I'm starting to wonder what it takes to get banned around here. (Not that I'm trying to find out.) I've noticed a lot of inappropriate content that consistently comes from the same people, but those same people keep posting the same kind of content. People who post lots of inappropriate content in a short period of time disappear (spamming, numerous racist jokes), but people who post them regularly, but not all that often, are still hanging around. So I want to know what exactly it takes for people to get banned? A lot of folks around here look like they're getting away quite a bit.
Quite a few forums I've been to don't tolerate any kind of inappropriate content. If you post something that's blatantly inappropriate, you're gone without a warning. This forum seems to be an acception. It'd probably make it easier on the admins in the long run if they were just dealt with right away.
ID:136325
 Jan 1 2003, 9:24 am
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Triste wrote:
I'm starting to wonder what it takes to get banned around here. (Not that I'm trying to find out.) I've noticed a lot of inappropriate content that consistently comes from the same people, but those same people keep posting the same kind of content. People who post lots of inappropriate content in a short period of time disappear (spamming, numerous racist jokes), but people who post them regularly, but not all that often, are still hanging around. So I want to know what exactly it takes for people to get banned? A lot of folks around here look like they're getting away quite a bit. What you have to consider is the fact that a very large majority of BYOND's community is in the teenage years, who tend to try and push barriers a lot more than an older community might. Try going to fan-sites dedicated to shows for teenagers, and look at the forums(Dragonball Z, Sailor Moon, Tenchi Myo?, Ninja Scroll, Gundam Wing, etc.), and you will find that in 95% of the cases the forum is totally unreadable, or no one posts for fear of being banned by the administrator. It's hard to decide where to draw the line, and what decision may benefit the community most. The rest of the moderators and I are here to keep the forums a nice place to visit, where people won't need to see useless and messy things like flame wars, spam and anything else which might repel people. But we aren't here to run the forums like a concentration camp, where anyone who happens to run out of line once, or get pushed out will be shot. People have bad days, and a lot of people tend to carry that "bad vibe" on to the internet and into what they write. We usually warn someone when we feel they are straying into a pattern where they are posting things which are not appropriate to the forums, in hopes that it will pass and we don't have to go to more drastic measures. There's a lot of content on these forums that isn't strictly black and white when dealing with it, where it passes into a grey zone that's much harder to judge. Making a mistake and banning someone who just had a bad day can turn things rotten really quickly. That's not to say that its any excuse at all for posting things inapropriate to the forums, but simply that the iron-fist rule of banning asap is not always the correct way to handle situations. | |
*coughs* Forgot to scramble all of your keys' passwords? =P
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Dantom choose to be very lenient on people who present low-level problems; it's just the way they prefer to handle everything.
The lesser problem users are people who tend to merely get over-excited and forget that what they're posting is inappropriate. Warnings are often doled out to them, but more often their material is deleted without comment.
I'm easily the most hawkish forum mod here, yet I think an instant ban for blatantly inappropriate content is a bad idea except in very very rare cases. Nunugi's recent racist "joke", for example, should have merited no more than a temporary ban with a stern warning that the next time he spewed something that foul it'd be permanent. However if a complete unknown began spamming the forums from minute 1, I'd have no qualms with permanently banning his butt. Even here there's a matter of degree; I don't consider racism better than spam, but it's not an outright attack on the forums either. I have no problem with a racist using the forums as long as he keeps his twisted perspective on the subject to himself.
Lummox JR