Sound sound?

Pretty much. What if there's more than one of each tag in the array? Which one gets deleted?

Hey All,

A discussion with John H prompted me to post in here about my experiences with moderation/banning.

I'm a moderator of an entirely different type of forum centered around common interests in dance music. The forum was started by two friends in May 2000.

In the beginning the members all knew each other from clubbing and dj-ing in Melbourne, Australia. The site has grown to have 4588 registered users (from across Australia). I'd estimate that over 1000 post very often, most are lurking to occasionally promote events or pick up knowledge about events, records or music production.

Our forum rules about banning were designed to prevent spamming, promotions in non-promotion areas, and personal attacks.

A strange moderation issue came up. An established user turned bad. This online character was always caustic, but began to target new users, and users who had different taste in music. As the site grew, this user became increasingly offensive and more of a bully than an in-joke. He would occasionally get banned for crossing a line, and then promise to be good and come back. A small faction of his supporters would argue that "people couldn't take a joke", "this is just the internet", and that this person "was a great person in real life". The fact that he kept returning meant that new users commented on the "clique-i-ness" of the forum, and the perception that some people were above the rules because they were friends with the site owners or moderators.

At the moment this person has been permanently banned.

The confusion surrounding the issue was exacerbated by no clear rules about what actions would result in what sanctions. Also, the decisions made by moderators were not transparent. Users didn't know what someone had agreed to to get unbanned.

I guess if we were to start all over again, there would have been more rules and moderation procedures in the beginning. Now we have decided that bans have to be nominated by a moderator (can be prompted by any user) and agreed to by two other moderators (there are 14 moderators). Our next forum update will include the facility to implement a soccer based banning system.. one, two or three yellow cards for initial infringements with increasing ban times, and red cards. Three red cards and you're out.

So, what are the rules around here?

plasmo, this is what we have. The discussions leading up to that point were, well, lengthy.

And the geek post:

John, we'd get the one closest to the end. I'll need to putz around with the array functions, but I feel best with that.

I guess the other half of this question is how do you ban people? And what happens when they try to circumvent the board and come back?

how do you ban people?

With guillotines!

And what happens when they try to circumvent the board and come back?

You feed them braaaaains and they go away.

Here's something that might be helpful:

phpTidyHt

I'm not sure how it's implemented, but it looks like it could be CPU intensive, with lots of subprocess forks.

Hello, peeps. I'm an ignorant soul, and I was futzing around with a pretend unix shell code in Buffistechnology. I was trying to do something with backslashes (and t tags , because I am a moron that way) and both backslashes and tags were stripped from the post. Tags I understand, but random backslashes? Are these forbidden characters for some reason?

To wit:

/////

//////

//////

What shows up? [edit: the above should look like mountains, or cross-stitches!]

Plasmo, brings up a good point. We circled around the banning process and came to a general consensus of warning, suspension, banning, but we didn't nail it down and make it specific. Which we should probably go ahead and do.

We also need to formalize who would decide that a warning was warranted (maybe a quick huddle of the admins?). Do we want more than one warning before suspension? If so, how many? At what point would the disciplinary process become public. I got a sense that people felt that warnings would be private, but that a suspension would be publically noted.

Would banning be something brought before the whole community for a vote, or automatic after somebody came back from a suspension and earned another warning. Would the ban be forever or for a year?

It might help to keep this discussion focused on just the protocol we want to use.

Not to nitpick - but shouldn't we move this to Bureucracy?

Well Ok, that is to nitpick...