Xavier Antoviaque wrote:You have my apologizes for not being clear enough, for having publicly announced Grimjim's ban, and for the bit of haste which made me consider the "Trolls and flames" as a warning in itself for those answering in it.
Thank you for that. Apology accepted (on my part, anyway)
Xavier Antoviaque wrote:
I planned to revisit the "Trolls and flames" thread on Monday and convert the bans which aren't justified by the users's post history into warnings.
I'm very happy to hear that you will be doing this. I would also suggest getting some input from the rest of the moderator team to avoid the feeling of a unilateral decision on behalf of one person. It's very easy for two people to see the exact same post in entirely different ways based on many things (mood, culture, how much coffee you've had that day, etc). We've seen this in practice with the various interpretations of the posts that were targets for suspensions.
Xavier Antoviaque wrote:
I'll thus apply the process I previously described in that thread too:
- When a new flaming/trolling post appears, I look at the history of the account, to see if this is a reccurrent behavior or not;
- If it isn't, I just issue a warning by email;
- If it is, or if a warning has been ignored, the forum access is suspended.
However, be aware that it won't apply to everyone - those with an history of flames will stay banned.
I would strongly encourage you to reconsider using a person's entire post history prior to yesterday's announcement as evidence for deciding whether to ban or not. In the context of the forums as they were at the time (very loosely moderated), someone's posts may have been fine and in line with the norm at the time. If you try to retroactively apply a stricter criteria, then many people could be candidates for suspension, even if they more closely adhere to the new rules going forward.
Now that everyone knows that things are stricter, I feel you should basically make a clean break and only consider posts since the announcement when passing judgement.
Xavier Antoviaque wrote:Yes, since the day I started to post in community-specific forums, I've become more involved in them. I usually act behind the scene by discussing the moderation issues the CMs have; for an action like this one though, I would let none else than me taking the flames.
My main point here is that someone that was perhaps less passionately and directly involved with the game development might not have made the initial mistake, thus not resulting in all the flaming. Yes, the mistake was made, yes, you've apologized for it and that's very apprecited. I just bring this point up to perhaps avoid something similar in the future.