Boogie711:
You can't ask another mod! You don't know who did the action in the first place, so how can you go and ask "another" mod????
Are there any incidences where a banned member was not notified of their ban? What is it you are looking for here? To know that you had an action taken against yourself, or to know what which is not really any of your business?
This is a never ending debate, and being on both sides now I have to say that I _still_ disagree with this desire to know every little detail. To understand any banning, you have to have a complete picture of everything that was pulled from the public eyes, and what has been discussed in private [if anything]. To do that, kinda sorta defeats the reason things are pulled in the first place. Would an answer of "The user was distruptive" be sufficent? I doubt that, you'll all want evidence of the disruption. But to allow the public to see the evidence is to allow the distruption to stay around. See the catch-22?
What are the alternatives? Accept the action and deal with it. Deal with it privately? Have the alledged violators deal with it privately? I opt for the last option. Tell them to take it up privately with the moderators. Bringing it into the public just breeds decent and calls to try and understand what is impossible to publicly explain. That's the nature of a moderated forum... things get removed from the public light, and the things that get removed are evidence used in decisions made for banning.
One may argue that if the public doesn't know the volations, how do they prevent themselves from violating? Well, that's pretty simple... conduct yourself professionally. Take the face to face atmosphere away, and put it into a written word message board; people will hide behind their anonymoty and/or the physical distance in order to basically be asses. If you have any concerns about your actions; read all your posts before you post them... is it something you would say to a co-worker, a boss, your mother? Is it something you would be embarrassed if your co-worker, boss, mother saw?
To answer the question of who polices the police? The other mods do. You'll have to trust me on this, but all mods are extremely responsible for their actions; much more so than members.
fgray1:
As I said banning the customers is not a good thing. Hard to make money when you stop the customers from entering the store.
Look at it differently. If you own a shop, and you have people loitering and bothering and fighting with the other customers, are they customers that you want in your shop?
Now to give my opinion on the topic of the thread. No ban should be temporary, and no ban should be permanent, and no ban should have a set time period. If I was in charge, there would be _many_ more bannings around here. However they would _all_ be negotiatable. All bans would be indefinate. A mod would be required to sponsor the cause for a re-instatement, and a vote would have to occur for said re-instatement.
Of course this wouldn't necessarily work here. It depends on the personalities of those with voting rights. If there are voters that are unable to disjoint themselves and completely re-evaluate a decision, it can't work. If anyone is of the mind that their mind is made up from the outset, it won't work. If voters are unable to objectively look at reinstatement discussions, it will never work. Likewise if voters can't step back and not take things personally, it can't work. In order for something like this to work, everyone involved needs to step back, re-evaluate everything again, and not take any decisions personally.
Ok... I think I'm done for now
