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Underground > Policy & Help >

Conflict and complaint thread

  
  

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Ticker
14:58 / 04.10.06
I believe asking the very busy owner of the site to ban you will cause the request to be taken at face value. No?
 
 
STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK
15:00 / 04.10.06
So he did. However, xk's point remains valid- if you ask someone to do something, whether or not they've agreed to somebody before, you can't really complain if they do it.

(Incidentally, given that one of Tom's reasons for not banning Sypha was that it was a complicated process, has the mechanics changed at all since then?)
 
 
MattShepherd: I WEDDED KALI!
15:00 / 04.10.06
I'm not comfortable starting one, but I'd love to see a new thread about the possible ramifications of "suit freezes" versus bans. I agree with Ganesh that such a tool may have altered the current situation radically.

I also hate seeing interesting and possibly future-policy-changing discussions stuck tangentally at the end of a thread with a name like "Conflict and complaint thread."
 
 
Ganesh
15:01 / 04.10.06
I believe asking the very busy owner of the site to ban you will cause the request to be taken at face value. No?

Not in the case of Sypha, no. I'm pretty sure there have been other instances, usually in the heat of a snarkfest, when people have said, "I'M LEAVING THIS BOARD FOREVAR DELETE MY SUIT NOW TOM!!1" and not been banned. Possibly because the very busy owner isn't aware of every sparrow that falls.
 
 
Char Aina
15:05 / 04.10.06
I don't think the apparent change in ParanoidWriter's behaviour in recent weeks is wholly explicable in terms of a "wall of defence"

i agree there's likely to be more to it, even if only to explain why he would feel a need to hide behind said fixture.
i'm leaning towards external pressure, but i'm not sure how much we can usefully speculate on that.
 
 
Ganesh
15:09 / 04.10.06
if you ask someone to do something, whether or not they've agreed to somebody before, you can't really complain if they do it.

I don't think it's that cut-and-dried. I don't believes Tom immediately bans anyone who says, "ban me, Tom". I suspect there are a range of possible responses, influenced by other factors. Several of us (myself included) have previously cited alcohol, for example, as a factor in posting stuff we regret - so presumably if someone appeared to be (or posted about being) royally twatted and said, in that context, "ban me, Tom", they wouldn't automatically be banned there and then.

I think there needs to be closer examination of when we do and don't use "consensus" in this sort of board decision - indeed, whether it's of any use at all. It may be that we're just happy to leave all banning decisions to Tom - which is fine, but let's stop pretending it's mainly based on some notion of "board consensus". If there are exceptions, we need to look at those exceptions.
 
 
STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK
15:10 / 04.10.06
Thing is, Ganesh, Tom had only ten minutes previously explained to PW why he was giving him a way out and what that way out was. That was what I meant about PW's response being a "slap in the face".

And Sypha may have pissed a lot of people off, but afaik Tom mostly reads the Policy, and this time round it was pretty full with the PW arguments across several threads.

Like I say, I'm a believer in consensus too, but even though I've seen people stick their heads in lions' mouths, I wouldn't do it myself for fear it'd bite.
 
 
STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK
15:10 / 04.10.06
(That last paragraph needs some rethinking- x-post).
 
 
Char Aina
15:12 / 04.10.06
a complicated process

perhaps tom was referring to the work that goes on around a banning, rather than the locking of a suit itself.
we do tend to do rather a lot of work either side of such an event, and he probably feels obliged to keep his eye on that, if not to directly involved himself.

if sypha had been banned at his request tom would almost certainly have had to start a thread about it, no doubt being expected to field questions.
 
 
STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK
15:13 / 04.10.06
Although if he's now sending (Tom) increasingly stroppy messages via the comments facility on (his) weblog, I doubt Tom's having too many second thoughts.
 
 
grant
15:17 / 04.10.06
i'm leaning towards external pressure, but i'm not sure how much we can usefully speculate on that.

There were posts about his financial situation in I *think* the Miserable Thread.

And it sounded miserable.
 
 
Ganesh
15:20 / 04.10.06
Thing is, Ganesh, Tom had only ten minutes previously explained to PW why he was giving him a way out and what that way out was. That was what I meant about PW's response being a "slap in the face".

Supposing PW had been drunk? You and I have both posted drunk, Stoatie, and have made moderator decisions we regret. I flag this up as an example of one factor which might influence whether we do or don't take people's statements/requests at face value.

I don't think Tom had a great deal of choice in this situation - but I do think things might've been different if there had been a freeze option. If ParanoidWriter's posting state had been a temporary one, for whatever reason, he might've recovered his ability to engage coherently, given time.

And Sypha may have pissed a lot of people off, but afaik Tom mostly reads the Policy, and this time round it was pretty full with the PW arguments across several threads.

We're kind of making up policy on the spot here, aren't we? People should be banned without consensus if they ask to be banned (whether or not we think there might be other factors involved), or if there's lots of arguing about them in the Policy?

As I say, the limited range of options meant Tom didn't have a lot of choice here. I do think the situation ought to kickstart more discussion, though; it seems to me that, generally speaking, the notion of "consensus" is something to which we pay lip service but to which we find all manner of exceptions. I include myself in this.
 
 
STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK
15:23 / 04.10.06
Oh, I'm not meaning to discount any of your points regarding board policy, Ganesh- just trying to come up with some practical reasons why Tom agreed this one and not others, and why one can't really blame him for doing so.

I'd rather it hadn't come to this, but it did, and you're right- Tom really didn't have much choice.
 
 
STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK
15:24 / 04.10.06
And I'm become increasingly attached to the freeze option.
 
 
Ganesh
15:24 / 04.10.06
Although if he's now sending (Tom) increasingly stroppy messages via the comments facility on (his) weblog, I doubt Tom's having too many second thoughts.

Which is well and good, assuming we're happy to leave all decisions regarding management of this sort of situation to Tom alone. If we believe there might - or should - be other ways of handling problem posters, then perhaps Tom's second thoughts, or absence of them, are not the sole consideration here.
 
 
STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK
15:26 / 04.10.06
That post of mine you just quoted was more in response to toksik's if sypha had been banned at his request tom would almost certainly have had to start a thread about it, no doubt being expected to field questions. Should have made that clearer.
 
 
STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK
15:30 / 04.10.06
Anyhoo, this is all very sad and complicated, and I must sleep. I'll try to rationalise my thoughts on the whole thing when I'm at work tonight, though I imagine discussion will have got well ahead of me by that point.
 
 
Feverfew
15:41 / 04.10.06
I think the main issue here was the momentum that built up into velocity via a single critical point - if PW hadn't said "ban me" but had continued with his posts, whether he engaged with the questions at hand or chose not to, I don't believe he would have been banned while he was still 'talking'.

However, since he himself initiated the critical "ban" moment, the pent-up velocity became like a stretched rubber band, and he, for want of a better phrase, 'twanged himself'.

I'm sorry if that sounds like an overly flippant oversimplication, but recently PW really did play out just enough rope to hang himself with, then kicked out the trapdoor in front of the crowd before anyone else could.

It's distinctly sad, really. I think everything from now-on-in in this post may have a wake-ish atmosphere.
 
 
Spatula Clarke
15:46 / 04.10.06
Supposing PW had been drunk?

For the entirety of the last week?
 
 
Char Aina
15:50 / 04.10.06
well, it is possible.
but then i think the point was we take things differently in different contexts, and that an absolutist approach is not always helpful.
 
 
Olulabelle
16:00 / 04.10.06
Equally, how is one to know what constitutes a banning offence if there is no consistent policy?
 
 
Lurid Archive
16:11 / 04.10.06
I don't want to overstate this, but I do want to register that I'm not entirely happy with the speed of pws banning. Especially after an offer of a final chance, it was unfortunately rapid. So, in that sense, I wasn't part of a consensus that wanted him banned.

That said, I thought it pretty likely that he would be banned and didn't really feel that pw contributed anything much that interested me on the board. My position is that this isn't really a criterion I rely on that heavily, and I am more concerned with having a fair and reasonable process that isn't a big reaction to what might have turned out to be a short term problem. Certainly, I find it hard to see spending a(nother) week on this sort of thing as too much, given that pws actual disruptive behaviour had stopped (as far as I'm aware), or was at least confined to this thread.
 
 
Spatula Clarke
16:16 / 04.10.06
An offer of a final chance that was turned down. I don't understand why people aren't seeing this - he was given an opportunity to put the pieces together and ended up responding to it by asking to be banned.

When your continued presence on the board is in question, actually going ahead and telling people to ban you probably isn't the best way of ensuring that you get to stay here. It's not so much digging your own grave as it is digging it then jumping in and yelling BURY ME YOU FUCKS before stabbing yourself through the eye.
 
 
Lurid Archive
16:18 / 04.10.06
I am seeing it, Randy, really I am. I just disagree that that was enough for a ban.
 
 
Char Aina
16:18 / 04.10.06
if someone was jumping into graves and yelling bury me you fucks i might worry that they were not in a position to be making decisions regarding their future.

someone who has seemed to have a lot invested in barbelith asking to be banned as PW did makes me worry too.
 
 
Spatula Clarke
16:31 / 04.10.06
Okay. Even disregarding the suiticide, he still demonstrated no understanding of what he'd done wrong. None at all, despite a number of people explaining it to him very slowly and very precisely. The chance he was given was to respond properly to the posts that, up until that point, he'd either ignored or attacked - which would be virtually everything in this thread up until that point. The response was "I don't understand what you want me to do".

That's either a total breakdown in his ability to process information - which we seemed to be leading up to fairly rapidly over the last few days - or a continued unwillingness to admit to having done anything particularly wrong/diruptive masquerading as the same. If it's the first, then it's kind of sad, sure, but I don't see what Barbelith could have done to help him - remaining here was probably going to do him more harm than good. If it's the second, then he was doing a modzero.

How do the people saying that the banning was too quick believe the situation could have been saved? As far as I can see, he'd passed the point of no return - the banning was an inevitability.
 
 
Lurid Archive
16:41 / 04.10.06
Almost certainly inevitable, yes. But I would have prefered a more considered process, since I don't think the chance pw was allowed really gave him much chance at all. And I also think that comparisons with modzero, while they make sense in a way, aren't quite right since pw never became as disruptive as modzero and had actually stopped spamming threads.
 
 
Spatula Clarke
16:53 / 04.10.06
We've got to reach a cut-off, though. Modzero managed to crash more of the board because the process of doing anything about him was so drawn-out - really, it carried on for months.We'd have this kind of thread - although they were generally started by modzero himself, moaning about Haus - and they'd go on for a number of pages before dying out, nothing happening as a result. And then, two weeks later, another one would pop up. In the interim, he was spamming about on the rest of the board. While the Policy threads were still active, he was contained within them.

That's part of the reason why PW hadn't become *as* distruptive - because, for the time being, he was contained within this thread. He may have stopped posting to other Policy threads, but that was only because there was suddenly a Policy thread specifically for him. Fencing trolls off in that way works in the (very) short term, but it's no kind of solution.
 
 
Lurid Archive
16:56 / 04.10.06
True, but if our offers of giving people a chance to make good are going to be sincere we can't use our past experience as an infallible guide. PW may have acted like that, sure, but he might not have.
 
 
Our Lady Has Left the Building
17:28 / 04.10.06
Well, sad that am I am what he became and that he had to go his last few posts don't give me much hope that banning was going to be avoided. Everyone was quite clear in what he needed to do, including him, so posting 'what do you want me to do?' smacks of attention seeking quite frankly. He's suddenly in the position of seeing his posts being ignored because people are busy discussing something else around it so shouts 'ban me' and, to his surprise, gets his wish.

Must remember, never play 'Chicken' with Tom.
 
 
Ganesh
17:49 / 04.10.06
E Randy, alcohol is one example. There are all sorts of other things that could potentially influence a previously non-trollish individual's posting style for days or weeks at a time. Depression. Bereavement. Too much grass. A convergence of stressful life events. Etc., etc. Where the change appears to have happened relatively suddenly, it's perhaps more likely that Something Has Happened - and, by extension, that the run of antagonistic or incoherent posting may be a temporary aberration.

This is why I think we should have the option of temporary measures - at least, more temporary than outright banning - to address such situations. If there's the suggestion that someone's problem behaviour might be caused by something other than sheer wilful badness perpetrated in sound mind, then absolutist decisions (banning) ought surely to be a last resort. Similarly, if someone says "ban me" in a similar context, then they should arguably be given time and space to think this through before the EJECT button is pushed.
 
 
Ganesh
17:53 / 04.10.06
That's either a total breakdown in his ability to process information - which we seemed to be leading up to fairly rapidly over the last few days - or a continued unwillingness to admit to having done anything particularly wrong/diruptive masquerading as the same. If it's the first, then it's kind of sad, sure, but I don't see what Barbelith could have done to help him

If a suit-freeze option existed, we could've removed him temporarily from a situation of escalating conflict and allowed him sufficient time and room to recover his ability to process information, if that was what was causing the problem behaviour.
 
 
Tom Coates
17:56 / 04.10.06
People are asking if I'd ban someone just for asking to be banned, and I want to make it clear that wasn't the situation here.

This thread was ongoing, discussing PW's presence on the board and a decent proportion of people on the first page of the thread are already talking about banning him. After a few pages of discussion in which it was pretty clear that he wasn't engaging with anyone's comments, these opinions became stronger. At this point, people started wondering whether they should bring me in and paranoid writer himself pushed straight past that and asked basically for my opinion.

A couple of pages later, I come in, read all the comments and try and get my head around the situation. At this point I say that if a significant proportion of people supported a ban, I would feel comfortable going along with it. I suggest giving him a second chance - specifically an attempt to simply show some respect for the community by actually addressing some of the arguments seriously and either defending his position logically or apologising for it.

At this point some board users - including Anna , Falcon, Sheik Zed and Pegs say that they're not sure he deserves this second chance and that he's pretty much definitely going to throw it in our faces. The views in the thread expressed so far have been for the most part an outright desire to ban him, a sense that he doesn't deserve a second chance but should probably be given one, a certain amount of confusion and exasperation from people who generally can't see why he's acting the way he is and think it's going to end in a ban. Generally, the impression is that he's getting a final opportunity and that this is either what he deserves or more than he deserves. No one declares that it's worse treatment than he deserves.

The position is restated, he queries exactly what he's supposed to do a day later. The position is clarified and restated again. In all of these cases he is not asked to justify all of his opinions or beliefs, but just to make a serious and concerted effort to engage with the board. After the third time that this has been stated over three days, he answers none of the points, refuses to show the slightest respect for the board or the process, says shame on you, declares that we have killed him and indicates that he has no interest in participating further.

At this point, I think it's justifiable to ban him. Not because he stood up and asked to be banned, but because he refused to do anything that would indicate that he was prepared to engage with the concerns or issues of the community in a serious way. Refusing to argue your case, engage with anyone else and prefering just to state annoying stuff that aggravates everyone else is the definition of trolling.

The previous cases of people demanding to be banned and not being banned are not because I didn't take them at their word, it's because they were causing no harm. If you actually want to stop posting, then you can just stop posting. That's pretty easy. I don't need to ban you to help you not post. If, however, you are actually a troll and state that you have no interest in not being a troll, and you've been given clear suggestions about how to not get banned and you throw them in everyone's face by challenging someone to ban you, then sure, you get banned.

(I should point out that the 'effort' talked about previously in banning people is actually in deleting them from the board, not stopping them from posting. Several users in the past have demanded that their account be deleted, rather than just disabled. This is an extremely time consuming and irritating process in which I have to go into the database, delete the account and then amend all the posts and threads that they've submitted to the board. I avoid doing this if at all possible, which is to say normally I refuse to do it at all).

I should also point out that as people have said, the stuff I'm getting through e-mail at the moment leaves me absolutely solidly convinced that banning Paranoid Writer was the correct move. The level of vitriol and 'You will regret this' rhetoric borders on personal threats and certainly amounts to threats of legal action which I believe are entirely unfounded. He's demanded that I send him a copy of his received private messages, which I'm considering doing as a courtesy, but I really think it's a bit above and beyond the call of nature given the names I've been called. But there you go.
 
 
Tom Coates
17:58 / 04.10.06
To Ganesh - I'll seriously consider the freeze user option. I'm not totally sure about it, and I'd like people to have a conversation about whether they think it would work. As usual, when it comes to board functionality, I'm not going to promise anything.
 
 
Ganesh
17:59 / 04.10.06
Given the options you had at your disposal, Tom, I think banning him probably was the lesser evil. I'm convinced that if a more temporary freezing/disabling option had existed, that would've been preferable.
 
  

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