Hello fellow techIMO'ers!
Seeing as how there are a few threads about people getting banned, I wanted to weigh in.
The first thing you should know is that not everything that happens here happens in the public eye. It may look to you like a moderator used a heavy hand or was harsh or too quick in banning a user, when in reality, that moderator may have had a lengthy ongoing private discussion with the user that you never saw.
The site has a few basic policies that all stem from respecting others. 99% of the users here have no problem with them. Fewer than 1% like to challenge those policies. Moderators enforce the policies by reminding offending users of the policies and giving them a second chance before taking action.
A few users came over to the site from a rival distributed computing team and decided to use the "location" field (that appears to the left side of every post) as a way to promote their team. We disallow the use of the location field for anything but exactly that, your geographic location, because of situations such as these. It may seem silly, but ultimately users will abuse the location field if it can be used for anything. So, a few users got banned for abusing the location field after repeated warnings - they broke the rule, the mods told them they were breaking the rule, and they made the choice to keep doing it.
The mods can weigh in to tell you why each user was banned if you want to know. I don't have a problem with that, but I ask that you believe them when they tell you. They're not on a power trip and they don't WANT to ban people. We're pushing past 73,000 users now with the March acquisition of ResellerRatings and its subsequent increase in popularity, and even if we ban 5 users a month, that's 0.007% of the site's population.
In my experience at SysOpt and at TechIMO too, bans come in waves. There will be 6 months of no bans, then all of a sudden 5 bans, then everyone will come out of the woodwork to accuse the mods of being on a power trip, then I write one of these reassuring letters
and all is well again.
Really, that's the case here too - I don't believe that the mods are abusing their power or taking inappropriate action. The site has basic/simple policies and if you break one of them, the mods respectfully let you know and you can choose whether you want to live by the rules or keep breaking them. Those that keep breaking them get banned.
I do agree that there were one or two cases where a mod may have overstepped their bounds by harassing a user who would not comply with our rules, but it was simply out of frustration, and I've asked the mods to turn down the emotional heat a bit.
If, however, you see a specific instance where you think a mod did something wrong, let me know, but the mods discuss pretty much all bans beforehand in our internal discussion forum.
Scott
Linear Mode
