it's weird to me that this discussion seems to hinge so much on a rigid reading of the CoC when, by design, the thing is vague and provides moderators with a fair amount of leeway for judgment calls. but yeah, if the same two people keep getting into fights, then there's almost certainly some baiting going on, and that's against the CoC. so I can't really construct a scenario in which two people keep getting into problematic fights and yet no one violated the CoC.

Yeah, the posts were removed, so you didn't see what happened. We might be on page 20 if not for the warning, with less actually accomplished.

I'm suggesting harsher punishments for multiple offenses including the same group.

We've had multiple cases of people getting into issues with each other and not getting a hard warning, multiple cases of people repeatedly getting into it with each other and the next dispute being seen as inevitable, etc. There has to be a proactive change we can make somewhere, that isn't just waiting for the inevitable and especially what the mods see as inevitable to happen. Especially if warnings start to expire, but the mods still see the next blow-up as inevitable.

Do you think that there's nothing he could post in this thread without causing a problem?

Your entire attitude in this thread is predicated upon the idea that you don't deserve any mod action. Are you so certain that is the case? (Remember when I was suggesting everyone should be taking this thread as a time for some introspection - everyone includes everyone)

Btw, Hakeem and Stevo didn't get into it in this thread. I just thought I should point that out. Hakeem, so far as I can tell hasn't gotten into it with anyone lately.

@DJ, I almost certainly deserve more mod action then I get, and I am commenting with that in mind.

@DJ, Rubik,

I will forward you some stuff I've got in my inbox.

And, with members reporting persons these issues and with enough Mods to patrol/act on this information, this should resolve itself. No extra action needed.

If it is found that this still is not working, THEN we move it up a step.

Small, reasonable steps, gets us to the right level of enforcement without going too far.

Good, I'm glad I was reading you wrong.

In this particular case, the Mods decided no it seems. Personally, I saw this post explode during that time with shots fired across the bow of many people.

Ok. Since I now have 4 outstanding pm's to people directly related to the topic, pertaining to different issues, and I am about to have a fifth if not a sixth, this is actually the best place to do this.

Please everyone. Check your inboxes.

I think we all know what road this sort of conversation goes down and I'm sure you know by now that it isn't productive, so please don't try to start it.

Regardless of the justifications you might have for disliking a poster or wanting them banned, there's absolutely no reason anyone should be airing that dirty laundry in this thread (or any thread for that matter).

If you think a poster should dealt with, talk to a mod in private. There's zero reason to discuss this publicly unless we want another round of edits and warnings.

Agreed. In any case, it's not worth it. Better to let the mods handle these things. Imo.

Ditto. I'm regretting bringing it up now.

It should be no secret that this is my point of view as well at the moment. There have been some suggestions made in this thread that we are acting on, and in return we asked for the users to act a bit differently as well in terms of the report button and fanning the flames.
I think that, right now, this is the main thing we should try out.

We recently made the change in the earlier punishments regarding hard warns and this combined with the extra set(s) of eyes could very well help a lot. But we will not know until we've actually had time to try it out.

Looking at the current system we currently have:
Hard warn 1 (no further action)
Hard warn 2 (Dayban)
Hard warn 3 (Weekban)
Hard warn 4 (permanent)

In between those we also have soft warns, where we send PMs if you did something wrong and warn you to be more careful.
And I think that's justified because you can get warnings for different infractions.
But repeating infractions is already handled pretty well, I think.

Edit
As a heads-up: I'm not going to look at Hakeem's post because it involves Steve again and like I said earlier I have no intention of looking into that history. I'll leave that up to the moderator that knows his stuff regarding this.

I mean I think this is to some extent down to semantics. You're describing this as reaching out, I'm describing this--based on Jack's description--as a threat. I think the carrot is much less important here than the stick.

But since you're, you know, razorborne, let me try to explain what I see as the central set of issues here:

I think it's ridiculous to adhere rigidly to the four strikes rule in cases where someone is outright stating that they're hear to cause trouble and a day ban will only inspire them to cause more trouble.

I'm frustrated that the cost of the four/six strikes rule, and this idea of everyone as being potentially a valuable contributor, doesn't seem to be something that people want to address, except to dismiss out of hand with a pretty weak "well no one can predict the future" response. Being a mod is ABOUT predicting the future and recognizing patterns of behavior.

It seems bizarre to me that mods can talk out of uniform about people being bad news, but in uniform don't actually seem to so anything to curtail a repeat of behavior they know will happen.

And I'm frustrated by other decisions that have to remain private but which I'll touch on below.



Well, I don't know. Honestly, I have a long term memory for things that I find upsetting. That's just how I'm wired. Maybe that particular neurodivergence makes my testimony inadmissible. I wouldn't categorize this as widespread degeneracy but a pattern of wrong decisions spread out over the history of the board, which occasionally lead to major flareups like this.

It's hard to get into specifics without discussing information that I know because of privileged information, and while I find this very frustrating, this isn't at a point where I'm going to take the nuclear option and spread that stuff around.

But I will say that personally I've always been uncomfortable with how much sway the OTTers had here--which goes to your point about the 4chan crowd honestly. I don't know if you remember this but it's always stuck in my memory that as things were getting founded you decided not to join the board because of Kobold's nonsense in the pre-board. That made a deep impression on me--that was really the moment when I realized that this "everyone is great" thing means making a tradeoff between, to put it bluntly, people who contribute something worthwhile and people who contribute only 4chan tier nonsense.

I don't know though you probably feel about or remember that incident differently? I wish I could pull up the history but the temporary board has fallen off the Net. I regret that because I think just generally speaking that was some important history... it didn't occur to me till now to see whether it still existed.

Beyond that though there was an incident where a staff member attacked me in a pretty vicious way and ultimately I was told that being upset and concerned about the way I was treated meant that I was, in effect, just wanting everyone I disagreed with banned. You know, despite the fact that I didn't report this person or anything like that.

That... leaves an impression on a person honestly.

There's one other set of incidents that I could cite that mirrors this kind of thing but I don't feel comfortable talking about that lest I break confidence. I'll just say that it involved considering someone with a long history of past infractions for a position of not insubstantial power. That was resolved correctly in my opinion but it was another incident where the attitude kind of was like... why would this be a problem? Like disinterest in the consequences or even just how something would look

If my personal feelings make my take on things invalid, I don't know there's not a lot I can do about that. I can't pretend like I don't have a deeply personal stake in this, and what I'm saying in this thread I'm saying out of a longstanding frustration. I mean I think it's also coming from a place of long experience with internet communities and a close interest in how they function and, in particular, the history of F&S on the motherboard that's rattling around in my head after I did all that archive work. I see both as valuable but I recognize that others might see the former as a liability to the latter.

I really invested myself deeply in No Goblins Allowed. I want it to do well. But it just often feels to me like the people running things would rather not have to deal with the unpleasant or complicated parts of their job, and it's always felt to me that I was just trying to keep my head above water while making sure that my particular community--not just my community on these boards but my community in terms of my marginal identity--had some sort of representation and defense.

I don't know, though, maybe I should have gone through with my plan to disappear completely once M:EM was settled and power handed over to Yxoque.

So you dismissed me at the outset. Call it "dirty laundry" if you like, but I am merely voicing my opinion on the reasons for the toxicity in the Duels Sub. I'm also fully aware that my responses to any perceived "toxicity" are toxic in nature and I am harming the community when I make those types of posts.

But that doesn't mean my opinions on the source are any less invalid. It just means that I don't get to partake in the community anymore because of past history that could hurt the community's future growth. I'm not posting there as a contributor anymore, nor do I intend to. I still care about the place, though, hence my presence here.

Well, on someone's request, I sent a list of things to Owen's inbox. If Scarlet wants it (she apparently really really doesn't though) she can have it too.

So please, leave it alone. It is not worth it.

I can't even begin to explain how much this resonates with me, so I'll just quote it instead. Well-said.

In the CoC, section 8:

In cases where it's clear that education would be meaningless because the user has no intention of following any kind of rules in the first place, such as someone who joins up for the sole purpose of spamming shock images or racist diatribes across the forums, we reserve the right to accelerate the warning process. With Lead and Site Owner review, a non-spambot user who falls into this category may be moved directly to permaban status. (Spambots come pre-approved!)

It seems this is already addressed in the CoC.

The overall issue, and this has been identified and hopefully will be corrected in in the next week or two, is the site needs more moderators to ENFORCE the CoC. Real Life Syndrome is a factor and does take its toll on response times. Everything, at this point, seems to be included in the CoC.

I may be wrong here, but his implication seems to be that he feels the particular clause there is not used often enough in extenuating circumstances. I'm not sure if I agree with this or not.

On my part, I think we have literally discussed every one I know of in this thread. But contrary to popular opinion I am not omniscient or omnipresent. Except in the Off topic thread of the Duels subforum.