chrisw wrote: ↑Tue Jun 25, 2024 7:55 am
Chessqueen has been permanently banned for the offence of spamming YouTube videos into his signature, an offence of which he has been previous made aware.
Definitely NOT a fan of Chessqueen, but the job of a moderator is to moderate....not take the easy way out and permanently ban the guy when other options were available. So...
I'm sure the list of moderator actions taken against Chessqueen can fill pages and pages of these forums.
chrisw wrote: ↑Sat Jun 29, 2024 5:15 pm
So, this here thread is a process. By the end of it the way to proceed should become clear. How would you propose we get beyond stating “should have happened long ago” and “too harsh” in alternating reply? Or is it okay we just have two clashing opposite views forever?
This is not likely to converge. Because these are really statements about two different issues. One is whether using a link to a media file in your signature, which used to be harmless before, but since the last upgrade is aggressively replaced by embedding the media, should lead to llife-time banning. It seems most people think this too harsh. And then there are those who want CQ banned for the quality of his posting, and do not care what pretext we use for it.
It is true that CQ was a nuisance to moderate. He abused the quoting system, using the quote button to modify his postings, rather than the edit button, often double posted, posted in wrong forum sections. He was really a very devious and malicious character if he did all that on purpose. But since I never saw any motive he could have for pestering me, I have always ascribed this to general stupidity and incompetence, most likely induced by some form of substance abuse. As mentioned above, there could also be a medical explanation. I warned him that I would apply a special moderation regime to him, deleting any postings in a wrong section without further notice, rather than trying to move them where they belonged. That kept the amount of moderation time I had to spend on him to a bearable level.
gaard wrote: ↑Sat Jun 29, 2024 6:07 pmI won't miss CQ but unilateral permanent bans sound like a bad idea. If this is something done by the forum admin for security purposes (embedded links can be dangerous) then all is fair in love and war. Otherwise, I think the age-old precedent of moderation-term bans are more than sufficient, if or when moderation terms exist.
Well, at the moment real moderators don't even exist. It was somehow agreed that the members of the founder group should not be moderators...
There wasn’t an agreement on how to move forward. You’ll remember that I cast an abstain vote on the forum hosting entity precisely because I was insisting there was a forward agreement first. You and Ed didn’t want that for some reason.
I was the one left to propose the items of this agreement but found you impossible because of your extremely long winded negative responses to everything. There were lots of items proposed but the totality was never agreed, eventually I gave up and the forum is now being run basically on precedent but without any set of agreed rules. You can’t cherry pick discussed items you may have liked and claim they were agreed. Nothing was. As it turns out, the agreement-lack hasn’t so far been a problem, but it will be if you try cherry picking from the general discussions.
We three defaulted into moderator positions out of necessity. Somebody had to initially start it.
I thought is was yours and Eds proposal, and thus a majority decision. I tried to formulate the duties and powers of a moderator, so we could add this to the charter and conduct elections accordingly. But you were against 'politicizing' the moderators, so I abandoned that effort. Since then I haven't seen any action from either you or Ed to resolve the situation.
hgm wrote: ↑Sun Jun 30, 2024 9:21 pm
I thought is was yours and Eds proposal, and thus a majority decision. I tried to formulate the duties and powers of a moderator, so we could add this to the charter and conduct elections accordingly. But you were against 'politicizing' the moderators, so I abandoned that effort. Since then I haven't seen any action from either you or Ed to resolve the situation.
It was more along the lines of the Founders didn't reach a collective agreed decision, so the discussion just ceased without resolution. No action from anyone, you included. In the event, it seems to not matter much, since at the moment we just run the thing on precedent.
I am not sure there wasn't a collectively agreed upon decision, or even that one is needed. I thought the point of having 3 founders was that we could decide by majority vote. And as I recall it, it was decided that a single person from outside the FG should be appointed, who would perform all administrator and moderation tasks.
But I guess the future of this forum is to be run as a triumvirate dictatorship.