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[ChairmanPoo]

I think ban should be renamed excommunication because its more accurate. And anyone excommunicated should get a PM saying "You've been excommunicated for your sins against your fellow forum posters"

[EuchreJack]

Actually, I dunno if x2yzh9 actually got banned.

Dunno, but x2yzh9 is still around.

[None]

Again, I feel I have narrowly evaded the banhammer over the years; I have been suckered into 10+ page long tit-for-tat flame exchanges over my bad habit of having (and sharing) hot takes. (I prefer to state the hot take, and the reasoning behindv it to explain it, as I dont take to a position in a vacuum, but tend to end up arguing against the phantasms others invent, instead of accepting my reasoning at face value. This is especially true when somebody new joins, and doesnt realize just how much i live up to my username. )

[Starver]

For my part, I've been a silly poster in the past, I'm sure. Back when I was young I was temporarily banned from a BBS (this being pre-Web) on two occasions. One for (ab/over-)using a feature within the BBS itself, another for apparently being the single highest (by a long way) poller of the server[1]. A couple of years later, I actually deputised for the Sysop for a couple of weeks during which they needed some time off, so obviously I'd impressed them with my reformed[1a] (but keen) dedication to the system.

While I'm still a child at heart, I (mostly, and only by my reckoning) got all the modern sins[2] out of the way in the '90s and early millenium, before too many of hoi poloi (from The Eternal September onwards) started to (re)discover how to stand out.

Yes, I can be opinionated, I can think of a recent statement even on here that I currently wish I hadn't made (far from bannable, but bad-humoured[3]) and there's a lot of self-censoring I do that means a post (or PM) perhaps even gets written but never submitted. And I can understand those that step slightly over that line of mine with not quite the same level of awareness (or caring!).

And let a thousand flowers bloom. But sometimes weeding is needed, even if the invasive plant in question has its interesting petals.

If I were (suddenly) in Toady's position, I don't think I'd reverse past bans, much as I wouldn't carry forward my unease with  the odd other user and hurry towards newly banning. I also am sure I wouldn't have the time to catch up with various ongoing dramas before everyone started testing (playfully or otherwise) where my own line is for entirely new banhammering.

On a Wiki of my acquaintence I'm (without any powers of my own, besides the usual page de-editing) absolutely astounded by the number of new accounts being created[4], and occasionally I undo a vandalism (or far more subtle advertising) arising from one of these (as I'm sure other legitimate users do). I believe the challenges there are much greater in suppressing these things than on Bay12Forums, but possibly 'free' Wikis have helped in being the lower-hanging-fruit to attract those that I now haven't had cause to report on, here, for longer than I can reliably remember. I think the tolerance for the merely misguided and the prevention of the truly intentional shitposting/adspamming users is balanced pretty well. Edge-cases will of course exist, and I think benefit-of-the-doubt is the rule of thumb (with cautionary notes made publically or privately) without weakening the deterrant enough to make it drift towards hyper-libertarian hellscape.

I may be biased. i haven't found myself the wrong side of a misunderstanding, so I don't realise what exile from Bay12 would mean to me. I've dropped/idled out of many other places in the past...Lost passwords, extended periods of apathy, just forgetfulness and being occupied elsewhere for too long. (Including the place I learnt of DF from and the place I learnt of that forum from, both nice places). One rather nice Usenet group that I still think of myself as 'belonging to' I lost access to after an ISP reorganisation a decade ago that I never got around to reaccessing, and it sometimes tears at my heartstrings that I dropped out of that community. Being forced out on the whim of someone else (albeit the 'boss' of that area) might hit hard.

But, unlike Marx, would I really want to be a member of a club who didn't want someone like me as a member? He who pays (or, indeed, is) the piper calls the tune. I do regret dropping out of online communities; But I can surely only regret what I hypothetically did, if I get pushed out instead.


You know, I originally had a short point to make, and I maybe submerged it in too many other words. (Despite writing the end of Footnote-2 really early on, which should have reminded me not to!) But having followed this discussion I think I've encompassed everything I might wish to say, so consider it said.



[1] Which meant the root of the server had a word with the sysop of the BBS who then had to seriously get my attention so that he could have a word with me. It was a (dubious) honour, but arising from a single little typo in a shell-script. 

[1a] The power... THE POWER!!!  Mwuhahaha... (Yes, I may have slightly overreached my remit with some newly-discovered admin commands, but only a liiiitle bit, and nothing actually bad/intrusive/corrupting...

[2] Over-sharing, over-meming, cyberstalking, radically misrepresenting myself, etc. Never quite got the hang of being succinct and minimalst in my writing, though.

[3] What's worse is that I immediately had a more Wildean equivalent of the put-down that I'm sure even the target would have enjoyed, with a little thought.

[4] *counts...* 71 over the last 16 hours. Which is a typical rate. Many versions of a couple of different <SameFirstFewCharacters><PaddedWithRandomCharacters> names, a similar number of <Firstname><Lastname><Digits> that look just as suspicious (and/or 'borrowed' from external userlists for verisimilitude), a handful of possibly quite genuine usernames. When you check, almost none of the created names ever even make an edit

[KittyTac]

GoblinCookie was kind of like Neonivek, but stubborn instead of incomprehensible, and mainly focused on derailing suggestions threads. Utterly convinced he was right on a subject while focusing solely on one factor, ignoring all others that were brought up.

One of the derails involved him asserting that ducks would eventually wipe out all plant life and their own species forever due to overbreeding, while ignoring that they actually need to be able to reach every single plant, and the effects of malnutrition on reproductive capability before that point.

I probably would have gotten banned too if I didn't have the good sense to step back after the Toad posted a warning in a thread. Decided to let others engage instead until the Toad Hammer came down.

I had shitfights with GC regularly and even though I still think my takes were correct, my arguing methods meant I wasn't much better than him.

[heydude6]

Toady doesn't even have an arbitrary "three or other number strike rule" for mutings that escalates to a ban by default.

I agree with this quite a lot. Most of the these policies were in some way inspired by the "three strikes" laws of California which were implemented as an experiment during the "tough on crime" era. Somehow they became incredibly influential, to the point where "3 strikes" is now the default way of thinking, even though California's 3 strikes have now been denounced as being overly punishing while doing little to deter crime.

I'm happy that Toady is able to see through this *expletive* and not perpetuate the madness.

GoblinCookie was kind of like Neonivek, but stubborn instead of incomprehensible, and mainly focused on derailing suggestions threads. Utterly convinced he was right on a subject while focusing solely on one factor, ignoring all others that were brought up.

One of the derails involved him asserting that ducks would eventually wipe out all plant life and their own species forever due to overbreeding, while ignoring that they actually need to be able to reach every single plant, and the effects of malnutrition on reproductive capability before that point.

I probably would have gotten banned too if I didn't have the good sense to step back after the Toad posted a warning in a thread. Decided to let others engage instead until the Toad Hammer came down.

My only encounter with GoblinCookie was in a suggestions thread where people were discussing possible implementations of economics into dwarf fortress. Everyone in the thread kept mentioning how the economics threads kept dying due to GoblinCookie showing up and then a few days later I got to see exactly what they meant. GoblinCookie showed up, disagreed with what the others were saying, and started arguments to push his point while stubbornly refusing to back down no matter how diplomatically people tried to engage with him. Suddenly, the thread revolved around him and the once productive discussion gave way to trying to get this idiot to shut up. Thread quickly died after that.

The guy was a leech, latching onto threads, draining them of all their life, and then moving on to the next one to repeat the cycle. I'm glad he's gone.

[scriver]

Toady doesn't even have an arbitrary "three or other number strike rule" for mutings that escalates to a ban by default.

I agree with this quite a lot. Most of the these policies were in some way inspired by the "three strikes" laws of California which were implemented as an experiment during the "tough on crime" era. Somehow they became incredibly influential, to the point where "3 strikes" is now the default way of thinking, even though California's 3 strikes have now been denounced as being overly punishing while doing little to deter crime.

I'm happy that Toady is able to see through this *expletive* and not perpetuate the madness.

I am fairly certain thst the "three chances/strikes is the reasonable amount of chances" concept is far older than those laws -- in fact I'd hazard a lot on a guess thst they're based on that pee-existing notion, not the other way around. You guys on your side of the trwnch even got it in baseball even

[martinuzz]

Even though there probably are people around that don't always catch my satire or shock-and-absurdism, I've only ever once received a friendly warning, and that was something like 12 or more years ago, IIRC for letting myself get flamebaited.
As far I can tell, bans on this forum are exceptionally rare, and the Toad is very tolerant and fair.

[Cthulhu]

I've gotten in trouble a few times but yeah, you can see by how most of the ban reasons are for racism and stuff that Toady is pretty slow to ban to begin with.  A lot of the guys who got banned for causing non-racist problems were around for months or years doing their thing before they went too far.

[ChairmanPoo]

Toady doesn't even have an arbitrary "three or other number strike rule" for mutings that escalates to a ban by default.

I agree with this quite a lot. Most of the these policies were in some way inspired by the "three strikes" laws of California which were implemented as an experiment during the "tough on crime" era. Somehow they became incredibly influential, to the point where "3 strikes" is now the default way of thinking, even though California's 3 strikes have now been denounced as being overly punishing while doing little to deter crime.

I'm happy that Toady is able to see through this *expletive* and not perpetuate the madness.

I am fairly certain thst the "three chances/strikes is the reasonable amount of chances" concept is far older than those laws -- in fact I'd hazard a lot on a guess thst they're based on that pee-existing notion, not the other way around. You guys on your side of the trwnch even got it in baseball even

The Rule of three is... one of those 'laws' about the Planes, about everything tending to happen in threes... or everything's composed of three parts, or there's always three choices, and so on and so forth.

[Starver]

"To offend once may be regarded as a misfortune, to offend twice looks like carelessness. To offend for a third time is clearly taking the piss, so STFU and GTFO!."
- Oscar Wilde, confronting online trolls on his LiveJournal comments section.

[Il Palazzo]

snip

If there's any justice in the world [1], one day you'll end up banned [2] for overusing parentheses and footnotes, mister (or miss (or gender-neutral alternative)).

[1] there ain't any
[2] that'll teach* ya talk proper like

*debatable

[nenjin]

Not to make this a singling out session, but yes Starver, I've wanted to comment on it so many times but stopped myself.

[None]

noooo don't come after my boy starver like this for a harmless communicative idiosyncrasy

[Starver]

Fetenete mean less ((()))s. While ((()))s mean less fetenete. I always strive for the best balance, and make no excuses.

In leiu of the exact smiley type I think I need, let's use this one...