tribeofjudah wrote:JansenFan wrote:There's nothing wrong with ES, IMHO. Every board has its own philosophy and its own tone based upon the members that make it up.
ES is run vastly different than our board, and really, with a billion members, it has to be. Here, we have a lot of mods because our most desired attribute is to have a good, easy-to-follow flow of conversation, free from bickering and name-calling (except in smack, of course, which is there to allow people to do what they need to do without clogging up the rest of the forums).
No matter how many mods we have, however, there are only three people that can weild banningn or suspending you as an option, only two that can suspend you, and only one that can ban you. Besides spammers and trolls, we've only banned two members in the history of the site, and both of them were given an ample amount of rope to hang themselves.
If I remember correctly one banned fellow was named after #26, our current running back....
As IB points out, most people ban themselves because they:
a) think that being asked to stay on topic, avoid name-calling unless in smack or adhering to the same basic tenets as everyone else is some type of insult to them personally.
b) are embarrassed by their last actions on the board and don't have the guts to face up to it, or
c) this just isn't the right place for them.
I can understand c, as its the same reason I don't frequent other boards, and b I can understand to an extent. We had a fairly recent occurance of this.
On the other hand, a is the most frequent and the one I get the least. I've been moderated on a multitude of occassions, both before I joined the staff and since, and I clearly get that its not personal. No one sits around plotting to moderate someone so they leave. Nine times out of ten, we moderate someone and they say, "Oops. I lost my head for a bit" and its over and done with. That tenth time though, is nuts.
I say, "In this post you did this, which is against this rule. Please refrain from this behaviour in the future. Thanks and happy posting." and I get, "you idiot. member X did action y in 2006 and no one said anything to him. You just hate me and are power tripping in order to try to be important."
I don't mean to break one of our most important rules and get off-topic (see, it happens to everyone), but I just want everyone to know that we do most of our work behind closed doors, so just because someone broke a rule and we didn't post something publicly, does not mean that it was not dealt with. We've got a pretty professional bunch of volunteers, and our only goal is to make this a good experience for everyone. If you break a rule, we'll deal with it. If the next time, someone else breaks a rule towards you, we will deal with that as well.
This has been a public service announcement from THN. We now return you to your regularly schedule thread.
