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.
I was not aware of this functionality addition to message boards. I know I should feel empowered to use it, but for some reason, my sense of self-validation in banning seems reduced to almost imperceptibility …
Apparently, the lack of measureable e-peen drive is now officially an issue. ::sigh::
Oh, well, when you apply for modship here, along with your three hundreds dollar application fee, you have to send in a 1000-word essay about why you want to ban people, who you would like to ban and how you plan to accomplish your banning goals for the year.
Then, if you make that cut, you submit a multiple choice test that measures how often you are likely to ban and indicates how banning affects your emotional well-being. If it doesn’t make you feel all warm and fuzzy inside to ban someone, you just won’t work out on staff here. The motto here is “I ban, therefore I am”.
You may also know that mods here have a special sig that only other mods can see. Mine is, “A ban a day keeps the voices in my head away”. I’m not going to tell tales, but others here use such gems as:
“I love the smell of banning on the morning. It smells like…victory.”
“I think that I shall never see
Anything lovely as a banning.”