improving the board.
Isn’t this a pretty stupid way of summarizing what I said? I closed the thread because it had derailed, and it derailed primarily (not entirely) because of what Cheshire Human was doing. I presume Chesire Human wouldn’t go back to the thread and start either threatening people or begging for forgiveness, but that wasn’t the only thing that took the thread off track. (I think palindromemordnilap summed it up pretty well, and for this entire time, there’s been nothing to stop anyone from starting a new discussion about relationships.) And on top of that, it’s been more than a week.
Let me try putting it this way: I understand people’s objections and I try not to be hasty on closing threads. I am not convinced I did the wrong thing in closing this one. Even if I were - because I grant Cheshire Human probably won’t act like a lunatic again - given that the thread has been shut down since last Wednesday, I don’t see the point in reopening it.
That would have been my recommendation as well. I thought about posting it upstream somewhere, but meh. I don’t care enough, I wasn’t participating in the other thread.
I just figured since there were numerous people asking for it, and the timeliness of **Cheshire Human’s ** interruption has been removed and thus the impetus for his continued whimpering, that any constructive [del]berating of Twickster[/del] discussion on relationships could resume. Threads do have a tendency to last more than a week, and interest was artificially cut off, suggesting it might resume. If not, the thread would die on its own without moderator reintervention to kill it again, for lack of interest. So what’s the harm?
Is a week long enough to call a MPSIMS thread a zombie?
I think this is the crux of the complaint: closing the thread was not the only way to deal with the one guy trying to derail it, and it had an impact on people who were behaving themselves. It seems to me that automatically jumping to close threads due to the disruptive posts of one person is just an admission that you have no idea how to use the moderation tools available to you. Whack the offender, not the whole group.
As to the issue of why nobody has simply opened up a new thread if this topic is so hot, isn’t it frowned upon when someone opens up a new thread discussing exactly the same thing as one that was closed? The collective bafflement about why that thread needs to stay closed is probably making people think the discussion is verboten for whatever reason.
The problem with that* is the the second thread, even when linked to the first, never gets traction. We saw this all the time during the period where whatever antique version of vB we were running had a maximum posts per thread limit. Mods were forced to close threads simply because if the thread went long enough, the database would get wonky. Not one of those "< such and such > part II " threads ever got past about a page. I dunno why…the psychology seems weird to me. But that’s the way it’s always worked.
I still vote for not letting one (or a few) out-of-control/crazy/butthurt-and-wants-to-close-the-thread poster ruin the fun for everyone else.
*And I don’t care about the “Bad boys” thread as such–it’s closed and been closed for a week. It’s dead
