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Since the Darkmatter test has failed...

MattShepherd: I WEDDED KALI!

15:24 / 02.10.07

Because I've got a great potential airlock candidate hummin' away right here.

Tryphena Absent

16:11 / 02.10.07

Don't jump the gun or anything there.

Our Lady Has Left the Building

16:44 / 02.10.07

Yeah, it's hard to tell which context 'queer' is being used in there, but to go airlocky at the moment would be jumping the gun, unless you can link to previous incidences of hateful behaviour.

16:48 / 02.10.07

With Our Lady at this time.

MattShepherd: I WEDDED KALI!

17:01 / 02.10.07

I was being half-facetious but acknowledge that the Policy probably isn't the best place for that.

OTOH there isn't a lot of room for interpretation when "I was going to say pillowbiter" is the follow-up bout of hilarity.

19:00 / 02.10.07

Has it failed? It looks like we were 8 of 8 over in comics with no vetoes, so I'm thinking there's a good chance he's been banned.

It's just difficult to tell for sure.

Phex: Dorset Doom

19:20 / 02.10.07

It 'failed' in the sense that it took one-hundred and eighty six posts and god knows how much behind-the-scenes work over nine days to get somebody who is the textbook definition of a troll off the board. But seeing as Darkmatter wasn't a 'live' troll it was the only way of bug-testing the new banning arrangement, and in that way it was a success.

MattShepherd: I WEDDED KALI!

19:22 / 02.10.07

More or less what Phex said -- I meant "failed" as in "didn't show whether or not this can be a clean and efficient process."

19:28 / 02.10.07

And in that we atually have no idea if he has been banned because how do we ever find out what the end result is when we go thruogh the voting process?

19:44 / 02.10.07

Try initiating the banning process again. If the Comics one still hasn't gone through, you might get the message saying that the moderation action is already in the queue. If it has, you might get the 'you do not have sufficient privileges' one.

I mean, you probably won't, but at least try.

23:13 / 02.10.07

Just an idea, but if someone was willing to go through the airlock to find out what happens on the other side, they could easily be membered up afterwards.

Just to test the process, they could try to make posts and see what happens. Just for feedback, of course...or is this not the issue?

05:54 / 03.10.07

OTOH there isn't a lot of room for interpretation when "I was going to say pillowbiter" is the follow-up bout of hilarity.

Actually, there is, unless you can point to previous posts. I personally am drawing a blank on what else this person has posted, so for now all I have to go on is the thread to which you linked, in which bacon seems to me to be mocking Ahmadinejad's statement -- exaggerating and repeating a ridiculous statement, and even going so far as to set it apart typographically. Certainly the sentiment in the paragraph preceding it doesn't seem like a buildup to a homophobic one-liner. I assume that's the problem, homophobia on bacon's part? The follow-up read to me as a response to getting dinged for saying 'queer' when he was satirizing or mocking an absurd and nasty statement.

Chad Raymond's response, bacon please don't use the word "queer" (or any other pejorative) in ironic context so early in a Switchboard thread. I'm unfamiliar with your suit or the views and biases you may or may not have. seems appropriate.

MattS, please note that I'm not saying you're wrong about bacon. I believe you have a memory of other posts and they are providing a context that I currently lack. I'm just asking to be shown that context, that's all.

06:19 / 03.10.07

It was the whole thread that made me post Jesus Christ, not just the queer bit. That was just the most obvious bit.

STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK

13:00 / 03.10.07

I'm with gourami on this one- I have a vague idea that bacon's previously posted stuff which makes me look on this in a less favourable light, but I'm fucked if I know what it was.

13:50 / 03.10.07

Bacon seems hard-boiled in terms of hir worldview, but perhaps also a bit fried?

MattShepherd: I WEDDED KALI!

14:21 / 03.10.07

Naming yourself after an oft-mentioned breakfast meat makes searching the forums for other posts difficult, but after trawling through many pages of Google search results I'm just finding stuff that's not particularly great but not particularly horrible.

And a passionate hatred of capital letters.

I may have been overreacting to what looked to me like a nasty homophobic streak; one of the first results in a search was a lot of one-sentence posts like "who the fuck's Ganesh?" in the Ganesh goodbye thread.

Nothing that removes the bad taste, but not much that makes it worse either.

STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK

14:28 / 03.10.07

one of the first results in a search was a lot of one-sentence posts like "who the fuck's Ganesh?" in the Ganesh goodbye thread

It could be something as simple as that- the name tripped alarms in my head, but I'm not sure what type of alarms they were. They may have just been "annoyed me a couple of times" alarms rather than "nasty piece of work" alarms. The fact that I can't remember suggests that the former may be more likely, though.

14:40 / 03.10.07

Bacon is (I believe) an old Fadetoblack/godisdead personality where (I believe) he and Ganesh were on fairly friendly terms, so I'm assuming that was a joke (more or less).

Hopefully Chad's nudge was enough of a reminder to watch what he posts here, but definitely worth keeping an eye on.

14:47 / 03.10.07

I ran a search using the special Yahoo search thingy buried in this forum, cross-referencing his name with mine, and came up with some irritating posts, but not much else.

I'm pretty sure he's quite annoying, but based on what I've seen definitely not a candidate for les banning

MattShepherd: I WEDDED KALI!

14:50 / 03.10.07

Can we chalk this one up to me having a Very Bad Day, reading too much into what may have been an ill-considered joke, and let this thread sink, then?

ONLY NICE THINGS

21:13 / 03.10.07

You'd probably get quite upset if somebody started suggesting you should be banned from Barbelith, and didn't even bother to do or show any working as to why. bacon is at best a low-value poster, and like many low-value posters appears not to realise or care that there is an expectation of a minimum level of quality which he is not reaching. However, this thread shows exactly the same lack of awareness of the expectations of a banning thread.

By all means propose that we ban bacon, or at least collectively tell him to pull his socks up. His contribution is negligible, and his attention-seeking in the thread at immediate issue is repulsive - it is pretty clear that not using homophobic language is a long way down his list of priorities. However, if you're going to do it, explain why you think it should happen, provide evidence, do some digging before you begin. These tossed-off "X should be banned, but oh I don't mean it really, just having a laugh" threads make it harder for us to get things that need to be done done.

There is Barbannoy if somebody is just hacking you off, and the Policy is a perfectly good place to raise concerns about a member's behaviour, but really.

00:07 / 04.10.07

Yes, that bacon's left a bad taste in my mouth— mostly for perpetrating the usual strident assertions of opinion people just love spewing so much on the internet, just done in run-on sentences with little punctuation or capitalization.

Given that Matt thinks now it was probably a bit quick and ill-advised to bring it up, I think Haus makes a good point that it's one thing to lament or bitch about some lousy posts, but we should come at the proposal of actual banning with some seriousness, and some standard procedure as well as standards of procedure.

ONLY NICE THINGS

00:43 / 04.10.07

We pretty much _have_ a standard procedure:

1) Identify who you feel should be banned.
2) Identify the behaviour that you feel should be banned for. Provide links to instances of that behaviour.
3) Explain why you believe that behaviour to justify banning.
4) (Optional) Suggest courses of action that might avoid the necessity of a discussion about banning.
And probably at present (5), propose a timetable for the discussion.

I think that if you are confronted by somebody who is obviously attacking Barbelith, these can be quite cursory - even to saying "X is doing Y across multiple threads (links), he has been asked to stop, he hasn't, he needs to be banned because he is breaking Barbelith with Y, unless anyone minds I'd like voting to start now". In most cases, though, an immediate and obvious attack is resolved by ban-by-fiat, after Tom is alerted, so anything with its own banning thread is probably in a greyer area.

01:04 / 04.10.07

I'm sorry, I appear to be consistently unclear in my use of language. I was not suggesting that there were not some procedures in place already, or that you, Haus, were making that point. Only that you were reiterating (yet again) the idea of implementing them correctly at an appropriate time, something I can agree with.