Community Warnings

John

Peacekeeper
Staff member
Messages
2,400
(Long story short: please see the new Moderation & Warnings section on the rules page.)

You may or may not know that moderators sometimes send out "warnings" to people who we believe broke a community rule while participating in the community. When we first started, we were hoping that these "verbal" warnings alone would be enough to help thwart the troublemakers and the trolls that often wreck havoc in such a community full of very passionate fans but we've seen glimpses of that only being wishful thinking on our part within the past couple of weeks.

First of all, I hope that everyone understands that warnings are not meant to be personal. Mainly, I like to think that the most important purpose of warnings is to simply remind people that this community actually has rules so that we can keep things civil. On the other hand, if you are the type to collect warnings almost like trophies, it will start to become something more than a simple reminder.

In the past, we gave out warnings and these warnings didn't amount to much. It just allowed us to track how many warnings a particular user received internally but there were no other consequences. Now, warnings will have a point value and expiration date associated with them and they will result in "penalties" depending on the number of active warning points you have accumulated:

Three (3) or more.
Your access and activity in the community will be purposefully discouraged. You will randomly be presented with various annoyances designed to discourage your participation in the community until your warning point count expires to below the threshold.​
Five (5) or more.
Banned from the community until warning points expire below the threshold. If you have accumulated five non-expiring warning points, you will be permanently banned from the community.​
Seven (7) or more.
Banned from the community for four months then one non-expiring warning point added to account.​

For the time being, each warning will consist of one point that will expire in one month. So if you post a personal attack, you will have one active warning point associated then after one month, that point will expire and no longer count toward the above thresholds.

Personally, I think the above thresholds are very lenient and "new member" friendly. I also understand that there is a loophole here but at this time, it is purposeful. We'd prefer not to ban people if we can help it and ideally, we would only ban spammers and ugag trolls.

With all that said, the mods reserve the right to override all the warning points and just ban a user outright if we find that you are just here to be disruptive.

Opening this up to discussion. Fire away if you have any questions.
 

collegeballfan

Helluva Engineer
Messages
1,694
John I believe you guys are doing a nice job trying to keep this as a "Tech family" forum. I usually ignore those who start to get testy. And I ignore those who decide to try and out do "War and Peace" when it comes to number of words. I am not ego driven and do not tolerate it in others.
 
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