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True, but we do need a degree of transparency. Personally, I still think that the best balance with the technology we have got is that if the board is not actively under attack, that is the potential bannee has abandoned all hope of not being banned and is flaming, then a three-day banning thread should be enough to kick around the key issues, at the end of which process the moderators vote. If things are more serious than that, either an admin steps in or we appeal to Tom, depending on what happens with that.
This does not affect the utility of Terms and Conditions, though, which are basically what message boards with open or largely open or indeed any admissions have. It is honestly a bit mad that we haven't had them since the UBB days. These to cover the specific things you should not do - multiple suits, spam, repeated merchant links, repeated and/or unapologetic hatespeech (in the opinion of the board), unsubstantiated generalisations or misrepresentations based on race, gender or sexuality (in the opinion of the board), harrassment of other members (in the opinion of the board) - an explanation of roughly how they have been identified previously, and an explanation of what will happen if a large enough number of people on Barbelith feel that they are being perpetrated - and what you should - accept that your posts may be edited or deleted by moderators, who will do their best to explain why, accept that the decision of the moderators and owner of Barbelith has final say on decisions to withdraw your membership of Barbelith, undertake to accept such decisions as final, undertake not to seek remedy by means electronic or physical to reverse or defy the withdrawal of membership, and so on. Nothing that will be read, but things that can be pointed to, to avoid, for example, the situation where every new incarnation of a troll not only gets people saying that he or she is not the troll in question, but then, when that is established beyond doubt, arguing that he or she deserves a fair crack of the whip, having gone to the trouble of sneaking back onto Barbelith to ask what happened to [previous, banned suit], who seemed to have a lot of good ideas. |
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