The Feud, The Ban, and the Admin

[DZComposer]

Ok, so it seems that despite people telling me they understand everything, there are still back-channel discussions going on over the Milky/Redeemer issue with people slinging accusations at the staff.

 

First-off, Milky's ban was not approved because of his feud with Redeemer. He made a public post berating the staff after I made the post saying that such posts were prohibited with zero-tolerance. I would link to it, but I unfortunately deleted it while trying to move it to an archive board (Yay for undocumented IPB feature changes...). If any of you have a copy of it, feel free to post it here as I would have had I still had it. See next reply. I'm sorry, but a zero-tolerance policy is not a zero-tolerance policy if there are exceptions made to it.

 

That is the reasoning for the ban, and the reason why Milky was the only one punished.

 

As far as my feelings on that feud, it was a personal matter between them and should have been handled between them.

 

Unfortunately, it is now involving others. Steve and I are receiving Steam PMs over this from people who were not involved. Firstly, thank you for actually talking to us about it. Continue to contact the staff if you concerns or questions.

 

What I am tiring of, though, is that this issue is still ongoing and as we look at all the options available we find none that we feel are painless solutions.

 

So, I decided to publicly ask for input here. What do you guys think needs to happen here? Any, and I do mean ANY, suggestion is fair game.  I want to know what the community thinks about what is going on here. If you do not wish to post your suggestion publicly, please PM it to me. If you want to PM it to Steve, at least CC me on it so I can read it, too.

 

The goal here is to find the solution that best benefits the community.

 

NOTE: THIS IS NOT A THREAD FOR DISCUSSING WHAT HAPPENED. IT IS JUST FOR SUGGESTIONS ON HOW TO MOVE FORWARD

[DZComposer]

This is the post that got milky banned. I added the emphasis on the part that sealed the deal:

 

I have everyone I'd care about on Steam and Skype, and as of recent

events, I just have no derived enjoyment or purpose for being here.

It's a few particular people whom I can hardly stand, mostly in staff,

driving me away for the time being. You know, the reds. The same reds

who inexplicably ragequit and then came back. The same reds whom, when

confronted in a PM after locking a thread I made that brought up

particular points that should have been addressed, devolved into

attacking me personally and using my private life as a weapon against me

instead of any substantial sort of debate. Sickening. "respect the

staff" is a rule I cannot follow when the staff in question are complete

fucking morons.

EDIT: I've been asked to clarify that the post Milky made references a PM exchange he had with Redeemer

The rule citation for the ban:

4. Zero-tolerance for staff disrespect. If you disagree with a staff decision, take it directly to me. Don't be acccusatory, and especially don't start shit with the staff member you have an issue with. If you start drama with the staff, you will be banned.

[Robert Monroe]

Zero tolerance is... ridiculous, if you ask me. Staff should be respected, yes. Drama should be prevented, yes. But if at the first sight of trouble, you whip out the big guns, all that will do is breed fear, anger, and misconceptions. Furthermore, it undermines the Staff's aauthority to hold the peace and peacefully resolve problems.

 

SF-O doesn't need to be Megacity-1. It needs to just grow up a little bit. People are gonna get angry, say inflammatory things, and piss people off. The correct response to that is not to shoot them in the head.

[Sarita]

That's not what we're trying to implement at all. disagreements are and always have been acceptable, and will continue to be. We need everyone's understanding that for situations that get heated, we need to stop it quickly and resolve it in the swiftest manner that makes everyone happy. We will never get banhanmer happy, you guys have proven to be reasonable enough for that.

[Dr. Orange]

I didn't see the fight and shouldn't be saying anything about it, but the person who was banned was Milky. I hate to say it, but he's more hot headed than a Gordon Ramsey on fire on the planet Solar. 

 

Still, Milky, I would think, knows the rules and he lashed out against an admin. He bought the ban ticket.

Yet I'd also be wary about his statement...

 ...devolved into attacking me personally and using my private life as a weapon against me.

I'm just more curious on what happened from this. 

[Drasiana]

I think people need to stop harassing you guys offsite.

 

I won't pretend to know what's going on entirely but my sympathy rapidly degenerates when alternate pathways of communication are taken to further attack those who clearly no longer wish to communicate. This always seemed like a weird personal attack on Milky's part and if his forum contribution was going to be showing up once in a blue moon to flat-out insult the Reds for reasons that aren't particularly clear then I don't really think his ban was misplaced. And really, that topic he made didn't make many points worth addressing: it was 90% just calling the staff "pussies" for reasons he never specified and demanding people get banned for the slightest offense. Now he's complaining about getting banned? Whatever dude, it was your suggestion.

 

Also just sayin' his complaining about "using my private life as a weapon" is hilarious considering that's exactly what he was doing in the deleted topic but y'know whatever.

[manthony_Higgs]

I'm just more curious on what happened from this. 

Same here.  I'm all for respecting the staff, but they should respect us too.  Hearing stories like this about a site's staff always makes me wary to stay there.

[Drasiana]

Hey guys maybe stop and consider with that PM that you're only getting a fraction of the story and maybe it isn't worth it nor fair to anyone involved to pry into the aforementioned private lives.

 

edit: Also I think it's worth noting that the best way to solve private disputes is to keep them private. If anything, not doing so is what's causing the problem. To me this looks like weird personal vendettas are being held and leaking onto the forums because nobody knows how to solve them in anything other than a clusterfuck of a passive-aggressive power struggle played on the gameboard of a semi-active video game forum. Come on.

[Dr. Orange]

Hey guys maybe stop and consider with that PM that you're only getting a fraction of the story and maybe it isn't worth it nor fair to anyone involved to pry into the aforementioned private lives.

I don't think we're really "prying" but curiosity follows to those who don't know. 

[DZComposer]

I've been asked to clarify that the post Milky made references a PM exchange he had with Redeemer

[DZComposer]

Same here.  I'm all for respecting the staff, but they should respect us too.  Hearing stories like this about a site's staff always makes me wary to stay there.

Hence why we want to fix this. :yes:

[Snys93]

Wow, I did not know any of this until now. A feud is the last thing I want to be in the middle of.

[unoservix]

i dunno what happened with Milky but in the future perhaps you should be quicker to ban people like Milky and Sabre (and me!) and so on. i get that you want to have clear rules that everyone can know and follow, and you want clear rules that apply to everyone staff and serfordinary user alike, and you don't want to be harsh and hardcore. but people like Milky and Sabre (and me!) survive and thrive by staying in the weird gray zone of any rule set you can conjure, because their behavior always lingers somewhere in the annoying gray zone of "being a giant fuckwad but not actually breaking any rules." yet those are the people who wreck the community, precisely because they can't be removed because they inhabit the Romulan neutral zone and you're not allowed in there. so they fester and rot and corrupt and poison and corrode and other pejorative verbs implying negative influence. the users don't like it because they want this giant fuckwad to go away, but the mods can't or won't do anything about it, so it fosters resentment against the mods. the mods don't like it because they want this giant fuckwad to go away, but their hands are tied, so it fosters resentment towards the users who, to the mods, seem to constantly egg on the giant fuckwad and never just ignore the fuckwad so he'll go away. so everyone gets annoyed with everyone and it's all bad. therefore, it's better to stand back and take a less formal and more holistic approach to who is disrupting the community and making people unhappy and shit, and then surgically removing the people who are causing the problems. if you need justification, point to the problems that that person causes. you don't need more than that; we're not exactly the criminal justice system here.

 

attendant on that, i suppose, is that if you want to ban people but not have to permanently excommunicate them from the congregation of SFO, you could give people some lengthy temp-bans. kick them off for a month, or two, or three, or six, or a year, and then let them come back. not a whole lot of internet drama grudges survive that long without something to sustain them. and yet if someone comes back after a three-month ban still all pissed off and not willing to let it go, and continues to harass people a la Milky, then you can feel all the more justified in getting rid of them permanently.

 

putting that into practice means you need to have moderators and admins that you trust**, and who have pretty much the same idea of what constitutes a community-disrupting fuckwad. setting out rules to explicitly define what constitutes a community-disrupting fuckwad is where the problem begins, because someone will find some crevice you haven't covered and thrive therein, but a community-disrupting fuckwad is a you-know-it-when-you-see-it sort of deal to begin with, so such rules aren't strictly necessary. putting this into practice also entails you and Steve and the mods all making sure that none of you stray from the general schema of enforcing a particular tone (or lack thereof) on the boards, and making sure that you all agree on what a community-disrupting fuckwad is and whether the person you're considering banning really is one. i guess in purely practical terms, that means more work for you, but, well, you asked for suggestions on what you could do.

 

speaking of which, i should think once people take to harassing each other over PM and continuing fights that the other party did not want to continue, that should be grounds for immediately being taken out back behind the woodshed and beaten to within an inch of your misbegotten life in the first place. you don't need some special rule or approval of the community or anything for that. in other settings we'd have no trouble recognizing that as legally actionable harassment.

 

*bonus game: count the metaphors i used in this post!

 

**not to insinuate that you don't. just saying, if you don't, then that's something you should probably fix.

 

***oh yeah bitches my posts have footnotes

[Xortberg]

Tl;dr, ban Uno. And probably me. We're all fuckwads.

[unoservix]

also bring back Firefly

 

/obligatory

[Robert Monroe]

Now I know the name of the game isn't to debate Milky's banning, but consider WHY he made his inflammatory post: it was reactionary to his previous thread being locked out of the blue, and while there was a share of Milkshake's signature smarm and viritol, was NOT anything rule breaking. He was drawing attention to the over-lax state of rule enforcement on the forums, and by and large the posts that followed his were -sensible- and well within the rules. Then it suddenly gets locked, and there's a whole mess of inflammatory PMs and other off-site bile, and Milky comes in for his swan song.

 

Was his banned post acceptable? Hell no it was not.

 

Did Milky really deserve the ban for it? Given the circumstances, no, I don't think he did.

 

And this is why I feel the Zero-Tolerance policy is flawed: people WILL go off their handles sometimes. It is human nature. Milky has done this sort of thing in the past, and every time he gets suspended, he calms the fuck down, and 7-10 days later he comes back and everyone's happy.

 

We should discipline those who break the rules, but I feel outright permabans should be saved for the trolls and dottards who just make it their business to piss people off and show their ass. Say what you will about Milky and his reputation for being a ball of spitfire, he has never made it his intention to just be an -asshole- for fun. Why do you think he made his original post about why he feels SF-O sucks? Because he cares about the community and wanted to draw attention to a problem.

 

Maybe he should've behaved better about how he did it, but I feel his punishment was outweighing his crime. Zero-tolerance leaves no room for understanding or peace, which are far better means of managing a community than disciplinary might.

[Fana McCloud]

Milky has done this sort of thing in the past, and every time he gets suspended, he calms the fuck down, and 7-10 days later he comes back and everyone's happy.

 

I'm never 100% happy when someone like that comes back so that they can be a drama queen a few months down the line.

 

The ironic fact is that people like Milky, who can't tolerate difference of opinion or action, are more disruptive than someone who has an argument about freakin' ponies (to cite another recent event) because they get to hide under this air of legitimate grievance and think that entitles them to do their part to tear down a supposedly unjust system when the fact of the matter is that if the people in charge ultimately disagree or do nothing, you don't have a right to do jack squat because the place DOESN'T BELONG TO YOU. 

 

What did I do when I didn't like the way this place was being run? I left. And then I heard things changed and I came back. What changed exactly? The staff banned someone who passive-aggressively took jabs at people (including myself) for simply being someone they didn't like. They recognized that intolerant people are a legitimate problem, whether they break the more explicit rules or not. I think that kinda crap falls under a general harassment rule myself. 

 

I would simply request that the staff do what they can to do the best job they can, and I'll continue to understand that they are human and thus if they fail to meet my expectations I'll either discuss it or leave. My hope and prayer is that the staff don't give me a reason to leave again, but I'm humble enough to know that I can't always have what I want.

 

And I'll totally lend my support to what unoservix said, he has it on the money.

[DoctorAllosaurus]

Maybe if the staff cracked down on the trolling in the first place this wouldn't have happened, I don't care if the trolls in question weren't technically breaking any rules, it was still making members feel like shit and that's a big no no in my book.

[Robert Monroe]

I'm never 100% happy when someone like that comes back so that they can be a drama queen a few months down the line.

 

The last time Milky was suspended was well over a year ago. Maaybe even almost two. This was hardly a recurring problem with him. My point was to illustrate that making a ban over a boiling point seems extreme.

 

Milky was wrong to say what he said, but the ban was too much imo.

 

 

I'd quote more of the post, but this thread isn't about discussing what sort of person Milky is. He can be a spitfire, but I don't believe him to be someone who takes shots at people jsut because he dislikes them.

[Fana McCloud]

The last time Milky was suspended was well over a year ago. Maaybe even almost two. This was hardly a recurring problem with him. My point was to illustrate that making a ban over a boiling point seems extreme.

 

Milky was wrong to say what he said, but the ban was too much imo.

 

 

I'd quote more of the post, but this thread isn't about discussing what sort of person Milky is. He can be a spitfire, but I don't believe him to be someone who takes shots at people jsut because he dislikes them.

 

Technically this personal spat of his is the second thing in very recent history where he decided it was wise to post tirades publicly on the forum. This isn't out of the blue and he should've learned from the first time that it isn't an acceptable means of resolving his issues.

 

And while I'm not the most vigilant of observers of events here, just because the last time he was banned for something was a couple years back that doesn't mean it was the last time he did something worthy of banning. Sometimes when a pattern of behavior persists long enough it really is the time to lay down the perma ban.

[Faisul]

Reading Uno's proposal I nodded my head so much it fell off. Which is another way of saying that I agree with his idea wholeheartedly. Specifically the notion that SFO's rules should not to be approached as something that must necessarily be resolved as if in a court of law. If you have some charming feller ballet dancing on the grey area facilitated by the rules while still coming off as a monumental dickhead the staff shouldn't feel afraid to get rid of this person. Honestly, the more rules you cram in to deal with what's acceptable behavior and what's not, the more ways there are of getting away with being a prick as the mods fall over each other to confirm whether or not rules are being broken in the first place.

 

Uno is exactly right when it comes to the holistic approach. I myself have done some moderating (not to come off as a self-important tool or anything) and think it really is the best way of managing the herd of cats that forums generally are. I have handed out exactly one ban as I remember but I sure have probated a bunch of people and always for being dickheads, never for breaking rules, even when the forum in question had a bunch of them. While there is definitely a need for some general guidelines, rules are more for strictly formal things, like using this and that host for images and for posting conventions and whatnot.

 

Guidelines should not be more complex than 'don't be a jerk.' While it is a matter of course that there exists a hierarchy of jerkery ranging from 'staunchly and abrasively defending an unpopular political opinion,' 'insinuating someone should be raped or killed for their opinions or for being x ethnicity or y gender,' or 'posting DEUTSCHLAND UBER ALLES along with white pride slogans 500 times across the entire forums,' this can be dealt with effectively without wasting time nervously seeking the wisdom of the Book of Laws or purging the forums.

 

A probation system is a very effective behavior modification tool, because either it does the job or you throw the offending party back into the no-post netherzone. It's also much less daunting to probate someone for a week or a month than it is to permaban them. When you permaban them you start to think 'hmm is this the right course of action and is it really appropriate for the offense' especially if you're like me and don't really want to be mean to anyone or scare away entertaining discussions by being strict, but probation is like putting an unruly kid into the quiet corner. It adjusts its behavior or you throw it into the spider pit when it does the bad thing again.

My feelings on zero tolerance policies are that they are great when dealing with really egregious things like some of the above examples, where the offense is an indication of the poster being a shitty, bigoted person that has no reason to be on the forums in the first place, but a stifling bore when it's to do with nuance of opinion. Like a total moratorium on ponies might satisfy some posters and remove headache potential for the staff but gouges out what is now a significant avenue of participation in the community, with the added bother of making people cranky and MAH FREEDOM OF SPEECH.

 

I might be in the minority for thinking this but my opinion is that the same goes for discussions on controversial issues. If they spiral into flamewars (they inevitably do) you probate both offending parties and leave it at that - it's a perpetual cycle of garbage town but at least those people with interesting or informed opinions can participate in discussions between the weekly probation handout sessions that aren't just 'fan thing is cool' or 'i ate lasagna today'.

EDIT: I forgot to actually say what I wanted to say regarding the milky situation. He's never been a shithead to me personally but I've seen (and heard) enough to agree with his ban. A feud getting brought in from offsite shouldn't happen in any situation really and when people are being legit harassed over whatever then the person is not good to have hanging around. I hope Redeemer is okay.

[DZComposer]

Thank you for your input. It is quite valuable in this situation. I am going to go ahead and lock this thread, but if you have anything you would like to add, feel free to PM it to me.