As far as I know a forum member has not been permabanned without the input of the community at large, and also afaik, the unwritten rule has been that members will not be unilaterally permanently banned without community feedback.
It also seems to me (but Wookie has not confirmed) that the assessment of “bad faith” stems from comments fidgetUK made in a private that were subsequently made public by an admin.
I am not arguing for or against fidgetUK 's ban, but I have concerns about how the ban came about, and am seeking community input. I’m posting this as a user not an admin.
Not sure which way to go with this. Think perma might be harsh, but if they come back they will 100% retain the same trolling behaviour. They were clearly trolling for months, the few defenders said “no, no of course they’re sincere” then they openly admitted it.
This can’t just be a playground for schoolyard trolls.
Why not do a really long ban, like 1-2 months instead of a perma? Much lower stakes, doesn’t need to be community reviewed and probably functions the same way unless there is unprecedented commitment level to trolling, and even then just ban them for 2-3 months next time
While the information and the posts where they openly admitted trolling were PMs, unfortunately, that ship has sailed, the cat’s out of the bag, etc.
I have refrained from voting, because I’m not sure it’s appropriate for me to do so, but Aofrantic makes a very good point. Based on my experience, for a forum to survive, obvious trolls cannot be allowed to continue, or should at least be quarantined somehow.
If we want to release them on a technicality (inadmissible evidence?), we would be following the “letter of the law”, of course, but we just had a 1000+ post PM then public thread about how so many people absolutely HATE the litigiousness of our current methods of governance.
Hobbes’ Leviathan would keep the ban. I’d say Monster probably has the right of it.
No of course it’s not a joke. Perhaps you don’t read much here, I don’t know, but I see few posts by you. Do you think it’s possible that you haven’t been following events over the past 6 months?
Ok, so there is only upside here for what I’m proposing.
I don’t need additional context to state with absolute 100% certainty that a message board for chatting about politics and other random shit DOES NOT require a “period of focused and planned mediation and reconciliation”
This is a browser tab that you can type some words into and pal around and stuff. If you are so unhappy with your browser tab that you need focused and planned mediation, the answer is more clicking the ‘X’ in the upper right corner, and less a staff of conflict mediators.
Anyway, I maintain that there shouldn’t be permas, and folks can just eat incrementally longer bans that don’t require community input. I don’t see much downside to operating this way unless it’s a huge burden for mods
No one’s proposing a “staff of conflict moderators”. I’d appreciate you not strawmanning a serious suggestion that was first proposed by a very kind-hearted mod here.
Banning someone for something said in a private message is wrong. Couldn’t dream up a better way to highlight the failings of the current group of moderators though, so maybe in this case it’s good