"we won't use warnings against people if they old BUT we don't want them to expire"

yeah ok

You know that I cannot. No one can demonstrate anything like that. But, on the flip side, and *can* you demonstrate that people wont be unduly biased towards people they have had to moderate? Regardless of if the warning expires. Again, having a record of it, IMO, is concrete, and, while new mods might see that so-and-so was warned last year, the older mod who did the warning would have specifics around the warning, not just a vague memory of it happening.



Maybe I'm naive, but I have a good-faith belief that the mods are really trying to do what's best for the site, not have private vendettas against specific people. If the punishment from a recent altercation seems to be stronger than expected, there's a clear escalation method here, and the mods have been very open (again, IMO) about being willing to have discussions on specific issues.



Action for a specific post does need to be timely. Bans should not happen two years after a post.

When you say "expire" do you mean no record at all of the altercation, or just that it's not included when determining punishment?

moderated posts don't disappear

the many posts I have had removed sill exist and anyone with moderator privileges can go and read them all regardless of my "warning level"

Talking in Metaboard in an "official" thread, regardless of how how asinine the post may be, warrants posting in the moderator account.

Joining a game as the moderator account is kinda retarded.

Ko,

I'm sorry you're offended that the Forum Stats Thread is in the Metaboard, and that you think forum posting games are simply copy/pasting. But there can be game-like threads that exist outside the PBP area without interfering with whatever area they are in. The Card Chain Game for all intents and purposes is a posting game, several of threads in the Off Topic could fall into the 'game' category as well, yet theres nothing wrong with the users of those areas wanting to have those threads in their areas.

1. it's "for all intents and purposes". I don't care if you were joking.
2. I think the card game should be in posting games though. I'm picking my fights however

I can see an argument for the forum statistics posting game having a home in posting games or in the metaboard. The fact that it could have stayed where it was doesn't mean that moving it is a bad thing, either. I personally probably wouldn't have bothered, but that doesn't mean moving it was the wrong call. The fact that I closed the post count thread previously was also a judgement call; I felt it didn't add anything, and I still feel that way, so it was closed. The forum statistics thread is just about as pointless, so to help resolve this issue, I'm going to just go ahead and close it now.

A record exists of all warnings, period. Quote unquote problem users who tend to receive a lot of warnings are going to be on the mods' radar regardless of whether there is any record of their warnings, so I think keeping that record on our end is a good thing, because as was mentioned previously, it allows us to track the good as well as the bad. "Oh no, here comes miss_bun, flaming people as usual; time to give her a warning" can be mitigated by checking the warning log and noticing that the user hasn't received a warning or ban in nine months. The tracked warning system is a good thing. Warnings do "fall off" of your account after a time, and the comment made earlier that the record is never actually completely cleared was perhaps misinterpreted by some users in this thread. Once a warning falls off, it is as if you have never received it.

I will also say that my number one priority in moderation is to ensure that no personal bias creeps in, to the point where some of the mods are probably pretty irritated at me sometimes when I grill them on why someone should receive a warning when they have perfectly legitimate justification for doing so. So please don't think that any mod is moderating anyone - ever - based on their personal feelings toward that user.

If we've misinterpreted it, please clarify in more detail just what will happen and when it will happen. What does it look like when a warning has fully expired? What does it look like for you? What does it look like for a user?

Your warning level on your user control panel will indicate the number of official warnings you have received since your account was created. However, the only warnings which will be considered are those that have not expired and fallen off of your account.

Alright. Sooo I actually had the exact correct interpretation. And it still sounds like an awful, aggressively punitive, unacceptably opaque way of doing things.

If you're going to make them visible, then you need to make it clear at what point the warnings expire. Otherwise, as I've already stated, there is literally no reason to believe that they expire at all. From our perspective, with no knowledge, it's always more reasonable to believe that you're going to continue punishing us for crimes committed against the forum years ago, because we'll know that you're looking at an entire case history. There's no reason to think that our mistakes won't always be haunting us.

I'm gonna be real here and I hope that by the time I submit this post I'm not already banned

This warning **** is really **** stupid. Like, you get banned and you're like "well I actually kind of like people here so I better get my **** together" and so you try and post better and stop involving yourself in discussions in which you **** hate everyone and are just going to flame people.

So even though you're tryin and ****, your past seven thousand warnings that never expire are still there so it's like "why do I **** try I'm just going to get banned again". Like, it doesn't **** matter how much you try because you have so many warnings that you're inevitably going to get banned. So you just report your post and accept forum account death.

Maybe that's how it's supposed to be but I think that is really stupid.

Speaking purely with hypotheticals here of course

So why was my forum stats thread closed? I originally posted it in the forum games section. Then it was moved to the meta board. Where "it ultimately didn't add anything". Not only would I argue that it does actually have a function of keeping track of growth and posting, how exactly do such threads as "word association" and "random story" and so on and so on actually provide any real content?

I mean by that outstanding logic, we should completely dismember the entire posting games forum. And if I wanted to be a philosophical jerk, I would just say ultimately nothing on this forum means anything and we should shut down the entire forum and all kill ourselves and turn into the cosmic dust that we're destined to be sooner than later.

Again, Ko, this part just isn't true:



They roll of your record after some set time; they still show in the count you see on your profile, but they aren't counted when determined what ban - if any - a specific infraction earns.

So, example time. Let's say that after your second warning in a one month period, you get a day ban; your third in one month gets you a week; your fourth gets you permabanned.

So, October 1st you come along and flame John Doe, because you think he's really stupid. First warning. Your user profile shows one, our complete record shows one, our current record shows one.

October 5th, you once again flame John Doe, because he hasn't learned diddly in the past four days. Second warning, and a one day. Your user profile shows two, our complete record shows two, our current record shows two.

You go away on vacation. It's one of those European style vacations where you travel for three weeks. (Damn, I would love three straight weeks off.) Between getting ready for your trip and then catching up with everything once you get back, you actually don't make another post on the site until November 2nd. And sure enough, John Doe still hasn't learned, so you give it to him again. Third warning. But... your user profile shows three, our complete record shows three, but our current record only shows two. Since this is only your 2nd warning in the last month, you get a day ban. That warning from October 1st has rolled off your current record, which is what we're using when looking at what happens.

You take your day ban like a man and come back. You manage to avoid John Doe most of the time, and the handful of times you see his posts, you're able to control your inner rage rather than letting it consume you. But finally, on November 10th you snap, and once again flame John Doe. And the mod gives you another warning. Your profile shows four, your complete record shows four, but your current record again only shows two. Day ban. Even though your profile and our complete record show four, we're using the current record to determine status.

There's a technical reason for this being in place as-is. As we've said for a while, we don't plan to delete anything - that's mostly so far been said about posts and threads, but it's also true for records. And if we tell the software that warnings expire after one month, it does two things: it resets the count on your profile page, and it deletes the record that the warning ever existed. Obviously, the example is simplified; I didn't want a drawn-out example. But the example works the same way as what we're doing, just with different numbers.

but you never actually tell anyone that warnings expire and my profile never changes so really you're not being transparent at all which is really frustrating to the end user because it feels like there is no point

speaking again in hypotheticals of course

creatures like us are meant to die. you should at least try to be funnier and more creative when you get banned like I do



the moderation is by design supposed to be opaque, dont you know? its why posts are deleted willy nilly and it's why mods get two accounts even though we can all guess who half of them are. if transparency was what they were aiming for, instead they would edit posts saying what was edited out and when, have only one account, and have a page for each user listing every warning and ban they've ever gotten for public record showing what they got warned/banned for with a link to the post in question. but it's not what the moderation staff wants, so they get to be wishy washy and needlessly obfuscated

So, you ONLY see the current warnings unless you actively, deliberately seek out the detailed overview? I mean, I don't like it anyway, but that's at least marginally less bad than what you folks seemed to be describing

But Ko is still fundamentally correct to say that this feels futile, opaque, and like the burden is never lifted.

I take issue broadly with the idea that you carry your sins with you but your virtues are so transient as to be utterly invisible to the system, but I'm not sure how to solve that problem exactly other than to mitigate the burden of sin.

I want to poke Ravenclaw to throw his two cents in since as someone who has a criminal justice degree he might have a valuable take on things, so I'm cool waiting for a response, Fire. Thanks.

That I would be highly interested in.

Ultimately what it comes down to is that overall the staff feels like the potential for people to game the system isn't worth the transparency provided by making all of the warning/ban policy guidelines public.

What's important is to know what's against the rules, and not break those rules. At some point, breaking rules will lead to a permanent ban. I think as long as everyone understands that, we are in a good place.

However, I'm definitely interested in Ravenclaw's input, and continued input from the community.

I don't like that the Forum Stats Thread was closed. Is it a topic that really doesn't have a home on this forum anywhere?

It gives the public a record of the dates of certain milestones, since we can't go and execute our own MySQL queries to access that information...and I am all for transparency in the public record.

That said, I also don't think warnings should ever be removed from the record. But that's because I think that literally everything should be public record. It has the same root reasoning as my desire for the removal of all word filters, censorship, and a public record of all edits.

But people should be able to know when their warnings don't count against them. I know you're worried about people "gaming the system" -- but that is the price of transparency. It is a price well worth paying.