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Should Moderators be able to ban people?

 
  

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ONLY NICE THINGS
16:05 / 10.03.06
think it means, 'don't do things that you would moderate others for doing,' with maybe a possible dash of 'don't vote on threads you're involved in?"

It doesn't, though, in terms of Shadowsax's demand.

Moving on, both of those are reasonable, although the latter would slow moderatin down to a crawl in some fora, especially as moderators are also supposed to spark conversation - so what if 4 or 5 moderators are involved in a thread?
 
 
ONLY NICE THINGS
16:07 / 10.03.06
Also, your model - zinging and then moving to lock the thread - is not a likely one - locking takes 3 agreements, so unless you ascertained that 3 other moderators were around and inclined to look kindly on your request, it wouldn't work, at least not until a fair amount of time had passed. Again, distributed moderation does odd things sometimes.
 
 
iconoplast
16:19 / 10.03.06
Yeah, I didn't think it was likely, I was trying to expand on what I meant by the responsibility of moderators.

And, w/r/t don't moderate your own arguments - ideally, you wouldn't have to. But a lot of mods seem inactive these days, and moderators are usually active in the fora they moderate, so you end up having to. I trust you to do so, and I don't think we've seen any problems with the system.
 
 
Spatula Clarke
16:47 / 10.03.06
But it seems like it'd be not-too-back-endy to create a moderator option that simply put User X on ignore for everyone. Same amount of time, I guess - a month.

From there, venturing further, it wouldn't be too hard for a dedicated group of mods to run around behind User X and delete all the new unreadable messages before the "ignore" wore off.


Seems a bit



no? There but not there. Like saying "you are not allowed to read posts by this poster" instead of what it should be, which is "this person is not allowed to post to Barbelith."
 
 
Less searchable M0rd4nt
17:50 / 10.03.06
I don't know, is that so bad? A "Post by suspended user" flag does little harm. Surely if people are wildly curious as to what's been said they can contact the poster and ask.
 
 
Shrug
17:58 / 10.03.06
I think it might mess up the thread dynamic after the user's posts were viewable again. Reiteration of points etc. Although why someone would post if their posts weren't being viewed I don't know.
In an instance like this moderators would still have to be able to view their posts though, wouldn't they?
 
 
*
18:06 / 10.03.06
For the same reason that the first thing most people would do if they suddenly became invisible is to run around naked and make faces at people a lot, I imagine.
 
 
Spatula Clarke
18:38 / 10.03.06
I'm not sure, Mordant. There's a difference between banning somebody outright and preventing them from ever posting again that way, and hiding their posts from everybody while still allowing them to post (and making it obvious that this is what's happening) that I can't quite put my finger on, but makes me feel very icky all the same.

As far as temporary bans go, I think it may be easier for Tom to lock suits out by changing their passwords to something of his choosing, then giving them back after whatever period of time by changing them to something generic and informing the owner.
 
 
Olulabelle
18:48 / 10.03.06
Yes and in an ideal world Tom would be available all the time to do that but as Ganesh has already pointed out, sometimes he's not easy to get hold of.

It would make much more sense to have a piece of functionality that allowed 10 or more* Mod's to lock someone out of the board temporarily if all agreed.

* I have no clue on the correct number of Mod's that should have to agree this kind of action, before it is taken. I just used 10 as it seemed like a good number.
 
 
Less searchable M0rd4nt
19:01 / 10.03.06
A sort of jury of 10--or hey, why not 12?--mods might be workable, with a strong majority (say, 10 out of 12) being needed to impose a ban.

Maybe--and I realise that I'm drifting into the realms of purely academic speculation here, since I have no idea how one might implement any of this--What about the concept of to banning people on a forum-by-forum basis? Some people seem to do okay in most fora and only cause problems in a certain hot spot.
 
 
Olulabelle
19:42 / 10.03.06
That might send the offending poster helter-skelter to another forum, probably conversation, probably 'barbeannoy' or similar, and conversation is not a dumping ground it's a...here begineth the thread-cross.
 
 
Spatula Clarke
20:41 / 10.03.06
Yes and in an ideal world Tom would be available all the time to do that but as Ganesh has already pointed out, sometimes he's not easy to get hold of.

I know, but I think what we tend to miss when we're talking about Tom not being here an awful lot of the time is that, in a very important way, that's actually sometimes a *good* thing. Especially when it comes to stuff like this.

BEcause we need somebody who's not caught up in teh middle of it all and who can take an objctive view of the situation, but who we all trust to have the best interests of the board and the community at heart. Honestly, I'd not want any powers of banning handed to me, regardless of how many other hands the vote had to go through in order to get passed.

I can't see the jury idea working. There has to be some way of allowing a ban to be vetoed if it's moderators who are given the power to chuck people off the board. How many negative votes does the motion have to receive in order to be killed? It must be more than one, clearly. And then you've got to realise that what's liekly to happen is this:

Big argument about somebody's status as a troll kicks off

Lots of people get involved

A moderator puts forwards a ban request

Lots of other moderators - also involved in big argument - jump on the vote and it becomes a messy free-for-all with no clear outcome

It's not in the spirit of distributed moderation, I accept, but I really believe the best option is the one we've already got. Tom.
 
 
Elijah, Freelance Rabbi
21:20 / 10.03.06
Suggestion:

Woot.com has a forum full of FIRST POST!!11 type spam on every new item thread.

The solution: When you make a post like that, a moderator sees it, flags it as spam, and next to your name it says "This post caused this poster to be suspended for posting for {X TIME}"

I don't think we need to really shield ourselves from offending posters, so leave their garbage intact, but suspend their ability to post for a period of time based on the seriousness of the offense.

I had more, but gotta run, stupid job,
 
 
Smoothly
13:11 / 11.03.06
I think grant's suggested a 'Post by suspended user' flag because, unlike a Ban button or Panic button, it could repurpose some existing functionality (ie. the Ignore function).

But it strikes me that if we were going to tweak some code to give moderators the ability to temporarily shut a suit down, the Posting Limit function might be the one to look at. If a user's posting cap could be tripped by mod vote, a troll could effectively be suspended for 24 hours. That would obviate the need for mods to work around the clock deleting posts, you wouldn't have the problems Shrub and id entity mention, it would give us time for Tom to be contacted, and it could be easily (in fact, automatically) repealed if used controversially - a built-in sunset clause, as it were.
Dunno, just a thought.
 
 
Tom Coates
14:44 / 12.03.06
I know, but I think what we tend to miss when we're talking about Tom not being here an awful lot of the time is that, in a very important way, that's actually sometimes a *good* thing. Especially when it comes to stuff like this.

BEcause we need somebody who's not caught up in teh middle of it all and who can take an objctive view of the situation, but who we all trust to have the best interests of the board and the community at heart. Honestly, I'd not want any powers of banning handed to me, regardless of how many other hands the vote had to go through in order to get passed.


I actually couldn't agree with this stuff more, on a whole range of perspectives generally about my absence from the decision-making in many of these circumstances. Firstly when I've acted on the board without the sanction of the community, all hell has tended to break loose. I've learned over a period of time that the extent to which I'm able to be involved in the board every day (spotty but regular) means that I'm much better served often by letting the board come to a conclusion or contributing as one of the community rather than being in charge. I really would rather you guys came to conclusions about many things in meta-systems and then asked me to implement them on a case-by-case basis most of the time rather than me being asked simply to 'do something' and being clumsy about it. I know that's not really what you're talking about, but it still bears repeating.

The power to ban users was always something that we've talked about giving to the moderator class, along with better new user handling and a better sense of political mobility through the various Barbelite classes. To an extent - as people have said - the point is rather moot, since I can't do the building concerned to make it a reality. As to the social implications - I agree that my distance is useful in these situations, and would add that my absence means that it's not acted upon in the heat of the moment. I am contactable via PM, although sometimes you will get a lag of a day or so. Some board members know my e-mail address and e-mail me if things really get out of control, so if it's urgent, I'm never that far away.

Do I think moderators should have this power? Well, yeah, I think I do - but with adequate protections of course ie. that while any moderator can propose an action it would require many more ratifications to be successful than normal, and voting would have to occur across the board bringing in as many of the active moderators as possible. Also any action would have to be reversable. I suspect to be practical, the board would have to operate in a different way to normal - e-mailing all the moderators when the proposal received a certain minimum baseline of votes (ie. five) to let them know such an event was occuring, in order ot get them to the board as soon as possible.. Also to be practical, I'd probably propose that you'd need more than one person voting against the move in order to veto. Otherwise you'd never get anything passed.

The point of the distributed moderation scheme was that we could move towards a system where the users were more in control and I was in less, and I definitely think that there should be no scale of decision that the community shouldn't be able to make for itself. The question seems to be just about the mechanics and checks and balances.
 
 
grant
11:47 / 13.03.06
I think grant's suggested a 'Post by suspended user' flag because, unlike a Ban button or Panic button, it could repurpose some existing functionality (ie. the Ignore function).

But it strikes me that if we were going to tweak some code to give moderators the ability to temporarily shut a suit down, the Posting Limit function might be the one to look at.


Yes, that was it -- I wasn't thinking in terms of leaving unreadable posts up, but in terms of using people (moderators) to do what code wouldn't (block posts). As some posts here witness, that would have some interesting social consequences.

But that Posting Limit is also an interesting idea, if that could be altered on a user-by-user basis. Actually, was there a time when different classes of users had different limits? A probationary period where you got fewer posts-per-month? I can't tell if I'm making that up or not. But if so, then having a mod decision for User X to join user class: Time Out, only five posts per month for one month (or whatever) would be an interesting way to do the same thing.

I like Time Outs better than bans, also.
 
  

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