If I'd had a private place to report what she was doing, perhaps I could have stayed out of her sights.

I do think Cindy has a point. Well, the point revolves around how responsible we the board are for events that happen off-board, since it was in service to the board that Cindy picked up an unwanted email correspondent. I think there's potential for a chilling effect, if doing something for the board causes you to get emails from creepy weirdoes.

I'm not sure what the solution is. One of the options is to make it easy to email the admins with a notice, and the admins rephrase or repost that notice in Bureaucracy, saying "this came from a user blah blah blah". But that wouldn't deal with discussion, only an initial complaint or heads-up.

Java Cat, to try to answer your questions, the kind of lurking we're talking about is banning people who aren't registered Buffistas at all from seeing threads, not banning people who aren't active in a given thread.

Anyone who's causing a problem in the threads is de facto a registered user, as are you if you ever decide to try the waters in Bitches (and I hope I can speak for other Bitches in saying you'd be welcome there).

Java, absolutely not. It's when threadsucking is used for evil, that I wish, like others, there was a happy medium. Like "Are you going to use this board for evil? Check yes or no." on the registration. Not that would help....but....

(and yeah, what amych said...get thee to Bitches!!)

Like "Are you going to use this board for evil? Check yes or no." on the registration.

Followup "Do you mean cool evil (the kind with leather pants) or merely annoying evil (the kind with big hair and multiple personalities)?"

that was pretty conclusively shouted down last time it was discussed.

I thought what was shouted down was a "complain to the stompies and get a ban" procedure that left out any public discussion or attempts to resolve things on-board. However, I could be misremembering.

I'm speaking only for myself here, but I can't really see the problem with someone writing to the stompies to say, "I don't feel safe bringing this up, but..." at which point, assuming that there have been attempts to resolve things in-thread, we could post in bureau on that person's behalf to get things rolling officially.

Java, what amy said, which I'm saying a lot today. The proposal is not about problems with posters, it's about people who haven't registered at all.

Again, I did not propose that any specific threads be locked. The proposal is whether or not we should even have the ability to do it. I probably shouldn't have mentioned examples of threads that one might propose be locked. Even if we have the ability, we would still have to propose, discuss, and vote to lock a thread.

I can't really see the problem with someone writing to the stompies to say, "I don't feel safe bringing this up, but..." at which point, assuming that there have been attempts to resolve things in-thread, we could post in bureau on that person's behalf to get things rolling officially.

From what I remember, there was a feeling that the problem with that was that the poster who was being discussed should know who they had offended.

Rather than locking an existing thread, what if we established a new reporting procedure? Cindy said:

I think we either need some sort of private thread to discuss our suspensions and bannings, or some other method.

What about an email account off-site?