General Moderation Topic

@Loudoun_Hillbilly has been given a timeout.

I’m pretty lenient with pedantry as a bit of a geek tradition. But consistently avoiding the bigger picture to nitpick the metadata of a conversation is an effective way to diminish the overall meaning, or impact, of events or discussions, and won’t be tolerated here (falling under the ”contentless comments” classification).

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Well, that was true until the user decided to create accounts to get around the ban. They are no longer welcome here.

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@anon85905360 has been given a brief timeout to consider how to continue their tenure here, in light of the fact that people in the past took things from other people, and that’s a thing to acknowledge, and maybe try to correct now.

We wish them the best in trying to determine how to integrate this newfound knowledge into their lives, and to be able to discuss such issues without resorting to whataboutism in the future.

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Seems to be a pattern today. @DixonHill has also received a timeout for the Exact same issue as @anon85905360.

Further attempts to derail topics with ludicrous strawmen will receive progressively worse bans. Don’t go there.

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7 posts were split to a new topic: What about… ism?

is there some sort of new badge for getting a time out or temporary badge ?

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If you click on a user who has been suspended, it will indicate their suspension.

If you go into their profile it shows a suspension count there as well (I think, anyway, maybe that’s a mod thing).

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@taz has been given a timeout for repeatedly denigrating the community and posting inappropriate remarks in general. They have generated a substantial amount of work for the mod team over the last several days.

Unpopular opinions are perfectly fine here, but not when they are interspersed with attacks on other users or wildly offtopic derails.

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I like this idea. Viewing a profile is too proactive, but having a special indicator in a user’s post when they are currently suspended would be really useful.

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You don’t really have to visit the full profile, just click to expand their usercard in the topic. You’ll see it there.

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That doesn’t work very well on mobile. (And again still requires proactive extra effort.)

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Well, that’s true. But I’m not down with a Crimson Badge of Shame showing on someone’s every post.

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If someone’s on time out (or banned) it could be a useful indicator to not engage with them. They obviously had to do something bad to get into this state and it could go away once their status is cleared.

I guess we’ll just have to agree to disagree here.

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How can you engage here with someone who isn’t here?

I think any posts the mods haven’t taken down is part of the conversation. I think we try to explore and discuss ideas more than personalities and behavior more than perceived intent, or we don’t.

I suppose we/they could shun the non-believers and discourage even positive further interactions, but that doesn’t appear to be the way the BBers want to do it.

Surely there are other places for the looking for indicators for who we’re not supposed to talk to.

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How do you know in the first place?

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i can think of three cases and having a scarlet letter badge doesn’t really do much for the community in any of the cases.

  1. someone new makes a comment, or a series of comments which violate community norms or community rules to the extent of earning a timeout. they learn from their mistake and don’t do that again. result: a community member in good standing.

  2. same as one, except they don’t learn from their mistake and keep on doing it. result: eventual banning.

  3. someone is a reasonable happy mutant except on one issue about which they get so strident and so worked up they often get a timeout or skirt the edge of a timeout any time the subject comes up. result: “you know how xyz is about that subject. they’re pretty reasonable on most things but on that issue they’re a complete and total loon about it.”

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I’m very much against anything we could give someone disruptive to the community that they could later consider a badge of pride.

Agreed. Public topics aren’t private discussions between individuals. if someone makes a comment that deserves a response, respond. Just because that specific individual can’t respond back (they can, of course, read what you wrote!), that doesn’t mean someone else might not have a response for you.

I’m not a fan of looking at discussions as an engagement between two people that others interject upon, for example. a fly-by-night poster who comes, leaves a valuable comment, then never visits the BBS again is just as valid a source to reply to as our most prolific poster - it’s the content of the post that matters, IMHO.

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I’m not a fan of people egotistically using others’ posts as foils to push their own ideas while really not having any intention of ever engaging with the ideas contained in the posts of the people they are ostensibly replying to.

Nobody likes to be somebody else’s unwilling puppet; if someone’s ego is too fragile and bloated to bear engaging in honest discussion with someone else, that person should not reply directly to another post, but reply to the post topic instead.

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“Reply to what I mean, not what I say” is, sadly, not sound moderation policy. Posts are public, and are subject to others interpretation of them even if you would prefer otherwise (of course, as long as such replies are otherwise on-topic!).

Anyway, in the confines of this discussion as it relates to moderation, I agree with @codinghorror that calling attention to those who behave badly by offering them a visible indication of their deeds is probably unwise.

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