If they disliked doing it, I doubt they'd be mods.

I always thought it's more akin to a chore wheel, but they decided to volunteer so that none of the rest of us have to take a turn and the people who want to take a turn but will mess it up don't get a chance to.

When I get on a computer I will go digging around in our tool box and see how we're getting suspension to act the way I described and get back to you.

Ultimately how something sounds =/= evidence that something is unsound though.

I mean, what sort of person uses alt account to circumvent a forum ban? That's ridiculous.

So I use different software, but forums have been streamlined to a point that they all look exactly the same at surface level. Sigh.

If someone from your tech side wants to reach out to me, I can at least tell them how it works on our end, and see if there is something that can be approximated.

It's not a solution to the problem, though, it's just a way of temporarily shutting people up by arbitrarily hurting a group of people.

It's the forum moderation equivalent of genocide. Hutu or Tutsi? Which group do YOU want to arbitrarily ban?

At a certain point, by trying to prevent conflict before it happens, you become the conflict. It's important that the mods don't ban people unless they clearly violate rules that are publicly known and agreed upon and that they treat people as impartially as possible when doing so. And as far as I can tell, they do that.

It's less easy and it doesn't prevent as many offenses before they happen, but it's actually pretty fair. I'd never advocate a system of banning people for their association with others. Doing that sort of thing would have such a substantial negative effect on the forum's atmosphere that it wouldn't be worth its few meager advantages.

The other problem is that our little corner of the world is currently bleeding members. It's slow, but it's happening. Thing is, you can't really blame it on the moderators.

I just like it. Must be the teacher inside of me. After all, I am a math teacher and surrounded by 12-18 year olds all day. It helps with dealing with stuff on the internet sometimes

Thanks for the responses and addressing my concerns, Althalus

Quick question, if I'm reading this right we can totally flame people that have never been members (e.g. Users) of this site. Amirite???

Jk

(Runs off and starts a post against that devil - WizardsChris)

I've gotten about 4 warnings in the past year and while it was annoying not receiving and email (or receiving a PM I can't look at which is ridiculous), it's unreasonable to expect Althalus' life to be mod and he's very open to communicating if you want to badger him via email.

Well no one reached out for a technical discussion and Im not going to spam mods with messages.....sooooooooo.........?

Sorry, that would be my fault -- I haven't been checking this thread as it didn't seem to impinge on the tech side of things.

On phpbb the sort of partial ban you're talking about -- e.g., users can log in and send/receive PMs, but not post -- can be accomplished by setting up a usergroup with those permissions and, rather than banning, assigning users to that group. The downsides are that you lose out on the built-in machinery of banning, and require each moderator to have admin permissions so they can do the group reassignment. These aren't unworkable, but they're also not nontrivial costs, so if you have another route that would be interesting to hear about!

you mean send/receive PMs to moderators, right? I feel like if someone's banned for harassment letting them just take that harassment to the PM box is a pretty bad solution.

I meant what I said. You can restrict permissions to a fairly granular degree, but not so far as to say "You may PM <users> and no one else".

I cant attach files in a PM, so here is a screenshot of a thing.

How do you 'ignore' a user for posts in threads? Possible?

If you click on a users profile and press "add foe" it will automatically hide all content they produce (with the ability to display it at will).

Thanks Elijin