Missin U <3 - lamentations for those felled by the SB

Glad to see you're calling me "Keith" now and not the "site programmers".

n1ck's idea has always been a good idea. the real arguments against SBans are the obscure length of time it takes votes to fade and the lack of a balance option for posters that piss lots of people off but whom others adore.

of course, that could just lead to a cliquefest clickfest. i'm sure if it's introduced a problem would come up within 0.2 seconds.

btw i have used SB liberally and often, usually for humor purposes.

as have many of us! or just against ppl who annoy us. And if we swear off it now, that just leaves it in the hands of the equivalent of Nascar fans.

keith I wasn't sure who was responsible for the suggest ban feature

I wrote it. I wrote all of the software except for the bit that checks your BBCode, which Libcrypt wrote. Stet wrote the Mac client app.

And if we swear off it now, that just leaves it in the hands of the equivalent of Nascar fans.

I don't get all the nuances of "Nascar fans", but that's seems pretty contemptuous of posters who aren't like you.

I can think of several posters who have deliberately toned down the more excessive, rude, or annoying parts of their personality in order to avoid it.

prithee what is this moron blabbering about

<3

posters changing their behavior because 1.08% of users want them too

SB phonies!

1.08% OTM tbh

and even then what the users of the sb "want" is an assumption

yes

what they 'want' is that user to be banned, failing a drop down list. when people start to usse the feature with this in mind, it might be a little more useful.

btw keith I know you are responsible for programming ILX & I have nothing but respect for your hard work and honest concern for the board, I just wasn't sure if the suggest ban specifically was your doing or not. You know that my opinion is that the SB feature has run its course, but that is not meant as an insult to the coding that went into it.

All I can tell from looking at recent SBs is what users want other users NOT to do, and that's very obvious when you look at it.

Thanks. That's definitely a better way of putting it than:

nothing to do with john justen/tombot/hi dere obv but I love how the site programmers ignore the fact that suggest ban is an obviously stupid and useless feature that needs to be removed immediately

― 51 is the loneliest number (Curt1s Stephens), Wednesday, August 5, 2009 2:58 PM (1 hour ago) [IP: 66.32.209.9: Atlanta, United States] Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

what do users want me not to do, Matt?

I am actually very tempted to write a 'Lady, If You Have To Ask...' guide to the top five things that will get you SB'ed.

can you tell what specific post people are sb'ed on? xp

can we ban gabbneb?

can you tell what specific post people are sb'ed on?

Yes, we can.

keith you have my express permission to suggest ban me for posting that shit, I would do it myself but I already suggest banned myself

i think that each time someone bites an SB there should be a list generated with each post that produced a vote, and possibly this should be a poll.

we could call it "gr8080"

oh, good to know. i'll keep my future sb's on the right posts then

Most times I tried to engage ppl in a detailed discussion on beliefs and policy

lol

has Tuomas been banned from this thread or something? how can we have this discussion without learning what Tuomas's opinion on suggest ban is? he is so inscrutable about it and we really need to know where he stands before moving forward

hope he SB's you for that

kudos/props/Suggest Unban button

Hm, I think the SB system is a bit flawed in its onesidedness and I like the idea of some way to counteract them, but a recent Keith post said that the success of SBs was clear from ILX now having less snark and personal attacks, and bitchy zingfests would probably be voted up for bringing the lolz, thus ensuring that slightly annoying but inoffensive posters would continue to rack up bans while being a juggernaut of hilarious spite and creepiness would be A-OK with ILX

but I guess put like that the only response is "well duh, way to be on the wrong messageboard if you disagree", so, yep, carry on

but a recent Keith post said that the success of SBs was clear from ILX now having less snark and personal attacks, and bitchy zingfests would probably be voted up for bringing the lolz, thus ensuring that slightly annoying but inoffensive posters would continue to rack up bans while being a juggernaut of hilarious spite and creepiness would be A-OK with ILX

^^^^

exactly why a kudos/props button doesn't work/exactly why I'm pro-SB

key word: hilarious!

snark can keep you prisoner, fear can set you free.

asc, a couple of things:

1. With the introduction of a time limit on a ban suggestion (which I can't remember the duration of at the moment), it is now very unlikely for an inoffensive poster to accumulate enough ban suggestions to trip the switch.

2. If "suggest props" were implemented, the suggest ban threshold would have to be dropped. Keith just implemented a menu that shows the number of current active users on the boards; we'll have to watch this number to see how it trends and I'd be curious if there are more detailed statistics behind the scenes (like unique users per day, for example) but right now it seems that the board is hovering around 70-80 active users at any given time. It's conceivable that we're actually looking at an active community that's in the low hundreds rather than the low thousands, in which case a 51 post threshold would be virtually impossible to reach.

3. Not all problems can or should be solved by coding a new feature. I would be more in favor of turning off the suggest ban link than adding a new one to counteract it. IMO, the best way to give positive feedback is to post positively.

no no no Dan I am sure you misspoke. the best way to give positive feedback, to any poster, is to SEND MONEY DIRECTLY TO J0HN D.

acting like ilx was a happy great awesome neato place before SB is pretty weird to me. curtis, you make it sound like ilx was innocent to the idea of clusterfuck threads about how this board works or something! i mean, i seem to remember a lot of clusterfuck threads about mod bannings, ppl demanding that bannings get more democratic, etc. the thing is, ppl complain that 51 is an insignicant # to get banned by, but i feel like i see the same handful of posters on these clusterfuck threads, saying the same thing every time.

if i was less lazy and had more time maybe i would go thru each of the SB clusterfuck threads and count names, but truth is: i just don't really give that much thought to SBs. it's not the end of the world if someone gets banned, either for us or for them. this is not the centre of the universe. they can even come back after a pretty short time! (most of the time).

obv, this site will never be perfect - not to YOU, or YOU or even YOU... precisely because there are like a million users. can't please everyone! and what's the total SB number at now? like 12 ppl maybe? so maybe try dividing 12 by whatever huge number of users there are. doesn't seem like SB is having that huge of an impact, when you look at it from that perspective.

pretty sure no one pays keith for his time or services to this site, maybe should cut the guy some slack and not pretend like he's some kind of idiot for ignoring 'everyone's' complaints to get rid of SB.

That was truncated; it was supposed to read "post positively obscene amounts of money to J0hn".

keith hasn't bothered fixing john d's paypal link to his username yet. more lazy coding, IMO.

wait did you mean perform obscene acts with money, for j0hn

2. If "suggest props" were implemented, the suggest ban threshold would have to be dropped.

if we keep only suggest ban I'd rather see the threshhold be way closer to 50% of the "active community." People who are real pests (like Dom) can still be banned without the suggest ban system.

acting like ilx was a happy great awesome neato place before SB is pretty weird to me. curtis, you make it sound like ilx was innocent to the idea of clusterfuck threads about how this board works or something!

^^^ never said this, never thought this. sorry if I came off this way, but I think you're jumping to hella conclusions justine.

it was precisely ILX's known propensity for clusterfucking which should have made suggest ban an obvious bad idea from the start

again, no offense to keith. but it was a bad idea.

OK, Curt1s, what's your solution for clusterfucking?

it's understandable if the same five people were taking shit on threads like this for it constantly (mea culpa, tbf), that keith might just have taken out the middleman. can't understand why mods are still taking the flack at this stage.

Curtis, I think what you're trying to say is that you think it is a bad idea. I don't think it was a bad idea, and I know I'm not alone here. Without doubt there are people on both sides, but saying "it was a bad idea" is to suggest that your own opinion is the only correct one, as you did upthread.

wait did you mean perform obscene acts with money, for j0hn

YES

I'm sorry, I thought saying it's my opinion would be redundant.

considering how every time someone is suggest banned a clusterfuck happens and nobody feels good or satisfied about it

it seemed to me like you were saying that without SB there would be no clusterfuck threads about bannings. how often does any clusterfuck thread end with ppl feeling good/satisfied. my point was: saying that SB is 'obviously stupid and useless' seems like a pretty weird thing to say, considering that plenty of ppl support it. i get that u think no one should be banned, and that lots of ppl you think are great for this board have been banned/driven away. but. not everyone else feels the same way. i think keith and the mods are genuinely trying to do what will keep the majority of users happy.

Srsly man, on ILX, nothing goes without saying. xpost

it seemed to me like you were saying that without SB there would be no clusterfuck threads about bannings.

how did you get that from what I said? I didn't say it was the only time a clusterfuck happens.