The Joys of Overzealous Moderators

[Amhazair]

Originally Posted by ghoul31

The rules are that if you launch personal attacks on people, and call them names all the time, you are going to be banned. That is what happened.

If you think that stuff should be allowed then you should hang out on the other forum, not here.

Originally Posted by Edi

I'm also rather amused at the indignation toward Calahan for being such a bad person for sometimes being short with certain people or even *gasp* using rude language. Generally (not limited to this forum only) I see that behavior mostly from people who have absolutely no problem wasting massive amounts of people's time, repeating their already discredited arguments ad nauseam and then swooning and reaching for the smelling salts the second someone loses patience with them and calls them out on it. How dare that person be rude to them?! As if it wasn't rude to repeatedly ignore his arguments and waster his time and perhaps even insult him into the bargain, albeit less directly.

Now, which one of those behaviors is actually more offensive?

Hey, look at that! I don't even have to bother to type an answer to that, since somebody else already did.

[Gandalf Parker]

Which is exactly what the other forum is for
http://z7.invisionfree.com/Dom3mods
I highly recommend that anyone playing MP games should at least visit it to see what is going on there. AND to their IRC channel. The benefits of such are obvious when you see them in action.

And those benefits are becoming more and more difficult to find here.

[Gandalf Parker]

They are support forums for games. Not quite the same as a forum like Dom3Mods is. The criteria for success is abit different. Most of the threads on Dom3 forums is about MP games. Sometimes a question pops up.

Other than game chatter, the Dom3 forum is slightly less than half of the posting traffic on the entire server. But it also gets 8 times as much reading as it does posting.

[Executor]

Thank you Edi, that was an excellent and well argued answer.

[Executor]

Posted at the request of Calahan.

@ Edi

I must say it's pretty unnerving how well you know my forum behaviour. Starts to make me wonder what else you know about me You might want to make note though that I prefer a minigun over a flamethrower, as I find it does more damage at a quicker rate (I recommend you check it out yourself). Although recently I've found the nuclear option to be very appealing, as the time savings you can make with it are just incredible!

Anyway, I thought you might want to know what my signature was which I seemingly got banned for. I'm not 100% sure if the following is word-for-word accurate, but it's around the 95% mark, and is certainly an accurate representation of what my signature was...


*CALAHAN'S FORMER SIG CONTENTS EDITED OUT*

(sorry to further disappoint my critics after Edi took the wind out of your sails, but no porns links were harmed in the making of my signature, contrary to some of the rumours I'm sure you'd all like to believe are true)


And that was it. No idea exactly what part of that signature got me banned, I'm guessing it was the word "stupid", but if so then it appers I effectively got banned for calling an Orange an Orange. I might have used "idiot" instead of "stupid", and in the context of "I can not take idiots like Bat-man...", but I don't see how that makes any real difference unless you are playing Scrabble.

I put that signature in place on, or soon after the 14th May, after finally giving up arguing with Bat-man in a thread on the main forum (and at the same point I firmly convinced myself that Bat-man was Chris-P, and so I also realised who I was pointlessly arguing with, and which therefore prompted me to stop arguing immediately due to significant prior experience). And I was banned (for this signature?) on either 1st or 2nd July (I noticed around noon GMT on 2nd July).

And apologies for the slight mis-spellings. They are there to get around a word fliter that's currently in place on dom3mods.


If the links don't work, which I suspect they won't as they never do when copied from a post (they get displayed in shortened form, and copied as such), then please use the following and add the letter "h" to the start of them. (to make "http" obviously). Most browers do this automatically when you paste the text into the address bar.

ttp://forum.shrapnelgames.com/showpost.php?p=671089&postcount=189
ttp://forum.shrapnelgames.com/showpost.php?p=671414&postcount=205
ttp://z7.invisionfree.com/Dom3mods

Link to this post on dom3mods, in case it doesn't display properly on Shrapnal
ttp://z7.invisionfree.com/Dom3mods/index.php?showtopic=835&view=findpost&p=22015865

[Soyweiser]

The anti Calahan camp is right in one regard. The hive minded abuse of ghoul wasn't nice. In the end it became a bit of a running gag to make fun of ghouls style. The "your mom" joke of dom3mods.

People at dom3mods even acknowledged this. Calahan certainly wasn't the main heckler or the most verbose about it. Still, it wasn't a nice thing to do. (Sadly, I could not find a link).

[WraithLord]

This is my perspective. Calahan is consistently, over the years I know him, helping the community in many ways, like sharing knowledge, doing tests, balancing maps ( he did this once or a twice as a generous favor for games I hosted) & subbing.
He is given much more than, I'd say at least 90% of the forum members. You see, how many vets out there have the will, time or patience to correct disinformation spread to newbs?

If his sig. was over the top the mod should have talked to him about & ask him politely to moderate it.
Many forms of abusive behavior pass under the radar but that does not make them right or any less abusive. I'm talking about P/A, answering wrong answers w/o checking & w/o a simple "ÿes I was wrong" when called out, ditching games etc. Yet such are not banned. Instead a top contributor is out right banned when reported for his sig. (who actually reported violation of forum rules albeit not in a polite manner)

That's wrong. And the sooner it's acknowledged the better. He should be un-banned and if it were me who banned him I'd do two more things - apologize for the harsh & unjust measure and ask him to take it easy and try to moderate his responses. I'm sure he'll comply since he's basically a good guy and has good intentions. But at the very least he deserves a chance.

And Exec is absolutely right about:
"
A simple solution to this would have been to appoint several very active and appreciated members to supervise the forum they are active in, and leave those mods to handle internal matters regarding those forums. Help new members, organize new projects, intervene in situations like this where two members were pointlessly banned, etc. I'm sure many member would have been glad to help (people like Soy, WL, Frozen, Maer...) and those people would actually be able to promote harmony on the forums and help the company as well.
Is that really that hard to do? And yet imagine how much better this forum would be, how much more people would be here, how many more people would actively contribute and participate on the forums, and how many more people would actually buy this game?
"
Although it's not a trivial thing to ask of working, busy ppl I'm sure volunteers would be found.

[Edi]

Okay, listen up everyone!

I don't expect to be a very popular person after this post is through, but it's got to be made. Like it says in the reason for editing Executor's post and removing Calahan's sig contents out of there, this is about preventive damage control.

It was made known to me that posting the contents of the sig second hand, even if the intent was to inform me of what caused this ugly chain of events, is a violation of the terms and conditions of the forum. Fair enough, by reading the T&Cs, it is. So it got removed for that reason, in order to make sure that Executor does not find himself in hot water for no reason.

There is another thing that is relevant here, one which is not spelled out directly in the terms and conditions. However, it can be inferred/deduced from the terms and conditions, so please pay attention:

If and when a member is banned from the forums, it is done to remove them from the discussions for their perceived disruptive or otherwise negative influence, as judged by the forum moderators and/or administrators. The ban makes it clear that the person is no longer welcome and the inference is that they should no longer have a voice in the discussions here. This is not about Calahan specifically, it is the policy with regard to all banned members.

Therefore people should not be posting messages on behalf of banned members, because it can be seen as deliberately circumventing the ban by proxy. That would land the proxy poster in trouble.

If anyone wants to relay messages to anyone else from banned members, it should be done via PM. This way nobody gets in trouble and the message gets delivered. There is also the option to ask the intended recipient of the message to take a look at the message on another venue that is not on these forums, preferably via PM, which again avoids trouble for everyone concerned.

[Edi]

Now, all of that said, there are some other considerations that I wish to make clear, if they were not already so from my previous posts:


I personally agree that Calahan was a valued member of the community for exactly the reasons Wraithlord outlines above and what Executor and others have been saying since the beginning of the thread.

I also agree that the ideal situation would have been for a moderator, such as myself, to ask Calahan to remove or change the offending sig upon spotting it and perhaps issue a warning about such behavior in the future. The problem would have been solved and these events would not have happened.

However, due to the absence of both myself and llamabeast, the remaining active moderators, this did not happen and resolution of the issue was kicked directly to the forum administrators. They felt that Calahan was blatantly and intentionally in violation of the terms and conditions of the forum and out to stir trouble and therefore decided to ban him directly. The fact that offending sig was put up as early as May and stayed up as long as it did certainly did not alter their stance on the issue in Calahan's favor.

So the banishment is in all likelihood going to stick and that issue is not up for debate.


I also agree that it would be a good thing to have other active moderators, especially for the multiplayer subforum, which is the one that sees the most traffic. I and the administrators will certainly take this under advisement, but don't expect new moderators to be named tomorrow. After the recent events and the emotions running high on all sides, making rushed snap judgments not in anybody's interest.

[PriestyMan]

Boy are they mad that they are being made to look silly. lets just censor the discussion down so we don't look any worse.