The Tavern

Yes, this is yet another thread where I bitch about moderation.

Except not really! I just would really like bans to be announced. Not all of them, really - I don't care about the occasional adbot getting his swift justice, but when an real poster suddenly stops posting, I can't help but wonder, what happened to him? Did he simply stop playing and posting, or did he break one of the rules of this place? That's not just a theoretical example, because Berder stopped posting recently, and I can't help but wonder whether he just got tired of this number-hating community or whether one of the mods got tired of arguing with him.

So I guess my proposal is - have a thread where bans are announced. Made it moderator-only if you don't want anyone questioning your decisions. Don't even announce reasons if you don't wish to. Just don't leave us in the dark.

This really isn't a good idea

If not a straightforward announcement, how about adding '(banned)' somewhere in the user profile?

First off, I don't see any way it could be a problem for me to tell you guys that Berder isn't banned. I haven't seen him around on tileschat either.

As for announcing bans generally, I honestly don't know. Every online community seems to have different norms about this, and it's hard to tell who's doing it right. We just never got around to developing norms of our own, mostly because bans that don't involve spammers are actually quite rare. So let's hash it out and figure out what we want to do moving forward.

That said, I'm not thrilled with the idea of an announcement thread, locked or no, and putting a "banned" in user profiles seems like a punitive scarlet letter to me.

Well it turns out we have this feature anyway whether we want it or not thanks to Tapatalk, I guess? But yeah I don't think announcing bans is necessary or a productive thing to do, personally.

archaeo wrote:putting a "banned" in user profiles seems like a punitive scarlet letter to me

Is it much better to just silently ban them, though? I wouldn't know mps was banned if not for a thread in this forum, either. At least lets you knows some borders, though, instead of leaving you wondering if that one poster said something rule-breaking. Also, is onget banned?

Edit: Campbell-senpai posted in my thread!

(USER WAS BANNED FOR THIS POST)

I'm similarly mixed. It seems a little grave-dance-y to me. And do we announce temporary bans, or just permanent ones?

But as MarvinPA points out, the fact that Tapatalk barfs ban messages to non-banned people means that phpbb publicizes this data *somewhere.*

<grumble subject="phpbb" />

Amusingly, even as a board admin, I can't find a way to tell if an account is currently banned. <grumble subject="phpbb" />

Yes, onget was banned. I don't actually know if it was a temp or permanent ban.

Sar wrote:Is it much better to just silently ban them, though? I wouldn't know mps was banned if not for a thread in this forum, either. At least lets you knows some borders, though, instead of leaving you wondering if that one poster said something rule-breaking.

I think this would be more of a concern if we were quick to ban. It helps to "know some borders" when crossing them once is a big deal, but from what I can tell from the records, we're pretty generous with second and third chances in all but the most egregious cases.

Given that we don't really need to "instruct" posters via ban messages, I'm not sure I see any other good reasons to make it policy to inform everybody, whereas there are several good reasons not to. Lots of people use account names across the Internet, some of which are easily associated with their real names, and I don't like the idea of making it easy for somebody to search and find a Tavern page where we have them listed as some kind of public enemy. Getting banned from a video game forum is no big deal, so we shouldn't try to make it one, I think.

Agreed. I guess that if people directly ask (as Sar did) I'm kind of inclined to answer (as I did). Oooh! Cultural taboos!

AFAIK, none of the mods use banning as a first resort (PMs and warnings are, I think, always used first) and usually do a temporary ban before a permanent ban, especially when "hey buddy you need to cool off a little" is maybe what's going on. That said, there's no Official Policy.

Spammers are the exception, of course, and are banned on sight without comment.

I think it's good for transparency. I'm curious why mps was banned.

I think it makes sense to announce as long as the banned user consents. It really should be up to them how much they want their banishment known.

njvack wrote:Amusingly, even as a board admin, I can't find a way to tell if an account is currently banned. <grumble subject="phpbb" />

Yes, onget was banned. I don't actually know if it was a temp or permanent ban.

You can go to Moderator Control panel and then either User Notes or to Banning and then find them under the Unbanning form. User notes doesn't seem to reveal the length of ban, but the Unbanning page does show this. You just have to use this horrible single-width input box to find them in that case.

moocowmoocow wrote:I think it's good for transparency. I'm curious why mps was banned.

In my opinion, curiosity isn't really enough of a reason to present some kind of public prosecutorial summary. MarvinPA has already provided as much of an answer as the mods are prepared to give on this issue, as far as I know. I say "in my opinion" because I've seen other mods go into depth about their decisions, so maybe they might disagree with me here.

What we can do is be transparent about our process. What I can tell from the moderation logs and subforum suggests that no actual community member (as opposed to obvious trolls or spammers) has been banned without receiving numerous informal and formal warnings or temporary bans. These are nearly all discussed with the entire mod team, and as far as I can tell, no one has ever been banned without it being a unanimous decision.

all before wrote:I think it makes sense to announce as long as the banned user consents. It really should be up to them how much they want their banishment known.

I'm not really sure that that makes sense; "We regret to inform you that you're banned, do we have your permission to tell everyone?"

Is there a way to close your own account? The way another site I participate in (metafilter) does it, the profile page will just show "this account is disabled", which can happen for various reasons including closing it yourself (which people do actually do there). But this wouldn't really work if there is only one way for an account to be disabled.

The Terms of Use wrote:Please do not ask for your account to be deleted. To maintain a proper record of conversations the owner of this board and other services does not delete user accounts. You agree that all material you submit will remain in the database even if you later decide to leave the board or request that your user account is suspended or closed. If you find yourself in a situation where you no longer want to be an active member, switch off notifications and log out.

e: though as an aside, it appears that if you ask to be banned, we'll be happy to do so.

archaeo wrote:
The Terms of Use wrote:Please do not ask for your account to be deleted. To maintain a proper record of conversations the owner of this board and other services does not delete user accounts. You agree that all material you submit will remain in the database even if you later decide to leave the board or request that your user account is suspended or closed. If you find yourself in a situation where you no longer want to be an active member, switch off notifications and log out.

e: though as an aside, it appears that if you ask to be banned, we'll be happy to do so.

Right, metafilter is the same, but there's a way of effectively self-banning, which it turns out people will use (basically if they need a break from the site for whatever reason), so the "disabled" message in a profile doesn't mean that someone has been banned. I guess this must be pretty non-standard.

Sorry, looks like I misread what you said. I'm not sure how useful something like that would be for our purposes, but metafilter has to be doing something right to have lasted so long, right?

archaeo wrote:Sorry, looks like I misread what you said. I'm not sure how useful something like that would be for our purposes, but metafilter has to be doing something right to have lasted so long, right?

Sorry, I think I'm just failing to communicate. I was originally just trying to ask if something like that exists here (not propose it be added) -- in which case a profile saying "this account is disabled" is not informative about whether someone's been banned, but does handily tell you that communication attempts are futile. But I didn't fully realize that it's probably a fairly specific metafilter thing, and hence not even very obvious what I meant.

Then no, it doesn't exist here. It's not entirely specific to metafilter, though; I'm pretty sure reddit gives you the same error messages when you look at users who've been sitebanned/shadowbanned or a users that have deleted their own account, for example.

In the Tavern's case, the only way to tell the difference between an account that was banned and an account that simply stopped editing is to look at the non-public moderation logs.

iirc banned dudes can change their avatar and maybe signature to communicate, but i dont have any banned accounts so i cant test that

archaeo wrote:
The Terms of Use wrote: To maintain a proper record of conversations the owner of this board and other services does not delete user accounts.

oh, really?

Banned users can't log in at all, nor update their avatar or signature. They just see the ban reason message and get a mailto link for forum@crawl.develz.org (not even sure if anyone checks that).

Well, if the argument against informing the community of bans or the reasoning behind them is not wanting to violate the banned user's privacy or put potentially damaging information about them on the web, then those seem like the sorts of decisions that should be in the banned user's hands. It is, after all, their privacy. If the argument is that mods don't want to or shouldn't feel obligated to share bans or their justification, then that's another matter, and I agree, it's your all's choice how public you want to be about those decisions.

minmay wrote:
archaeo wrote:
The Terms of Use wrote: To maintain a proper record of conversations the owner of this board and other services does not delete user accounts.
oh, really?

I am still completely baffled as to what happened to your account. I believe your old messages are still out there, orphaned from their previous minmay-ness. There's nothing in the admin logs that say anyone deleted it. <grumble reason="phpbb" />

More seriously, because of the way Tavern and Mantis interact, deleting an account doesn't do what you expect; accounts get auto-recreated when people go to log in. I think deleting an account *does* delete its messages, though.

gammafunk wrote:They just see the ban reason message and get a mailto link for forum@crawl.develz.org (not even sure if anyone checks that).

That's actually pretty funny. "Here's where you send mail to ask about your ban. No one will ever read it."

njvack wrote:
gammafunk wrote:They just see the ban reason message and get a mailto link for forum@crawl.develz.org (not even sure if anyone checks that).

That's actually pretty funny. "Here's where you send mail to ask about your ban. No one will ever read it."

Napkin definitely reads it (or at lest has read it), as he got in touch with me when the system mailed him after I needed my account reactivated when I changed some settings. We could always ask him to have the account set to forward messages to a more active mod, though.

If napkin checks that account, it's enough, I think.

i had a dream last night that i made a post here saying i would never be banned, then and into banned me for the post

Onget was banned? Why?

Pretty sure the why of bans is supposed to be handled in PM. Regardless, he's largely had low contribution, and typically just calls everything he doesn't like stupid. I suspect it's related.

RIP Onget, killed by stupid remove

I'm not banned.

The Tavern

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