Author: David Blackman
Date: 23:59:21 01/25/00
Go up one level in this thread
[ I've made some cuts to Rogers post, removing the bits that i don't have any comment on. ] On January 25, 2000 at 18:08:27, Roger wrote: >I would like to formally ask the candidates what their position is on issues of >banning and temporary suspension, which I raised earlier. I'm hoping banning won't come up often enough to be an important issue. I wonder exactly how many people are currently banned? How many were banned in the past but are now allowed back? Have the current team of moderators banned anyone at all during this term? Have they even seriously considered it? >1. I believe that CCC works well as a moderated board, and I believe it is >working well now. I do not believe that it should return to the chaos of RGCC, >and this is NOT an attempt to get us on a slippy slope back down to RGCC. agreed. >That said, what I believe is that the moderators should have the authority to >suspend someone's posting privileges, but that only a group vote should be able >to ban someone permanently. In principle i like this idea. In practice it could get a bit messy. To make an informed decision on banning someone, the membership would have to read all the offensive and off topic posts by the accused. Or at least a large sample of them to see that this poster is an extreme repeat offender. Most of the membership probably wouldn't want to do that. And having all that bad stuff there to read defeats the purpose of deleting bad posts. Worse, the type of extreme posts that could get someone banned would most likely be illegal in my country, and if i had any part in presenting them back to the membership as evidence, i could be in trouble. ICDChess staff, being based in USA where there is free speach, could probably get away with this in most cases, so perhaps they could administer the voting and banning process, leaving the moderators out of it. But then there would be a danger of ICDChess being firewalled completely out of some countries (including mine), which would be sad. So the principle is nice, but it will only work if most of the membership wants to get involved in this, and even then there are practical problems. >Banning is, as I have argued, the functional equivalent of death. It's not that serious. CCC is a private club were we gather to meet our friends and talk about computer chess. If someone causes huge amounts of trouble, we don't invite them back. No drama. They can keep hanging out on rec.games.chess.computer . They can start their own competing forum. They can even rejoin CCC under a false name and it's just about impossible to catch them out on that. That said, i think banning should only be for really serious repeat offenders, since there are a lot of members here who have said a few silly things in the past, but who make a net positive contribution most of the time. (Actually, i've said a few silly things in the past. They didn't even get deleted. Maybe no-one read them.) >To me, it seems that there are tangible advantages for banning only through >vote: > >1. The group must take responsibility for its actions. Banning someone is >uncomfortable, but it is something that needs to be done once in a great while, >and I think we should ALL shoulder the responsibility for it. Yes, it's messy, >but I think we should never cease to be aware of that, because THE MESSINESS OF >IT ONLY POINTS TO THE GRAVITY OF THE ISSUE. Unless the issues i raised above can be solved, the membership will only have the moderators word that someone is a trouble-maker. So they will be voting based on what the moderators say. If the moderators decided they wanted someone out, i think it wouldn't be hard to persuade the membership to vote that way. So unless the membership really examines the evidence, this is just a trick for the moderators to evade responsibility for their decisions. >2. Karinsdad said in an earlier thread that banned people sometimes post >constructively under other names. I do NOT believe they should be able to do >this. I would like to see banned people prevented from coming back under false names, but it's just about impossible to enforce. In proven cases, is would support banning accounts that are false names of people already banned.
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