Asking other mods' opinions

Regular
Rep: 6

Joined: 20 Nov 2004
Posts: 1,286

Take a look at these two threads first
http://www.moviecodec.com/topics/40314p12.html
http://lounge.moviecodec.com/topics/40454p1.html

I didn’t ban him for the second offense (yet) because I’d like to get your opinions.

He states he believes his stepbrother may be the culprit but I’m not buying that. (I’ve thought this before but I didn’t say it publicly.) Virtually all his posts are on lounge.moviecodec.com, while the spamming is on www.moviecodec.com, and as everyone knows, separate logins are needed for each subdomain. It’s possible he does two separate logons (forgetting to logoff www), but that’s unlikely. Also the sheer amount of posts suggests this is done by scripts rather than by hand.

Thoughts? Opinions? on the person and the way to deal with them (length of ban etc.)


[rant below - mostly for mods - skip if you’re easily bored]

It’s always been my opinion a lot of people on here see some mods are more “neutral” and just want to “test” them by picking fights (I’m thinking particularly of thread 40571).
I don’t like to get entangled in issues which are subject to debate or discretion, or are not clear-cut (like the ones you’d find in the lounge, or any social network for that matter). I just mostly want to help out people with genuine media playback problems.

That being said, I don’t encounter much of those posts anymore in the main section. (It seems to have been overtaken with portable mp4 player posts.) Instead I see lots of brought up dead threads where people ask question totally unrelated to the original posts, spammers with their pseudo-guides or responding to posts by promoting their products (they do need to make a living, but that’s taking it a little far - Bjarne hasn’t taken a final stance on these yet; blueberry287 is a name that comes to mind in terms of regular offender), and the usual pointless thread with broken english, gibberish, or quotes without anything else (I normally delete those - thank god Bjarne implemented a script to stop the last ones - all I ever did several months back was delete them).
I tremendously admire other mods for being able to read through all the other kind of posts, clean up the mess others make, and being able to do it tirelessly day after day, month after month, year after year. Like I said earlier in this post, the social element in those other posts increases the complexity in moderating them.

I raised this idea in other posts in the past (here for example) and I’d like your opinions: It’s clear the board’s ability to ban people is limited (as seen by the redundancy of the troublemakers); I see it more as a slap on the wrist, or a way to remind people to be good netizens so as to make the board viable.*
There’s not really a permanent solution to this except communicating with the culprits and getting to the bottom of their frustration (what drives them to vandalize the board), and perhaps somehow talking them into stopping. The other solution would be to track down via the proxies all the way home to the ISP, and report the user for abuse. This is very time-consuming and may not yield results 100% of the time. Should it work it may be successful because if it’s a 12-year-old, their parents may finally take action if their internet service is cut; don’t know about adults though.

In other subjects: do you think the test board should be closed or cleaned? I think it’s become a spamming board, and is by far the most abused board on the site.

* Sadly most members see banning as some sort of power trip / abuse of power, and this creates many unneeded enemies.

Guardian of MvC
Rep: 85



Joined: 06 Jan 2006
Posts: 44,448
OFFLINE

First, about Corolm... I’ve always stated that we ban accounts, not people. Even if an account is hacked or hijacked, it should be banned for breaching the rules. A member always has the option to create a new account and post again, unless they have repetitive offenses, being banned 7-8 times for the exact same thing. In that case I think that a person loses their right to an account until their ban is up.

As for the test section, I don’t see why we need it. If a member really wants to test something they can post in one of the chat threads we have in offtopic. As long as they’re not posting several times in a row there’s not really a problem with a spam post here and there for the use of testing a feature. As you said, people are using the “testing” guise as a cover to spam. And if we ban or even threaten to ban we’ll be called tyrants and have claims of abusing our status thrown at us. More trouble than it’s worth.

firewolf81NLI

Guest

I agree with Cid whole heartedly.

I also would like to add that if a member is found spamming the Movie codec side of the forums, they should be banned if they are a regular here.

They are more than likely doing it as to get their post count up without being found out.

I say ban em on sight if they spam like corolm has. They are doing it for person gain.

those who are regulars on that side of the forum and don’t tend to post in the lounge part of Movie Codec should perhaps get more leniency and a warning first.