but the fact is we can't (or won't) block offenders, because we're afraid of blocking non-offenders.

Cindy, I think the bigger problem is that since most IP addresses are dynamic, blocking them doesn't do much good. Most dial-up (and even most DSL) accounts assign you a new IP address every time you sign on.

late to the party, but can I get an explanation of Doblerize?

What behavior do we consider deserving of a warning?

Let's use our real life example. Being personally insulting, being unresponsive to community members asking to adjust tone, or continuing to use a purposefully abrasive tone that sets off more than one person. What happened with mieskie is that a number of people complained about it her in Bureaucracy, enough (whatever that number was - I remember about 8 or 9 people chiming in) that a Stompy posted a warning in the thread identified as an official stompy warning.

What constitutes a warning?

How do we notify party of said warning?

I think a official notice from a Stompy both in the thread where it happened (we talked about making it formatted differently so it would stand out) and through email.

How much time do we give a warned poster before moving onto the suspension phase?

We didn't handle this very well with mieskie. Also as a newcomer he didn't really know/understand Bureaucracy at first. We should allow some recourse to defend or appeal. This was not a popular notion at first because folks had encountered Trolls who derailed admin threads by using this door.

How do we handle a poster that has been warned but feels it unfair or unjustified? Is there an appeals procedure?

We had discussed (in lieu of letting the warned person make their case in Bureaucracy) letting them make a direct email appeal to the Stompys which could be posted here, and allow people to discuss it without letting a troll dominate the board with debate about their behavior.

late to the party, but can I get an explanation of Doblerize?

Lloyd Dobler - John Cusack's character in Say Anything. "You must CHILL!"

Anne, that's a reasonable proposal. I think it will need kink-work-out, but what doesn't.

The one thing that worries me about it is that I know there are Buffistas so conflict-avoidant that they will disappear from the thread rather than confront a person who is being offensive. I don't want to judge these people, but we might want to take their behaviors into account. Because if the onus is on an avoidant person to do a duty she dislikes, she may just split rather than deal. Or maybe appeal off-board to a friend of hers who is less avoidant, which would be kind of a burden on the friend, I think.

I don't know how to deal with this, or even, given the vast volume of "Hey!" people there are here, whether it will really be a problem. But it's a concern of mine.

Lloyd Dobler - John Cusack's character in Say Anything. "You must CHILL!"

I like the word.

I like it much.

I am so happy to see people use it.

Nutty makes swell points. I really think MARCIE will help a lot.

t cough

We still need a thread name and an actual thread.

Allyson + Bitterchick -- All I'm interested in is the technical aspect of how they got around Cindy's problem. My guess is that they put in coding like "IF the IP address is bla-bla AND the user is CINDY, THEN DON'T BLOCK. ELSE IF the IP address is bla-bla, then BLOCK." If that's what they did, then I definitely wouldn't want to do that here. It would require hardcoded intervention everytime the situation arose, and it would mean that a harmless new user could potentially be blocked until they "proved" they weren't the troll. If they solved the problem in a more elegant way, then it's at least worth looking into, even if we ultimately decide not to go that route.

About blocking users: I don't know how the Beta does it, but I'd bet that they simply blocked people by username instead of IP address, which means that an hypothetical troll would have needed just to start posting as "lloyd12MD" to circumvent it. Until he gets caught by the admins, of course, who would then proceed to ban that username too. And so on, ad infinitum.

Basically, there's no reliable way to uniquely identify a person who gets on the net. "On cyberspace, nobody knows you're a dog" and all that stuff.

I thought we were talking about this on Monday?? Does nobody obey Nutty the All-Powerful?!?

I'd sign on to the Nutty the All-Powerful charter.

The problem that I have with the moderator suggestion (aside from what others have already mentioned) is that I feel it’s somewhat premature. We had one problem poster and we handled it in a less than smooth fashion. So, okay, Method A didn’t work. But, with the moderating proposal, I feel like we just skipped to Method E without even considering Methods B, C or D.

Part of why I think the m/S/A situation was so difficult is that it was the first one. There was no existing policy for us to refer to when dealing with him. We had to feel our way through it. In retrospect, I know there are things I wish we’d done differently (like, making mieskie aware of this thread and that he was being discussed).

What if, before going to the moderator option, we tried to create a policy for handling problem posters? I’m not saying it’s going to be the solution but I feel like we need to make the effort before we start talking about empowering posters to be watchdogs.

Just wanted to repost bitterchick's comments since I agree.

The Stompys do already just step in and stomp posts which are spoilery, or inadvertently spilling real life details on the boards that should be kept confidential.

I think we need to discuss the range of Stompy powers and responsibilities before we get into the idea of moderators. Also, the filter will ease things.

It would be a huge change in Buffista culture even to have a rotating crew of moderators. I know we're missing some of the anarcho/libertarians from this discussion at the moment but I'm pretty sure they'd hate this idea.

I don't things are working all that poorly right now. Things could be done better, and it's important to have an idea in place before we have to deal with either a Troll or a long-time member going Reaver on us. But we did have a long talk about board discipline before we came to Phoenix which is why we had something in place to deal with mieskie.

"Oh, David's proposing a Whoopee thread in Monkey Junta again !"

How do I get this reputation? monkeymonkeymonkeychimpyapeorangmonkey!