In my experience (and others can feel free to contradict me) it isn’t so much a policy of laissez-faire but rather of benign neglect. Semantics, but if we’re already quibbling . . .
Is this the original ‘Someone is at the door’? I’ve moderated in other sites. Not that it was something I wanted to do…I recognized help was needed to keep those sites running smoothly. I know this personally, because I had my own philo site. I could have had mods on mine , but I didn’t want to pose duress on anyone else. I had problems and decided to finish out my contract there because of the pettiness which ensued and let the site go.
I was asked to help here and did so. I can appreciate the trouble it takes to have a site like ILP. Granted the one I had was nothing on the scale of memebership ILP enjoys. In my particular case, I opened mine because I enjoy seeing what other’s thoughts are and share mine.
I don’t operate under the ‘gotcha’ or ‘you’re wrong’ point of view. My interest is in learning by expanding my viewpoint through observing the human dynamic. In some instances I am prejudiced against having converstions with some folks because I know through viewing their posts nothing positive will become of it. The ones I have had unproductive discussions with I choose not to interact with anymore.
ILP’s forum rules premise are agreeable with me because it closely aligned with my now defunct site and personal operating structure. I don’t agree with a lot that is discussed, but I am still interested is seeing those different viewpoints.
I don’t take any pleasure in doing that. I consider myself something of a laissez-faire Moderator. It may be true that I might be one of the first people to put the possibility of a ban on the table, but I don’t take action of any kind unless a definite infraction of the Rules has occurred.
Is self-banning allowed at ILP? I mean, if you feel that your own personal level of argument failure is exceeding logical boundaries for any given day. Or maybe it should just be a community function, a type of voting system function. Have a page where users can vote, and after X number of votes, an offending user is auto-banned for 24-48 hours …
Wait, nevermind, that would end up being a perma-ban for me. “The jury is instructed to disregard the previous remarks.”
Mastriani - as the owner of a successful message board website, you may know about this already - we sometimes use the Ban-O-Matic Random Ban Selector. It randomly selects a member name to ban. Most of the time it will, obviously, select a long-gone, zero-post, just-lookin’-around member from back when stuff like philosophy was discussed here. But it’s something to do.