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

^______^

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

btw nobody is ever fucking happy, these threads make me feel like a cranky mod who does not keep having to explain why they are kicking out somebody for offboard flaming or something as though it were part of their "quirky personality." Just so you know, all of you are filthy animals who do thinks like link to santorum gifs and white supremacist websites and you need someone to tempban you and maybe you should just like it. If you were civilized you wouldn't need to make all your friends on the internet.

the sb system consists of too many arbitrary numbers

are you proposing that we commission multiple studies to determine what the right # of sb's would be, or put it to a f**king vote, in either case what class of mentalism is this

the fact that it was implemented by a single person without any input
This isn't really how it happened. The idea came up during a long chat Keith and I were having about the situation where a vocal minority can claim their view is the dominant one just because they're the loudest, and how sometimes quieter posters just get drowned out. We were also talking about the "BAN X" problem, and also how mods could find it difficult to act because of the shitstorms that would result. I'd mentioned the idea earlier of favouriting posts, like an auto-excelsior, and then one of us -- I can't remember which, i think it might have been Keith -- came up with the idea of voting for bans.

A few code bumps later, Keith had put it in, and there was a lot of mod discussion about it, with both pro and anti views, some quite strong. After it had been running a while -- and it has evolved with poster input too, it hasn't just been left exactly as it was -- there was a much more positive view of it, because it had helped in a number of areas.

the "but it worked!" justification falls flat with me because the same actions/bans could have been made by moderators
I don't think the same bans could have been made by mods, a) because SB gives the bans a legitimacy that a single mod action doesn't necessarily have, and b) SB handles the BAN X case where a lot of posters are getting a bit pissed off but the poster hasn't done a single thing bad enough to earn a clear ban.

but for specific reasons without the guesswork
Who is doing the guessing? If it's that other posters don't know why a person was banned, I think this problem is the same however the ban was dished out and the way we deal with it is the same.

I also cannot think of a case where sb's as notifications for mods wouldn't have worked
SBs do still act as notifications for mods. If you're arguing against the auto-51, I don't think that's a huge deal -- even if it wasn't auto, I imagine the mods would set a similar cut-off and take action against a poster who hit that cut-off. The auto-ban is just a convenience thing to my mind, it doesn't mean that this is a hands-off process: mods scrutinise SBs pretty closely, especially as a user gets closer to the limit. It's totally not an unexamined process.

arguing against the sb system is arguing in favor of moderator judgment.
That's a bit catch-22, because a whole host of people used to argue very strongly against moderator judgement, some even against the whole idea of mods on ILX having any power at all, except maybe to fix broken HTML, regardless of who the mods at the time were. SB is one answer to that. But if you can't have ban by mod or by popular vote the argument just becomes "ILX should never have bans", and that's not realistic.

zillions of xp

are you proposing that we commission multiple studies to determine what the right # of sb's would be, or put it to a f**king vote, in either case what class of mentalism is this

― the evil genius of Zaiger Genetics (J0hn D.), Wednesday, August 5, 2009 6:20 PM (5 minutes ago) Bookmark

all of those ideas pale in comparison to one guy picking the number out of nowhere

just curious where we are now in terms of SB count statistics. How many posters are close to the magic number?

The number isn't hard-coded, it's a variable in the site setup. Keith guessed at the initial value, but he was pretty clear that he expected a bit of trial and error to find the best place for it. That 50 worked out to be a pretty good guess of too-high-for-a-clique-to-hit but not so high as to be unrealistic was good luck.
xp

sarahel: not really sure why this is all that germane to the discussion at hand, but factoring in both the speed at which the sbs have been coming and the totals um basically none?

which is really how its supposed to work, so im not actually surprised.

I don't think the same bans could have been made by mods, a) because SB gives the bans a legitimacy that a single mod action doesn't necessarily have, and b) SB handles the BAN X case where a lot of posters are getting a bit pissed off but the poster hasn't done a single thing bad enough to earn a clear ban.

Notfications could be used in the same way in both of these instances. And in this case "the poster hasn't done a single thing bad enough to earn a clear ban" you've got to wonder if gabbnebb the poster deserved the banning then? honestly I don't know how you deal with that ... it is the genius of the undercover troll.

SBs do still act as notifications for mods. If you're arguing against the auto-51, I don't think that's a huge deal -- even if it wasn't auto, I imagine the mods would set a similar cut-off and take action against a poster who hit that cut-off.

to me, that would be more fair and allow mods to dish out admin actions that fit the situation. (I know, they do this anyway, but it aint the same.)

xp JJ: It's germane in the sense that there seems to be this recurring theory/feeling that the SB system would result in lower tolerance for dickery: that there would be a constant rate of SB-ing with posters that were relatively less offensive becoming more offensive in the community's eyes once the worst offenders were gone. This is as opposed to the theory/feeling that the standards of dickery would remain the same, and that lesser offenders would not be SB-ed any more than when the worst offenders were still posting.

wouldn't that happen more with just mod bans? mod bans are supposed to be based on community standards, suggest bans are based on the standards of 51 individuals, whose levels of tolerance probably stay the same on average

which would happen more with just mod bans?

(I know, they do this anyway, but it aint the same.)
How is it different, though? (Genuine Q) Nobody gets *near* an auto-ban with a mod knowing about it, and if there are other actions that could be taken to head it off, they are (like JJ's timeout of Ethan, or ppl getting banned from one thread). The automatic-ness of it is in practice little more than a safety -- I suppose it could catch some sheepfuxor going nuts while Jim's in the pub and the rest of us are sleeping.

progressively lowering tolerance, if mods are supposed to just ban outliers rather than people who are annoying to a large number of individuals. i dunno. xp

sarahel: i think there's the same tolerance for dickishness. There's definitely not a consistent rate of SBing, and the trigger level isn't getting any lower. ILX by and large lets a whole lot of stuff slide that other wetter forums would be all metatalkin' about, which is how it should be, and that doesn't seem to be changing.

what's the highest number of SB's one individual has given out, if it's easily available?

xp harbl - I agree.
xp stet - that's what jjusten's stats seem to imply

huh i thought i disagreed with you!? oh well! good enough.

No, I'm pretty much ok with SB over mod ban, as long as people are given proper warning and made aware of what triggered the SB's and that the number required is a reasonably large percentage of active ilxors, which sounds like more or less how it's being handled.

Also the "b" key on my laptop has been sticky today.

sb

alot of sb clearing up by jj has made it clear that the sb method is pretty good imo.