Hi
Given what happened with that new defense act that Obama said he would veto and then signed, I'm not going to trust that until it happens.
I would recommend that you make a new thread for it. I'd also like to point out that there's a (long) thread about this in OTC, though that obviously is not where this site's actions are decided.
Quod gratis asseritur, gratis negatur.Some suggestions to help make the existing moderation tools seem less heavy-handed:
- Mods should use (and encourage others to use) the language "suspension" rather than "ban" when the intent is explicitly temporary, especially for suspensions used to keep damage from spreading during investigations.
- It should be explicit when a suspension is intended to be temporary, and when they are for investigative purposes.
- When one is suspended, there could be a banner or otherwise un-missable message that explains what's going on with one of a few precomposed messages.
I actually would follow Wikipedia's way and call it "block" instead, when indicating a block on wiki or forum activity for short-term, temporary reasons. Suspension would be a set amount; ban would be an indefinite amount.
I don't know how suspensions are handled right now, but a PM notification indicating "please post _ to discuss the situation with the mods" can be helpful.
Now using Trivialis handle.Again, I'm against pre-emptive bans. It makes the moderation look incompetent, as if they can't handle a situation without throwing around with bans, and only causes distrust in them. Pretty euphemisms like "suspension" doesn't make it better.
Blocks on the wiki, to protect it from "mis-edits" are alright. But a forum is different from a wiki and I don't think it's a good idea to moderate it in an identical way.
People aren't as awful as the internet makes them out to be.Someone is stirring up drama publicly, the mods suspend them from posting while they look into it.
Fresh-eyed movie blogI don't see what's wrong with that. Seeing as bans are the usual tool for dealing with problem makers, I'm not sure what the problem would be.
Fight smart, not fair.I think the problem is in the perception that such action is a "ban" and "bans" are a punishment, and only overturned if found to be in appallingly gross error.
Fresh-eyed movie blogThe problem is they are used in a knee jerk shoot first ask later fashion. There have been a couple of instances where a ban should not have been applied. The first time Annebeechee was banned on suspicion of being a goon and recently with haven. Both were handled very poorly. Such incidents leave a lasting bad impression and lead to bitterness and distrust of the staff.
Who watches the watchmen?Yep. Haven complained about how the mods had failed to stop him being harassed over PMs. Fast Eddie claimed there was no evidence of this, and banned him (the evidence soon turned out to exist when the mod who'd made the call over the PM harassment and admitted his wrongdoing).
What's precedent ever done for us?And, as was pointed out, Haven swooped in for the first time in over a month to say "well you're wrong about the mods helping about PM harassment. This is what happened to me."
Fresh-eyed movie blogParadox: still no excuse to ban him. We call it lurking lots of people do it.
This is a good of example of the right direction to go with the situation
edited 29th Feb '12 2:58:26 AM by TuefelHundenIV
Who watches the watchmen?Adding a few cents:
@2380, on the single points:
- As far as I know, I've always understood "suspension" to mean the form of edit-only ban, while "ban" is (likely) a combined forum-and-edit ban for obvious trolls (not yet a site-ban, though). Sure, the terminology is a bit confusing at times. "bans" are usually not meant to be temporary; a troll or vandal isn't likely to reform, after all. That being said, a more cleaner terminology might be useful.
- All bans/suspensions are "permanent until further notice". They are usually damage control measures and will last until it's clear that the damage will not continue. They are temporary if they're appealed, so to speak. That's why I disagree with @2381. I am not sure what investigative purposes means - there's no way I could imagine a ban being used for investigations.
- The suspension page
is a message that can't be missed, and if you never try to edit after having been edit-suspended, the suspension won't matter anyway.
@2381: The suspension works by redirecting you to this page
when you try to access a page ?action=edit. It also has the instructions for how to deal with them.
I don't know how a forum ban works.
@2382: I read earlier in this thread that forum bans aren't supposed to be used like edit suspensions, since you'll likely get warnings before a forum ban in form of thumps etc, while these things aren't used on the wiki as they have a history of not working and are more difficult to repair.
@2386: Do you say that forum bans should officially be called forum suspensions as well?
@2387: I think they are the exception, not the rule
@2388: Yeah, given that admins have the ability of reading other people's PMs, that was a very inconsiderate move. They should have tried out more usable measures there - unless the ban was about something else.
edited 29th Feb '12 5:18:55 AM by SeptimusHeap
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard FeynmanI think the issue brought up in the Absent People thread is not whether Haven was inaccurate, but the fact that a person made a statement critical of a past moderation incident, and after the claim was made by Eddie that they had no evidence to back up what they were saying, they were banned without the other people participating in the conversation being made aware. If we hadn't heard about Haven's ban from a third party, we quite possibly would never have known.
This is the kind of thing that, whether you have good intentions or not, fosters distrust and furthers the sentiment that the administration will ban people simply for disagreeing with them. While I personally would not make that claim, since I've disagreed with Eddie on a number of occasions and I'm still here, it's easy to see why someone with less personal experience would find it extremely suspicious.
Whether or not what Haven said was true (I personally have no opinion either way, not knowing anything but the vaguest details), this situation served to highlight a long standing problem people have had with the way things are done. While I'm sure there are plenty of situations where secret preemptive bans are warranted, this time around the genie was already out of the bottle, and the ban just made the issue snowball.
edit: And for what it's worth, I still would have voted for you Best Of.
edited 29th Feb '12 6:19:25 AM by Meeble
Visit my contributor page to assist with the "I Like The Cheeses" project!I admit that we sometimes lack tact, but you must appreciate how much there is to do with only about 1 to 3 mods online at any time. I mean, the Hollers thread goes something like 6-9 pages on a busy day and two or three pages on a slow one. (These are estimates, I've no actual statistics on this.)
Sometimes, we may act hastily, but of course, no individual troper sees more than a couple of per cent of all mod decisions, so it's entirely possible that 5 different mods make 10 decisions each during the course of a single day and one troper sees one bad (or not immediately obvious) decision by each of them and concludes that we have 5 bad and lazy mods.
Quod gratis asseritur, gratis negatur.I certainly do appreciate how tough moderating a forum of this size must be (I definitely could not handle it), and I am usually one of the first people to side with giving the mod staff the benefit of the doubt.
I think this is primarily a perception issue. That being said, people can only go by the information they have to work with, and in situations like these a lack of visibility really can blow otherwise minor issues out of proportion. I think it's something that needs to be looked at from both sides of the equation if we want to improve.
Visit my contributor page to assist with the "I Like The Cheeses" project!I think the current level of transparency does lead to other issues, yes.
Whether it's something that should be changed, and if so by how much, I can't say for sure. I think it definitely merits some discussion, however.
Visit my contributor page to assist with the "I Like The Cheeses" project!I'm not sure it's so much transparency issues as people only really picking up on the rulings that they disagree with. All the threads in TRS that are hollered locked or crowners hooked, all the thumps that are actually deserved thumps, those are just blurred into the memory as things going how they're supposed to.
It's only the few bad things that people notice. How do we change that?
Reality is that, which when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away. -Philip K. Dick
