I haven't weighed in yet, because I had limited Buffista time yesterday, and chose to spend it in other threads. But I'm all caught up now. I'm x-posting with a lot of people that I agree with, but I want to get in my two cents.

I agree that there's probably something a bit off about Zoe. I don't personally have a problem with employing the personal MARCIE, but I think that it's apparent by the volume of posts here, and the responses she has provoked on other threads at times that quite a few others have more than reached their tolerance with her. Ergo, problem.

So, we send a warning. I don't think that's such a big deal. It's not a banning. Really, it's not even close. But, if we ever want to ban anyone, ever in the future, for anything we have to be willing to take this first step.

This is a first step towards a lot of things. Most importantly, towards clarity. Once the warning, or notice is given, we can't say we haven't been clear that a significant number of people have had a problem with Zoe's post in x, y, and z ways. We can try and work with her because of her specialness, her youth, whatever, but first we need to be clear, I think. Someone used the example above (sorry for not going back and referring) of a job review, and I think that's apt. Not that we aren't about fun, here, but this is obviously affecting a lot of people's fun, and y'all (ita, et al.) work hard to keep this place running, and we should respect that.

If you're screwing up in your job, there may be a million reasons for it, and you shouldn't necessarily be fired. But before your boss can work with you on your particular special circumstances, there needs to be a moment where you two sit down and things are made clear and official what the problems are. No matter what the course of action taken after that is, there can be no denial or murkiness about what the problem is, and that all the pertinent people have been made aware in an official way.

So. This warning doesn't have to be mean. It doesn't have to be the end of the world. It just has to be clear. It's up to Zoe to decide what to do with it. The trying-to-be-nice-and-moving-on approach doesn't seem to have worked for a lot of people. The trying-to-correct-behavior-within-the-thread hasn't worked, either. So this is what's next.

I don't agree that if she's a troll, that warning her will be giving her exactly what she wants. Isn't that precisely why we have the warning system in the first place? If she's mentally ill or just unable for whatever reason to understand the nuances of communicating on the board, the warning is a next step (again, not mean) in helping her understand.

If she's mentally ill/special in some way, she's fairly high-functioning, and seems to have periods of lucidity, where her posts make at least some sense. We should at least give her the opportunity to understand what we are trying to say once it is written out in a complete form, and not assume that she is incapable of it. That's not really fair to her, either.

Bagels:

I think that ignoring disruptive behavior is a bad idea, as that behavior then becomes entrenched. It also tends to get worse over time. We've also seen that it tends to bring out the worst in ourselves.

I agree. Warning given, not in a mean way. That way we are not becoming complicit in it by not saying anything.

Not COULD lead to banning, WILL lead to suspension, which is the way the policy is written.

So, do we have the guts to do this, is the question? Do we want to do this? It seems that the problem I envision is not so much that Zoe will continue to post in a way that's hard to understand after that warning, but that she will not respond to the warning at all. She has been linked to this discussion and has not jumped in to respond. I agree with Fay that it is intimidating, but I also think that she has shown in some of the forums that she is not shy about posting in a way that is rude and that will make others upset and will cause an uproar. Does she know what she's doing when she does this? We won't know until we ask for a response.

That is, if it had to be applied to you, Missy and/or Young Mister Buffista, how would you feel about it?

I like to think (as a "non-cool-kid" weighing in, whatever that means) that I would welcome a warning. Like I said above, for clarity. I mean, I wouldn't want to receive a warning for just anything, you know. Like, if no one had ever said anything to me in-thread to Doblerize, or mentioned to me in any way that my posts were rude or in some other way in violation of the rules. But, if that had happened a few times (and I'd like to think that I would self-correct, but let's imagine that I wouldn't...grrr) if I received a rational, non-flamey email stating exactly what it was that was pissing people off, I would welcome the opportunity to apologize, explain myself, and correct my behavior. If I felt I was being attacked unfairly, I feel like this community would allow me a forum in which to defend myself, as long as I didn't resort to attacks.

I think that there's a little paranoid voice inside a lot of us (or, well, me) that hates the thought of doing anything like this to someone who isn't clearly Satan because we are afraid of it happening to us somewhere down the road. But if it did happen to me, you know what? I'd live. And I hope I'd deserve it. The same little paranoid voice whispers that hordes of people are going to MARCIE me when MARCIE comes to town. You know what? If people do, then we're all better off in the long run, ultimately.

I think that there's a little paranoid voice inside a lot of us (or, well, me) that hates the thought of doing anything like this to someone who isn't clearly Satan

Yes.

...because we are afraid of it happening to us somewhere down the road.

considers.

Okay, maybe that's in the back of my head, in a do-unto-others-as-you-would-be-done-by kind of way.

But if it did happen to me, you know what? I'd live. And I hope I'd deserve it.

This is true. And, yeah, colour me pretty much sold on the concept of Marcie.

I just want to say one more thing about bringing up warnings.

Everyone I know that finally said something about Zoe's behaviour did it after a lot of frustration and thought. No one rushed into it.

There hasn't been a history of people rushing around trying to get other people warned.

We've had two cases (and only two because mieskie and Schmoker were the same person) where a number of people have felt that a particular person consistently fails to meet the basic etiquette standards of the board.

Leaving Zoe out of this completely for a moment, there are rules & guidelines for dealing with problem posters and this community has to be willing to stick by those rules and use them.

I have a few, possibly, random, thoughts on all of this.

I'm fairly new here. It still freaks me out when I see my name in someone else's post (hey Nou!) because I think of myself as pretty much invisible most of the time, just sort of going along, saying my howdies, being as buffistalike as I can be insofar as I understand that to mean, taking the corrections given (i.e., backchannel, inappropriate levity) even if I didn't really understand the problem and figuring out what I did wrong and saying my sorries, saying them, sometimes, when the problem wasn't what I said but how someone read it. That's just the way it is. Doesn't matter if you intended to be unkind or ugly, if something you do hurts someone or frustrates them, you apologize, and you learn to be sensitive and you figure out another way to say it. You try to improve. If you think someone has a problem with you, you try to talk to them about it and figure out a way to fix it. At least, that's my rule, I think it's pretty much the buffista rule, so far as I've seen.

What I find interesting about some of this, is that I consider everyone with a lower user number than mine, and many with a higher one, to be one of the cool kids. I'm not, because I'm me. But everyone else is, especially if they seem to fit pretty seamlessly with the community and flow with it. Maybe I'm not the only one who thinks everyone else is a cool kid.

Someone pointed out to me, somewhere, sometime, that if another poster bothered me, I could point out to them that what they said disturbed me. I thought about that awhile. Realized that I felt embarrassed that, instead of saying something, I'd go to another thread and stop hanging in their neighborhood of the party anymore. That I didn't really MARCIE, or self-doblerize, I ran away so I wouldn't have to deal with it. Not my problem anymore. That hardly seemed to be fulfilling my civic duty. And so then I did my civic duty, as I saw it, when Zoe posted her religion joke. Ouch.

I remember being highly annoyed with schmoker when he got into a minor kerfuffle with another poster, who subsequently apologized, and immediately dashed into bureacracy to complain. In my mind, it seemed as if the schoolyard bully was looking for the teacher to protect him after he'd pushed someone down. I think, though, that in that instance he was trying to obey the rules of buffistadom as he saw them. Something to ponder.

I think, though, that we've all been very leary of starting something that could turn into a lather, rinse, repeat of the last Thing. Unfortunately, that's made us, me, anyway, afraid to say too much. Afraid to bring it up. It had to reach a point where I don't think we're as capable of being calm and positive about it as if it had been brought up before.

I think we do need a process for the gap. A way of dealing with things, a way to check with others and see if they're of like mind, calmly, without tempers being engaged because it's just gone on too long.

Weighing in on the Zoe issue after plowing through 150 or so posts:

First, I have real issues with the “she has a disability” argument. For one, several people here are dealing with mental disorders and yet no one else seems “incapable” of avoiding stepping all over other people’s feet. In other words, she can have a mental disorder that plays into the problem and *still* be a troll, in my book. It may be unintentional on her part, but nevertheless, if one definition of a troll is someone who pops into a thread, misbehaves, and quickly makes it revolve all around her and her behavior, then she is a troll.

Furthermore, she herself has made no claim that her health problems are severe enough to make her incapable of recognizing polite interaction, and therefore making such a claim seems unreasonably presumtuous to me. And why should we presume it must be so? Because otherwise there is no excuse for the way she posts? In that case, there *is* no excuse for the way she posts.

I also have problems with the Big Brother analogy because it assumes that we are a government. We are not. And enforcing CS does not seem Orwellian to me.

I am still undecided about whether or not a warning should be issued, at least on this last offense. But now that the question has been raised, I *do* think that the next serious offense should warrant one.

In part, we hesitate to take it to an official level, specifically because we learned a difficult object lesson with mieskie.

I’m not convinced we all learned the same lesson. Some of us learned he was an OK guy at heart, all he needed was a little love. Others learned he was a lying troll from start to finish & that suspension and banning were appropriate.

I don't understand why everything is blown up into such a mountain around here and why it takes a couple thousand posts, people stomping out of the thread, and in some cases leaving the board out of frustration, before something is done around here. I run a board. It shouldn't be this hard. Really.

ITA, except for the part about running a board myself. As I said before, a warning does not signal THE END OF THE WORLD & does not warrant this level of handwringing, IMO.

a warning does not signal THE END OF THE WORLD & does not warrant this level of handwringing

Absolutely. I couldn't agree more.

But this doesn't change the fact that, as a stompy, I sit here going "So do I warn her? Have the conditions been fulfilled?"

I feel quite vacuous, because whether or not I think she should be warned, I'm not sure of the precise conditions. And I suspect that might have been what Gandalfe was talking about last night.

Agreed with Burrell. Also Amyth, because clarity is an important part of feeling like the process is working.

So... what's the next step? I like Cindy's "fill-gap" idea; what do Stompies think, since they're the ones who will have to carry it out (if implemented)? What do people who don't agree with this instance of it think of it in general?

Maybe I'm not the only one who thinks everyone else is a cool kid.

I thought the whole idea of the Buffistas is that we're all cool kids! Okay, cool kids who post for hours on a Friday night, and then turn off the computer and read a comic book before going to bed by 11:30, but, you know, somebody out there's definition of cool.

Chex:

ita, do you think it's an ambiguity of the formal Stompy duties that makes you feel vacuous? Like, how many posts do you need, or whether you need unanimity, or some kind of minimum complainant turnout for you to feel empowered to act Stompily?

That's sort of a side issue from what we've been talking about, but I've had it in the back of my mind for a while to bring up. At some future date, when other things weren't all happening at once.

Okay, cool kids who post for hours on a Friday night, and then turn off the computer and read a comic book before going to bed by 11:30, but, you know, somebody out there's definition of cool.

Hey! I fall asleep with the TV on. I am not reading comic books.