I would’ve greatly preferred that “You’ll have to talk to him about that, sorry” would have been good enough. No need to belabor this any further.
RealmEye Forums Moderator AMA [Request]
… that seems cryptic and unhelpful. aloof and non-specific is one thing, but hiding the truth is quite another. what if said person had asked him what happened and was either unsatisfied with the answer or wanted this side of the story?
since there will never be an end to “what happened to so-and-so” questions, here’s an AMA question for you:
how would you prefer we answer those questions? shut up and pretend nothing happened? give full disclosure to what happened? give a vague and unhelpful response? ask them to go find the answer themselves?
and what if they keep asking after that? what if they find those answers unsatisfactory?
the other moderators can answer too, it seems that you don’t all share the same opinions on these topics sometimes.
The rules here are rather vague on purpose, aside from the Hard and Fast rules. If we ban someone for “activity”, the reasons are going to fall into the vague category. Typically it’s when we’ve had enough of a person not going with the spirit of the rules, often continuing after temp bans or several attempts to talk with them about behavior we don’t find acceptable.
As soon as we start laying out specifics we trap ourselves to explain why we interpreted the rules the way we did. We’re happy to speak directly with the person who was banned. However, as I mentioned chances are high we’ve already tried talking with them first, so the conversation is pretty much over by the time the ban hammer gets involved.
To explain why bans happen to a wider audience would mean we would have to disclose private conversations. If they want to tell you then that’s their choice, but we won’t.
I excel at cryptic and unhelpful.
Really, what I was getting at was “There’s no compelling reason to speculate on the forums about why somebody else was banned, or to speak ill of them once they’re gone. If you want to know why someone else was banned, you’re always welcome to track them down and ask them directly—in fact, that’s often a more productive approach.”
is there more news hiding from me?
<cryptic and unhelpful>
Yes!
</cryptic and unhelpful>
cryptic and unhelpful
Unhelpful to whom?
To the banned party: I would argue that they stand the most to gain by not having their dirty laundry aired out publicly for everyone.
To The interested bystander: I can think of very little that anyone stands to gain by one of the mod team listing off the offenses of someone who has been banned.
The two arguments in favor that I can think of are
- the bystander might have a better handle on what is acceptable and unacceptable and
- there may be a question as to whether the mod action was justified.
As to 1 - the query itself is too vague (“why did X get banned?”) to be useful. If the question was about specific behavior (“is Y acceptable to do?”), the answer would be forthcoming. But a general “I don’t know what that person did wrong” doesn’t really help you understand how to apply the rules yourself.
As to 2 - we have always accepted criticism and appeal. However, this does not seem to be the case when someone is just asking “why did X get banned?” rather than “I don’t think the ban of X was justified and here’s why.” We could probably avert the possibility of accusation by being transparent about all bans all the time, but I believe the trade off is not worth it. We hope that visitors to the forums will know better by having interacted with the mods, and those that don’t most likely would not benefit from the argument.
To the mod staff: Although we could potentially avoid accusations by being more transparent, we would also be opening a can of worms for anyone who wants to rules lawyer for/against some activity by the mod staff. This environment is not tightly controlled - it is a forum for the players, by the players. It is not our intention to set up the rules with careful controls to make sure they are applied meticulously. It is our intention to have decent conversation, and occasionally someone has to clean the place up.
I mean, personally I don’t think that a user who gets banned deserves to be shamed by me listing off their offenses to everyone who asks.
Also, there are these notes here with some further elaboration which generally apply to “Activity” as the reason for a ban:
When I cited the account history on those two suspensions I had a few goals.
I want to put my name on the ban. If anyone feels that I have acted inappropriately they should know that I made the decision to impose the suspension. That way if they want to address it either with me or the other mods they aren’t dealing with the cloak and dagger nonsense of not knowing who did it and what the reasoning is.
I cited the account history as the reason for the suspension because the ban is not the result of an individual action or post that was inappropriate, but rather a pattern of posting in a way that is inconsistent with the rules of our community. Although many of the examples of bad behavior may now be hidden as a result of flags (as a point of reference, xspinatkx had over 50 flags), I consider that the pattern of behaviors which precipitated the ban should be discernible from a cursory review of the account history.
I am not interested in rules lawyering. We are an overwhelmingly lax moderation group, and if you get banned it is very…very… likely that you deserved what you got and then some, three weeks earlier. A person who gets banned in this environment and then comes back and wants to say “which rule specifically did I violate, how, when, and why didn’t this other person also get in trouble” is not trying to better themselves or the community. I prefer to see the ball in the other court. Don’t ask me what exactly to the letter you have to do, instead you tell me how you see your own behavior and what you are going to do to change.
I mean, personally I don’t think that a user who gets banned deserves to be shamed by me listing off their offenses to everyone who asks.
Agreed. Why they got banned is none of anyone else’s business.
By that same token, I find it mildly grating when general readers keep asking about banned users. If whatever it was that the banned users was doing was bad enough to get them banned in the first place, then I’d rather everyone simply forget about them and move on. Instead, people seem to obsess over the banned users, thereby glorifying the very behavior we attempt to discourage.
@Moderators
what happened to @BMG
Idk if this was asked before, but i remember him when i first joined forums. He was pretty chill
It is/was possible to re-open threads using regular powers, so maybe that’s what happened?
Maybe that would show in the post history though, so I don’t know.