Help Forum Bans, Or Probation Forum

[Tobriand]

There's been a lot of talk about whether this is a friendly community still recently. This suggestion (or rather, these suggestions) are things I just came up with which might, potentially, help with that. I actually came up with the second idea first, but I personally prefer the first one, so I'll explain that one first...

Basically, mods are reluctant to ban people for mild flaming, or constantly pointing people towards seaching and stickies, which is often potentially felt by new members as flaming. And there seem, typically, to be a specific number of us who do that.

Now, it seems fair to point everyone towards the sticky or the search function once, but if everyone's doing it, I suspect it might get a bit overwhelming - thus perhaps it might be an idea to temp-ban people from the help forum *only* (for maybe a few hours or a day) if they post so and someone's already done so; of course, only if a mod sees it. That would potentially address the issue of some actually polite threads seeming to be flames if only because of the lack of helpful answers, and repetitions of the same ones. Of course, its hard to police, but it might make people a little more thoughtful about what they say there...

The second idea would be to (temp)ban more people for things like flaming just generally, but have a forum where they were still allowed to post. Though I suspect that would be somewhat less of a good idea. I like the first though, to a degree... what do others think?

 

[PinkSpider]

I think if people flame in the the help forum they should be banned from it myself. If they point someone in the right direction and tell them nicely then it should be fine tho ^_^

 

[Rico]

I like the first idea, but the second 'purgatory' is just asking to be a platform where people can brew up hatred for the mods. I'm not in a position to make a decision, but I can tell you that tempbanning for a few hours or even having every post a user makes have to be approved by a mod can be done easily. So your first idea can be put into action immediately

 

[Tobriand]

Yeah, I thought of the second one mainly because I had the thought that its not really that nice either to ban or be banned, but it might potentially allow some people to get banned for lesser offences with less of a backlash - but I agree, it probably would cause more problems than it'd fix.

The other one I came up since I'm fairly sure the most common place for people to get swamped by the same comment and feel flamed is precisely the place where that shouldn't happen - the help forums. So just banning people, temporarily from them - or better still, moderating each post (though I imagine that'd produce a massive ammount of extra work for the GP32x team) - would help reduce that a fair bit, I suspect.

 

[generalnmx]

I agree, but since I'm a nice guy, I'll give at least one warning about the new policy before suspending.

 

[sebastian_insua]

Yep... this should be certainly done as lots of people flame because they believe it is expected of them.
ie. they post "You are gonna get such a flaming for this" an then further down "shall I do the honours etc..."