When BF's posts were too long or combative, I just skimmed faster or skipped a few sentences. I'm against any suspension or ban, and I'll never use Ignore. If you"re telling the truth that there are a lot of tattlers who PM moderators, they need to grow up and stop crying to authority. Who are the weirdos who constantly lobby mods by using PMs? Are they like the hangers-on at small town city council meetings? Years ago I saw some real idiots there who wield power way out of proportion to their IQs, just by badgering the ears of those really in power. Following secret PMs between mods and bannee, a resulting ban or suspension will always seem unfair to the public. Warnings should occur in open posts, not covert PMs. I see no reason for the PM function at all. Denny should turn it off and make everyone communicate openly. There are ways to manage people without reward & punishment. There is building conformity, often called consensus-building, by provoking the board to determine its median opinion about behaviors. In this case, Blazer Fanatic often went after posters who said something non-homer. No mod ever answered her by engaging her in open debate over the issue of how much diversity of opinion to allow on the board. Apparently you just handed down pronouncements to her in secret PMs. Such a debate would have been a popular thread, and established an average board opinion, a process which might have rounded off some rough edges of outlier posters, including Blazer Fanatic.
I don't give a shit who made the decision. It was stupid! As far as the premise that she was driving people away...that is ridiculous! Bannings of this type will certainly drive people away though.
i doubt it. Whoever would leave from something like this, IMO, wasn't likely to stick around anyways. To address those who say to just ignore it, the issue is, you can put a poster on ignore, and then not see their posts. Hurray. The bigger issue, which comes into play here, is when someone's posts continually derail threads, or become personal attacks that draw others into addressing said attacks, as opposed to carrying on an otherwise productive discussion. So now it's not ignoring only a few posts, it's going into a thread and seeing it having gone to shit. So oyu leave and don't post.
Of course bannings like this will drive people away that is the point of a ban to get rid of someone.
Maybe, and no doubt the decision was based on more than the public posts. It also may be less conspiratorial and reflect the fact that BF was just.......well, a jerk. If I was the owner of S2 and the goal was to attract new forumites, I would have been concerned that potential new posters casually perusing the site would have been turned off by the MANY long and caustic entries.
Every time a woman comes on this board the same few posters find a way to put her on the defensive, provoke a reaction from her, taunt or twist her words, then cry like a baby that she has "hurt" them. No wonder this place has a higher % of men than the YMCA. Fortunately, there's help for these impotent souls: [video=youtube;WWmkTtZNxBk]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WWmkTtZNxBk[/video]
I wasn't over at BBF with some of you but I was always told that the mods banned people, didn't give reason why and if you complained you were banned too.
I wasn't on that site, but everything that you guys from there have said isn't anything like this at all.
Exactly the same thing. Went from major forum to ghost town in a matter of days. It was hilarious fun. I'd jump on board in a minute. Or maybe if some guys weren't so scared of girls...