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

not licking ethan or dom btw

I agree that a "suggest ban" feature is not very useful when a poster is going on a highly-visible rampage across all of the boards that requires immediate moderator attention.

hey HI DERE can u email me my sb total?

(Where it is helpful is that it allows the posting community to define what "acceptable posting" is without the mods. You're clicking on that link presumably because someone has said or done something that makes you wish they weren't posting anymore; that may be as specific as making offensive and/or intensely annoying comments about you or something you find important or as trivial as someone liking a band you hate. From what we've seen, the vast majority people using the system are not doing so frivolously, and the people who have been banned by it were doing things that make it understandable that 51 people would want them to stop.)

_exactly_. the problem it solves is one we already had licked.
banning someone who's on a rampage in the middle of borad drama isn't the problem SB solves. (although that said there have been periods when virtually any ban for any thing would have resulted in a hail of mod-aimed invective, and SB does help with that, even in what you'd think are clear-cut cases like imagebombs). xp

ok, that ethan thing was kind of a red herring and i regret mentioning it since you're focussing on it rather than the rest of my post.

my point was: a few mods did a better job of dealing with the behaviour we don't want, without getting rid of the stuff we do. as people (rightly imo) say, this is not a democracy. the posting community's idea of what is acceptable, at least in the average, is going to lead to an uninteresting site, almost by definition. if you do not already know what your idea of "acceptable behaviour" and you need the help of SB clicks to guide your hand then you should not become a benevolent dictator.

That a few mods were doing a better job sure wasn't the feeling I got from modreq in the pre-SB days. There were always threads like "BAN X", so some people were falling through the cracks unbanned, and there were often complaints about the justifications for banning people who were banned. SB helps with both of those problems.

As for uninteresting: people aren't SBing based on what people *say*, only *how* they say it -- ppl are getting SBd for acting like dicks. If that leads to a site where people don't act like dicks, then I don't have a problem with it. I know some ppl do, and that they want ILX to be almost a grown-up 4chan home for dicks and the thick-skinned only, but nobody who is responsible for this site shares that view, so it's going to be fought against.

but then I see things like jjjusten admitting that he tried to intervene before a SBing and I can't help thinking, shit, things were at least not significantly worse for them before this feature.

kind of bending my words here, im being pretty clear that i did what i would have done with or without SB in place - instead of an SB, we would have had a mod request clusterfuck with people demanding that e get temp-banned or whatever. also, your use of the word "admitting" connotes that i am getting my actions dragged out into the light somehow or fessing up to something, which im not. i just havent bothered to mention the specific related on board before. again, im just making all of the facts available because if people want to talk about this, its helpful if there arent any gray areas that can be misinterpreted.

xposts

As for uninteresting: people aren't SBing based on what people *say*, only *how* they say it

How do you know this?

(And I don't mean interesting in the "may you live in interesting times" sense.)

xp, yeah, sorry, that sentence got editted then pasted back in an old version which made it seem more like i had tricked you into admitting something terribly revealing.

but in that case surely there would not have been a mod request clusterfuck?

also, to reiterate, i can wholesale guarantee (speaking for myself) that there would be more perma-bans in effect right now than there are, and that is largely due to the SB system. maybe part of the problem is that i dont want to see mods as "benevolent dictators" - this vision of mods is what led to most of the "mods are nazis!" screamfests in the past, not terribly interested in going back to that.

xpost: we know that because we can see what posts people get sbanned for, and as incredulous as people seem to be about this, it is abundantly clear, particularly when a few choice posts lead to the majority of the ban votes.

xxpost

Because I see the posts people click SB on, and there's hardly ever anything innocuous or even controversial-but-said-genuinely. It's nearly always either being creepy, or abusive, or just blanket hollering and not engaging, or any of the other things that when you see people doing you think "they're being a dick, there". Challops or just honestly pushing your case doesn't get SBd (see Crut upthread)

jjjusten, you would have permabanned people who have been SBed, but you didn't because they got SBed?

xp I SB-ed someone for challops ... only one of two people I've pushed the button on.

but in that case surely there would not have been a mod request clusterfuck?

oh come on, pretty sure you've been posting to ilx long enough to remember the good old days!

and it isnt just to avoid clusterfucks either - although i would venture to say that the tone of ILX is generally better when opposing groups of posters aren't engaged in rageful back and forths about who should or shouldn't be banned. also, i think most posters would prefer not to have to watch people make the case for what a scumbag they are in a public forum.

xpost: no, i would have made the judgement call to permaban some people who arent currently permabanned.

it didn't take, or it didn't last. xp

xpost: no, i would have made the judgement call to permaban some people who arent currently permabanned.

Probably missing something, but i don't understand what difference SB made in those cases then? Morbs notwithstanding (he is presumably not who you're talking about here) none of the SBed posters who've returned have moderated their behaviour as a result of the SBing (LJ has grown up, troo, but that would hopefully have happened anyway) and claiming that the sociopaths have become nicer because of the new moderation technique seems like wishful thinking a la "war in Iraq made Libya disarm".

i dunno gabbneb's been a lot improved since his suggest bannings--it's almost like the dude isn't even here

what is gabbneb's current status? i have lost track?

upper upper middle class, i think

yeah i love gabbneb now

^______^

not speaking for jj here, but if someone's pissing you off as a mod, and you think "would drop the hammer here" but they've only got 3 SBs, it definitely gives you pause. Dom lasted for a good while because his account didn't accrue SBs due to a bug, so he just got temped again and again. When we found the bug and discovered he was already well past 50, that changed.

I don't think sociopaths will all necessarily change because of SB, but they'll have to try if they want to stay in an SB world. and I think of those that have, SB has played a part in it. It's much harder to justify continuing to act shit when a chunk of posters have voted for you to go than it is when you can just shrug off a ban as the result of a nazi mod you disagree with and nothing you need to take into consideration.

yeah but then you can blame it on a secret clique acting on a policy/tool that you're ignorant of...

In fairness, only one person has done that.

That makes a lot of sence, thanks stet.

I guess my disagreement then is not whether SB makes moderation better target a certain kind of asshole (you and jj have convinced me that it does), but whether you should be targetting those low level assholes in the first place. But that's not something I can argue with. You want the site you want, and you have the server.

xp: on the other hand, one could feel oppressed by the whims of what one feels is a thin-skinned minority of anonymous lurkers. I'd be interested to know whether most of the SBs are from active posters or from people who rarely post/lurkers. ... Not to revisit a subject I know has been discussed at length in previous threads like this. I'm just curious to know the numbers.

i think we should be able to ban people who annoy us and thus SB is a good feature, and i say that as someone who is nearing the big 4-0

and as a few others have pointed out, the idea that there are thousands of regular posters on ilx is insane. i'd be shocked if we were even above like 120

i don't have those numbers, but I usually recognise the majority of names of people giving out SBs. It's not being done by a silent choir, I'm sure of that.

I don't think it's whims, either. But as for thin-skinned -- you can either have a board that only the thick skinned can bear to be on, or you can have one with both thin and thick-skinned posters, at the cost of the aggressive having to rein in their more extreme impulses. I don't see that as a huge cost. The things that have been implicitly asked of those already SBd aren't totally onerous.

ILX has veered about on a spectrum from cuddlestein to prison yard in its time, but the advantage of SB is the equilibrium it is finding now comes directly from the posters themselves and not via mod opinion, for the first time. xp

It's way more than 120 dude - I'd say we were probably knocking around the 250-350 mark at least. (xpost)

anyway, the difference that SB has made is that it allows me to let the community set its own standards and become somewhat self-policing. if i hit a post that strikes me as totally out of line, i dont have to be the judge/jury/executioner. everyone has certain flashpoints, even mods. im not going to get into any specifics for obvious reasons, but there have been things said on ILX that i consider totally without mercy bannable that havent resulted in bans. sometimes further review of the situation makes me reverse how i feel about them, but often it doesn't. so what im doing here is making a statement of fact: there are permabans that have not occurred because SB puts a different system into place.

the reason im clarifying this is that one of the complaints about SB is that it has driven posters away from the site etc - my argument is that there are more people posting here than there would be without it.

holy shit like 20 xposts or something.

sarahel: almost every SB vote has been from posters whose names i recognized immediately

thanks jj.

i feel like i've said my piece and you guys have responded fairly. hand jobs all round.

see now that's why I became a mod in the first place

One thing that confuses me is that a couple of posters - at least according to the admin log - have been permabanned for making what seemed like somewhat joking posts of a racist nature, while other posters have done the same and not suffered that treatment.

now i feel weird that you guys can tell where we sb and i'll be more judicious with my sbs in the future

maybe harbl and I balance each other out.

What confuses you? That they're not all perfectly consistent? The whole thing is done by a biggish group of people (apart from ILX System RIP), and there's no giant Book Of Rules that says what is and isn't acceptable, and with some posters context and history matters a lot, so whether a ban's by SB or by mod, to expect them all to be uber-consistent seems irrational.

obviously the SBs are not going to be consistent. These were mod actions that seemed to indicate some sort of zero tolerance policy.

There are plenty of disagreements even between mods about what should be done in any given case (another reason SBs help massively), so no, mod actions aren't ever going to be consistent, either. (And calls for absolute consistency just lead to board lawyering "but I didn't X!" in my experience.)

That said, mods here are virtually never capricious, (which would be much worse), and do very much aim at consistency.

gotta be a bracket record for me

thanks for the explanation.

One thing that confuses me is that a couple of posters - at least according to the admin log - have been permabanned for making what seemed like somewhat joking posts of a racist nature, while other posters have done the same and not suffered that treatment.

― free jazz and mumia (sarahel), Wednesday, August 5, 2009 9:47 PM (47 minutes ago)

can you give me any examples? if you are talking about pipecock a)he is tempbanned b)at this point any hotlinks to st00rmfro0nt are not going to be tolerated, and will result in post deletion and temp ban as far as i am concerned. hotlinking to a wh1te p0w3r site that is notorious for checking their referral logs is just never acceptable. if you are talking about inconsistencies re: the fact that i mentioned tuomas doing the same thing and not getting mod temped, i can guarantee that he (or anyone) will not get cut any slack if it were to happen in the future - this is not inconsistency, it is a permanent change in (my) modding policy.

he was one, and there was another one a couple months ago/last month - british poster - I think it was some sort of cankles backlash.

oh yeah, i remember that now. i think he was trying to make a point, but did it by using um TOTALLY UNACCEPTABLE racial slurs. that shouldn't be a permaban though, even if the approach was pretty thickheaded and rong. let me go find out more and work on it.

btw, these sorts of concerns are what IMP is supposed to be all about, and mods are not infallible (oh hey look im one case in point), so in the future if something like this is bothering you plz bring it to our attention.

it only bothered me a little ... I thought there might have been some sort of zero-tolerance policy for stuff like that, or that it was a combination of the slurs and attacking another poster, though it was in response to that poster using misogynist language and attacking another poster, and that poster's modban was quickly reversed. I thought that was a bit unfair, but then there was some engrossing thread full of lols and I forget about the incident.

the sb system consists of too many arbitrary numbers made more problematic by its cumulative nature (a time limit is an improvement but still just a best guess). the fact that it was implemented by a single person without any input is more reason to question it. the "but it worked!" justification falls flat with me because the same actions/bans could have been made by moderators but for specific reasons without the guesswork of "well some people clicked the message here on this thread and some here on this other thread four days ago, etc." I also cannot think of a case where sb's as notifications for mods wouldn't have worked and allowed for a subjective review of the user's behavior including "history and context".

arguing against the sb system is arguing in favor of moderator judgment.

the fact that it was implemented by a single person without any input is more reason to question it.

are you missing the fact that this "single person" is also the one that implemented um nearly every other aspect of the current ilx code? this is basically a red herring of the highest degree.

i am going after the blue text next

oh also:

the "but it worked!" justification falls flat with me because the same actions/bans could have been made by moderators but for specific reasons without the guesswork of "well some people clicked the message here on this thread and some here on this other thread four days ago, etc." I also cannot think of a case where sb's as notifications for mods wouldn't have worked and allowed for a subjective review of the user's behavior including "history and context".

the difference is that, like i keep saying, there is an added level of input from the non-mods that post on the site. the only other difference between this and the current situation is the fact that the system is automated. every SB is vetted by mods.

arguing against the sb system is arguing in favor of moderator judgment.

yeah except several of the same people arguing against SB were the ones arguing for more democratic control of sitewide bans.

we can put all the layers of interpretation we want on this issue, but the truth is that nearly every way that users can be policed/banned/chided/whatever is going to be met with opposition by people that like that user, or people that only interact with that user on threads in which their behaviour is totally innocuous. SB or mod edict or random daily ban culls aren't going to change this fact.

xpost