Top Mud Sites Forum - Moderation

Top Mud Sites Forum (http://www.topmudsites.com/forums/index.php)

- Tavern of the Blue Hand (http://www.topmudsites.com/forums/forumdisplay.php?f=17)

- - Moderation (http://www.topmudsites.com/forums/showthread.php?t=4478)

That's sad. The situation as I thought it existed was 1) that Crat, while being difficult, was also being rational and communicative, 2) that he had a point about overapplication of moderation, which is a non-deadly, expectable, and correctible sin in a new and newly tasked moderation team, and 3) that, despite the "difficulty", the team was hearing Crat's message and trying to work out where exactly it needs to stand.

So it was kinda looking to me like it might work out okay. :( Oh, well. So it goes.

Why was he banned?
I did not see him break the rules. And I'm not seeing the explanation in the previous post.
Are we allowed to know?

Was he really banned?

For discussing moderation applications in a thread about moderation?

If so - sorry, but I regard that as overkill.

I will only say that the thing that really bugged me most about Crat was his proclivity to use hard returns in his posts, making them look strange. As for moderating, I think it would be good to ban him perhaps for a week in you really wanted to ban him and then longer if necessary. I think banning forever on what someone does if it is not flagrant, is detrimental and leaves everyone feeling like they need to walk on egg shells.

Consider this: In the short time since the moderation team has been freshly at work, he's received more warnings, I believe, than every other user of TMS put together. Between his personal attacks on people and his "I'm a victim" attention-seeking it's hard to blame Lasher for deciding that his time and the time of the rest of the moderators was being wasted.

--matt

I hope I'm not the only one who's confused what freedom has to do with throwing a party, aside from the freedom to throw a party.

Well, if I interpret this correctly you're stating the obvious now, which is quite convenient given you didn't make much sense to me earlier on. So am I correct to assume you state something awkward first, next summarize it as something obvious, then assume me to believe your previous argument was obvious because you summarized it as such?

If that's the case I find it very clever move, but not overly productive for a discussion, unless you wish to derail it.

Banning people for what Crat did is actually quite common.

Punishing someone for bad behavior is generally not a big deal, not to mention that some people get a nice kick out of punishing others. The problem is with people disagreeing that the punishment was just which will give the punisher a sour aftertaste upon delivering the sweet punishing, hence you might as well add to the rules that openly disagreeing with the people in charge can get you banned. This way people will be aware that thought crimes are not allowed and hence will not share their thoughts in a forbidden fashion, subsequently avoiding uncomfortable situations like these where people wonder who will be next because they're not quite certain which of the lemmings is closest to the edge now.

I'm however willing to volunteer for the task of "the lemming that is closest to the edge" since it will give people piece of mind, until I am banned of course, upon which the uncertainty will return until a new uber lemming has courageously stepped forward from the dull masses to bear the burden of the ever impending threat of the forum ban.

Speak for yourself. I don't feel I need to walk on eggshells at all here. I'm sure there are plenty of people who have absolutely nothing to fear from the perceived over-moderation. Personally, I'm surprised it went on as long as it did. He was practically begging for a ban, just to "prove his point" that he was being singled out. Instigating arguements, provoking emotional responses from others, quoting things that were intentionally deleted by moderators, are against the rules in most forums I visit, from mud-related to gardening enthusiasts and everything in between. He was warned via PM, according to both himself and the mods. He was warned many times, according to his own admission and the MODs who have posted here about this. He was warned that he was going too far, that he was being a pest, that he was being intentionally obtuse, and yet he continued. So - he got banned.

Oh well. At least now, even if he didn't learn his lesson, we won't have to spend the next 5 pages and 3 new topics listening to him gripe about it.

There was no "sweetness" or joy in banning Cratylus, he manages an LPMud codebase (driver?), runs a MUD forum of his own (ironically with posted rules very similar to ours) and could add a lot of value here if he chose to.

Most people posting here run some kind of community or another and put significant time and energy into getting people to try their community. Removing someone goes against everything you try to do, but you reach a point where you make a judgment call that someone's presence is harming or derailing the service overall. We reached that point.

It is irrelevant what is against the rules on other forums. That argument has no merit. The rules are posted here now; that is the appropriate yardstick.

There are two threads to your point however which do warrant discussion. First, there is the question of whether he broke the rules as written. I do not think he did. Unless there are more rules that are not in the FAQ Rules section. There are four rules there. Paraphrasing: 1) no foul lang. 2) no personal flames. 3) stay on-topic. 4) dont reply to off-topic posts. I just do not see where he violated those rules.

Second, is whether the moderators have interpreted their own rules correctly and therefore the banning was justifiable. It does not appear to be so. It looks like Cratylus was banned because he was argumentative. Agreed, he was very argumentative. The important point here is that there is no rule against being argumentative listed in the Rules. If argumentative is the new standard, then certainly several other people need to be banned too. [I am against that, in case it is not clear.] I am really shocked that he got banned for discussing Post Deletions by Moderators in a Moderation thread. That is how it appears to me. The moderators may have some other yardstick here, but the impression I have is quite clear .... he was banned for being argumentative, not because he broke a listed rule.

Also, we have no way to know (and I dont want to know) what the subject matter of the mod's PMs were to Crat. I dont know. I dont think you know either. So speculating that they were justified, is not fair to either side of the debate. Its certainly not evidence for anything, since it is unknown.

What I think needs to be said here is that, it looks like there are 'more' rules on this site that are not explicitly written. If argumentative is a rule, then it should be stated. It is my honest impression that he was banned and did not break a rule. That is troubling on many levels. And that impression should trouble the moderators.

PS. Just as an aside, I think the rules here are fair.

Give me a break, Detah. Get something straight:

1) Why this one specific poster was banned, was no one's business but his and Lasher's. It isn't our business to know what went on in PMs. The P in PM stands for Private, and it's private for a reason. Often, to save the member from public embarrassment, which is a good thing. For all we know, Craywhatever threatened to find out where Lasher lived and kill him. We don't know, and we won't know, and I'm glad of it. There's such a thing as confidentiality, and Lasher seems to have enough integrity to feel uncomfortable telling us anything, and he only told us what he told us because Craywhatever insisted that all this crap be aired in public.

2) People don't need to disobey a rule in order to get banned. People could be banned for any reason at all, and in fact, there's no rule in that list of rules saying "spam-bots are against the rules" but I'm very very thankful Lasher bans spam-bots. If you really feel people need -that- much hand-holding, and need to be instructed on every detail of what -might- get them banned, I recommend you work for the Microsoft legal team. They'll love you.

2a) It's common sense. If you troll, you'll annoy enough people enough of the time that the boss's mailbox will be filled with complaints. Enough complaints, and rules or no rules, you're outta there. And good riddance until you learn to play nicely with others. Craywhatever was being a troll, by instigating arguement for the sake of arguement, then claiming he was a victim, making accusations, implying facts that didn't exist, etc. etc. etc. All of that combined - is called trolling/jackassery, and whether it's listed specifically, with links to the dictionary definition for the reader's convenience, in duplicate and notarized - trolling/jackassery is a bannable offense on just about every single forum on the internet - and obviously here too, because - you guessed it - Craywhatever was banned for it.

You could give us a break as well, since you're not getting it straight yourself.

Detah made a clear argument and making unjustifiable claims isn't going to help the matter much.

This and the rest I snipped for brevity is pure nonsense, using your own reasoning it's up to Lasher who's business it is. Not to mention it's pretty clear why Crat was banned, Lasher even explained it himself.

And I guess you don't need to break any laws for a cop to shoot you in the head. You seem to desire some kind of Stalinistic rule by Lasher over this forum. I'm sure you can find some forums out there that can fulfill your fantasy to the fullest, but personally I don't find the thought very attractive.

Common sense is obviously not that common, it takes two to tango/argue.

There's gravity just about everywhere on earth, I demand gravity on TMS!

The block party analogy given by the_logos above is something we've used on our game for a long time. Lasher puts in the legwork and foots the bills. He's the host. Everyone else is welcome to come in and have fun. They're the guests. The people Lasher's known for a while are the moderators. They're the people he's asked to help him keep an eye on things. In general, the host wants lots of guests to come by. The more the merrier.

To steal from a co-owner of CF: In that analogy, Cratylus is the guy who drank too much and took a dump on the couch. The host is going to ask him to leave, even if he stands on the lawn afterwards and curses about how the 'Stalinist' violated his 247th Amendment rights to attend any party he pleases.

That doesn't make the host a mass murderer. It makes him a regular guy that wants to go about his business without a pile of unneeded aggravation. TMS has been seeing a lot of long-needed upgrades recently, and I'd rather see him continuing to get that done instead of re-re-re-re-clarifying his every decision.

Just so no rumours start flying around, I'd just like to make a few things clear as it's obvious that most of the antagonism between Cratylus and the mod team was via me.

First off, if you want to "blame" someone for banning Crat then you can blame the entire moderating team. Whilst the final decision was Lashers, it was discussed between the moderators first and we're all 100% behind him. I will mention the fact that when the discussion came up I abstained from giving an opinion because at the time I was feeling rather annoyed by Crat and I didn't want my emotions clouding my decision. Looking back now after a day or so away from the forum I fully agree with the action taken, and I shall explain why.

Crat was/is a competent debater. I'm sure he could (and with certain of his posts did) bring useful information and an opposing viewpoint to a discussion. However, all the skill and flowery language in the world can't hide that a number of his posts were basically trolling. They were posted to get a reaction from someone because he disagreed (justifiably or not depending on your own viewpoint) with someone he was debating with. You can argue he's not the only poster on TMS who utilises such tactics, but to my mind he was the most obvious in doing it.

I think anyone who read his posts knows he disagrees with the way moderating is done on here, but where Crat fell down was in not realising that just because he disagreed does not mean he was automatically right. I recall a post where he hoped I didn't think my own judgement was without flaw, and I couldn't help but remember the old saying "People in glass houses...". Crat thinks we should do things one way. We disagree. It should, and in a perfect world would, have ended there. Crat would have accepted that this was the way the site admin wanted things done and that was that.

Instead, Crat decided to challenge pretty much every moderation decision. There's little doubt in my mind that he realised we weren't going to change everything to suit what he views as the way to moderate, but he continued to argue anyway despite it being made clear that we disagreed with him. My only major gripe with Crat is that he thought he was right, and was determined to prove to us he was when the entire issue of what is acceptable moderation is up to the site admins to decide and not a clear-cut, this-way-is-the-way-to-do-it-and-if-you-don't-you're-wrong, issue.

As for his opinions on post deletions and whether they were warranted or not, that's exactly what they were: His opinions. When it comes to moderation you will never get 100% of people to support every decision. Some will be happy with it, some won't, and this can and will change from decision to decision. As moderators all we can do is use our own judgement and opinion as to what action is warranted and go with it. We do discuss things between us when we can, but sometimes quick action is needed to head off people responding to flame bait. No-one is infallible, and we're certainly not above making mistakes, but that sort of thing you just have to accept. To err is human, etc.

The one thing I really would like to say is that despite some reservations some of you may have, I fully support the moderating team we now have in place on TMS. I know some of you disagree with some of the moderators positions when it comes to normal, MUD-related topics and that's fine. There's disagreement between us moderators too. Just don't let their opinions on other topics influence your opinion of them as a moderator, because I can honestly say that if I thought there was any hint of a conflict of interest going on I wouldn't be here. We're working to make TMS a relevant place for discussion again, something I haven't really seen happen here for years. Yes we'll make mistakes, but in the long term I think what we're doing will speak for itself. I've already seen some names browsing here that I haven't seen for a good few years, and to me that's a positive sign.

For what it is worth, I think the moderating team is doing a better job now than they have ever done on TMS.

Personal attacks are an endangered species for the first time ever.

It is so nice to participate in threads and actually read content. It is nice to feel like I can post an opinion without the Usual Suspects chiming in with their same, tired personal attacks over and over.

Crat was trolling, plain and simple. You don't need an express rule to forbid that.

One thing I have learned in 11+ years of running muds is that you can never write a rule for everything, and trying to do so just gives the jerks out there a means to try and rules lawyer you.

Perhaps because I'm relatively new to these Forums, I found it tough to deal with a person being banned without a temporary ban first. Regardless I have to agree with the above.