an open letter to the mods from Whiney G. Weingarten

Dan, goddamnit, don't quit as mod.

Why shouldn't I?

I mean, who in their right mind would put up with this unmitigated bullshit indefinitely?

take a day or two off and think about it

i vote for dan staying

subtle dig at jj imo

seriously, dude--shit got heated today and that's the worst time to make any decision.

if you came back tomorrow and said "yeah, i'm definitely done" it would make a lot more sense imo

If you're just saying "we'd like the mods to stop banning people in the heat of the moment" then yes I think everyone's agreed on that. I personally veer very strongly towards yellow carding and warning people first and then going ahead with the ban if they ignore that, but that's a personal view.

If we're still pretending like the suggest ban system has some kind of corrective effect on poster's behaviour whereby we're supposed to "learn something" from it (because trust me, from experience, it does not function that way, it just tends to make one more defensive and paranoid) rather than the crude popularity contest it actually functions as, then perhaps it would actually make more sense to have an automatic yellow card which tells you, privately, when you are approaching the 51 limit? (and maybe give you some clue what you're getting hit for? Like what post, what thread has acrued the most bans?)

Because my personal experience is that mod bans *do* have a behavioural effect (mainly because you are *told* what you are being banned for; and because the ban is effective immediately, the punishment is actually linked to the negative behaviour in a Pavolovian sense, rather than just being inflicted - seemingly randomly - hours, days or even months after the mysterious "thing" you are supposed to be being punished for, which is how SB functions.)

And Suggest Bans, as they function now, do not; in fact they actively functioned to make me *more* defensive, more prone to meta and sniping and thinking "I'm being persecuted for having unpopular *opinions*".

Anyway, that's my new rule of "no meta" broken already, but honestly, if you want to have some discussion of how banning is supposed to work as a "reforming" tactic you might actually bother asking the repeat offenders if it works like you think it does - and the answer is, it fucking well doesn't, for all the reasons above.

Why shouldn't I?

Because I'm imagining you being all goth about it right now.

automatic yellow card which tells you, privately, when you are approaching the 51 limit?

This is an EXTREMELY sensible suggestion, in my opinion.

"you have 8 SBs to comply"

lol

include a little ed-209 icon

http://gifarchive.files.wordpress.com/2008/02/robo1.gif?w=510

i have to think that any new mechanisms or code changes or board functions are just not going to happen

if people are arguing for changes they have to argue for either policy change or personnel change

see the problem that is kinda arising here is that peeps dont want the sb because it should be up to the mods to make decisions about what justifies a ban etc, but then a mod decides to ban someone and everyone is all up in arms about abusing their power or whatever so uh what exactly are people suggesting as a coherent way to do this?

xposts

frankly the current situation where WGW got mod banned and then sbed within 24 hours could not illustrate this better imo - yet here we are still arguing about how mods mod. or at least i think that is what we are arguing about? idk anymore frankly

i have to think that any new mechanisms or code changes or board functions are just not going to happen

this could be done manually with minimal extra work afaict

sb is not relevant to this discussion--if ppl want to talk sb they should take it elsewhere

"manually" = "policy", right? don't think we're disagreeing

I think it illustrates that 51 people does not make a consensus on ilx and no matter how this is done, people are gonna be pissed when their friends get in trouble, so you mods should just pat their heads and say "there, there...there, there, little ones" for a day or two until it blows over.

the prob ppl are having with wgw is that it *appeared to be* a quick pull of the trigger and was accompanied by namecalling in the admin log.

i still don't know how widespread the thing whiney was doing was. could only find it a couple times in search. i could easily see how it could be misconstrued if you weren't aware of certain threads.

sorry goole i read too fast

I agree with kkvgz

anyways, the fact that temp bans auto-increase is dumb and doesn't make any sense. what he was doing was not worth a 4 week ban. that caused ppl to freak as well.

k3v, still would like to know what, if anything, you want done.

― Unfrozen Caveman Board-Lawyer (WmC), Thursday, November 4, 2010 1:13 PM (16 minutes ago)

well when this started i didn't know that whiney had gotten 51'd too - originally i thought the temp ban was unnecessary but if he got SB'd there's not much to do there.

i also want a pony

whiney has been suggest banned within the past year and people didn't get that pissed; this is strictly about mod action, like it always is.

this ilx tea party shit is lol

yeah i agree with cad

in hindsight, the *best* way to handle whiney in that particular thread would have been to check how many sb's he had and let it drop--but hey that didn't happen and here we are.

frankly the current situation where WGW got mod banned and then sbed within 24 hours could not illustrate this better imo - yet here we are still arguing about how mods mod. or at least i think that is what we are arguing about? idk anymore frankly

― O_o-O_0-o_O (jjjusten), Thursday, November 4, 2010 1:32 PM (4 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

yeah i guess we just see this very differently -- to me that illustrates how unnecessary Dan's action was. it's almost like a cop planting drugs on a criminal that's already been caught in the act, why even stick your neck out taking a questionable action when justice will be served either way?

this could be done manually with minimal extra work afaict

Always my favorite part of a mod thread.

yeah because so many people are over 40 sb's at all times

http://pic.phyrefile.com/n/na/narf/2010/06/14/facepalm.jpg

We don't really need to go through this again do we?

I'd support the idea of warning people when they hit, say, 40 Suggest Bans, but an automated warning is the very worst way to go about it.

^^^making sense all over the place

you mean in terms of coding, matt?

Seems to me like being a mod is a pain in the freakin ass. Other boards that I come across don’t even indulge these discussions so big up to the mods for having a dialog.

In the end it’s just a temp ban and it's like don't you have to go really out of your way to get a ban in the first place?

MOST PEOPLE ON HERE DONT GET BANNED IMO

yeah i guess we just see this very differently -- to me that illustrates how unnecessary Dan's action was. it's almost like a cop planting drugs on a criminal that's already been caught in the act, why even stick your neck out taking a questionable action when justice will be served either way?

What the fuck are you talking about? "Planting evidence" would be editing Whiney's posts into inflammatory nonsense to encourage other people into suggest-banning him. This is a deliberately inflammatory, prejudicial analogy.

My communication method in this instance was too compressed because, quite frankly, I was also severely annoyed at the time, but what I was attempting to accomplish was:

- stopping an unnecessary, IMO destructive derail of the thread (which was dragging on off-topic beef that had been going on for several days on other threads)
- informing Ph1l that his username was offending people and that he should change it

The "27 days" portion of the admin log comment was an allusion to how many times Whiney had been temp-banned. To my knowledge, there's never been a temp-ban that's lasted longer than three but I'm not going to search the archives or the admin log to verify that, so I'll just assume I'm wrong and it's happened a couple of times. Also, and I don't expect anyone to believe this, I was hoping that a temp ban would keep him from getting sb'd yet again, because the point Masonic Boom raises with regard to the anonymity of the suggest ban and how it comes across as a gross popularity contest without any relevant feedback is possibly the best point I've read on this thread with regards to the system as it is currently working (and one reason why I ultimately think the "how many sbs do I have" is a good idea) and has actually been a topic of discussion amongst site mods within the past couple of months.

lol, all this talk about sbs made me revive the 77 version of that thread, hi dere.

bring back whiney

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well, i said "almost" because i couldn't think of an analogy that didn't involve a more serious offense than what you actually did, sorry.

it's almost like a cop planting drugs on a criminal that's already been caught in the act

Why would anyone even want to be a mod when you get rhetoric like this? But then I would just ban people at whim so it's not like I'm ever going to be asked to be a mod anyway, the point is probably moot.

i did it for the ilx tote bag but tbh in retrospect i regret the decision

the MODS have DEATH PANELS

Why would anyone even want to be a mod when you get rhetoric like this?

really really good question

It is really fucking rich to be all "mods should be held to a higher standard of behavior" on one hand and then going out of your way to use deliberately provocative language to describe their actions, pretty much daring them to lose it and therefore prove themselves unfit to be a moderator.

also lol @ "ILX Tea Party"

dunno if everybody's figured this out yet but there is NOT A HOMOGENOUS MOD STYLE.
You don't become a mod and get a handbook. Everybody tries to respect everyone else's decisions and discuss them. Generally if there's a confrontation or disagreement, it gets discussed on the mod board and you get a sense of what the group as a whole thinks. Everyone strives to match a mean.
I don't always agree with some of Hi Dere's hardman modding decisions but then I'm willing to put up with a lot of shit that he isn't and that's our respective prerogative. He's also more of a comedy modder; he'll toss out a one day ban for the lulz and the uproar is mostly just because the log reads it as 27 days or whatever. I kinda like dude's insouciance and "oh you wanted a fight" venom; if anything hi dere is your representative in this congress.
Personally, I haven't SB'd anyone in the past six months and my only attempst at banning were an LJ ban (which kinda shouldn't count) and a bad decision on my part for a threadban when I was figuring out how this worked. But I'm more chaotic neutral and happy to see shit get crazy as long as nobody's feeling's get hurt/no godwin's law/no racist shit/no irl repercussions. Not everybody rolls like that and i can dig it.
real talk: this is a diversion and without some shit-stirring and drama, it can be not enough of a diversion to hold everyone's attention. So some of the 500 post threads on these kinda topics are mostly about talkin' to talk. But nobody should be losing sleep about this stuff and nobody should be taking it personal. it's the internet

i hear hi dere is a secret 4channer, a manchurian chandidate as it were