A modest proposal

rsynnott

Anyone who recieves a serious forum-level ban (say, perma-banned from PI, etc) should be site-banned for about a month. More of a deterrent that way, and would make Prison more interesting

And tougher sentences for the terminally annoying

Boston

O dear god no. Each forum should be self contained. Site bans shouldn't be used as a stick to beat people.

Hugh Hefner

LiouVille wrote:

O dear god no. Each forum should be self contained. Site bans shouldn't be used as a stick to beat people.

"I..... conquer."

aidan_walsh

LiouVille wrote:

O dear god no. Each forum should be self contained. Site bans shouldn't be used as a stick to beat people.

Agreed.

damien

Yeah, go for it. Just change the name of Prison to Prison/Drama

Boston

Another point, This would give a single mod, the ability to site ban based on an individual post. Something Smod(afaik) are not ment to be able to do to people that arn't misbehaving in the extreme.

Hobbes

Site bans are for people who contribute absolutly nothing to the site (eg. Spam).

Some people can get banned easily from one forum yet be the shining glory of another forum.

RuggieBear

Hobbes wrote:

Some people can get banned easily from one forum yet be the shining glory of another forum.

kevin_rc is a good example.....they seem to love him in self defence/martial arts

Boston

I diagree, ruggie, martial arts was the exception that proved he should be banned. He was a muppet on many forums, but controled himself on the one he cared about. It showed that he knew he was out of line.

RuggieBear

LiouVille wrote:

I diagree, ruggie, martial arts was the exception that proved he should be banned. He was a muppet on many forums, but controled himself on the one he cared about. It showed that he knew he was out of line.

i won't argue with that interpretation

GoneShootin

rsynnott wrote:

...stupid idea here....

Ive permenantly banned people from Tennis/Squash/Racquetball. Do you think those people should be site banned? Or would you class being perma banned from that forum a lesser crim than perma banned from PI? What's your yardstick on individual forum importance?

Doctor J

rsynnott wrote:

would make Prison more interesting

Are you joking, man? Prison has been fantastic recently... better than Neighbours and Home And Away combined

nesf

rsynnott wrote:

Anyone who recieves a serious forum-level ban (say, perma-banned from PI, etc) should be site-banned for about a month. More of a deterrent that way, and would make Prison more interesting

And tougher sentences for the terminally annoying

Sounds like a political parties promises in a run upto an election tbh.

1

get a grip people.

regi

I see where you are coming from, but I don't think we'll do this.

CuLT

Heh, the amount of people who get banned from the FS section might lead to a significant amount of sitewide bans.

Some people just aren't prepared for the For Sales section; I respect that (as long as they respect the fact that they'll get banned for disregarding the rules), and while they might get banned from there I wouldn't necessarily think that they don't belong on boards.ie altogether.

zAbbo

GoneShootin wrote:

Ive permenantly banned people from Tennis/Squash/Racquetball. Do you think those people should be site banned? Or would you class being perma banned from that forum a lesser crim than perma banned from PI? What's your yardstick on individual forum importance?

Yeah you need to keep your eyes open on that forum, busy little nugget right there(racquetball haha)

Give the lad a forum to mod, shut him up likes

oscarBravo

Doctor J wrote:

...better than Neighbours and Home And Away combined

Or, to put it another way, better than chewing broken glass.

Talliesin

CuLT wrote:

Heh, the amount of people who get banned from the FS section might lead to a significant amount of sitewide bans.

Well, one of the most common cases for site-bans is people touting in FS tickets, however these people generally don't show up in Prison, as their only interest in this site is as a place to tout tickets (the exception being someone who felt he had a moral right to tout tickets just because he was stupid enough to pay over the odds when he first got the tickets himself) which in itself shows that the admin policy of having such people completely banned is sound.

Apart from that the criteria for a forum ban is that you are doing something which is detrimental to the running of that forum (just what depends on the forum), the criteria for a category ban is that you are doing something which is detrimental to the running of that category (again, depends on the category), and the criteria for a sitewide ban is that you are doing something detrimental to the running of the site as a whole.

It's worth noting that the majority of site-bans are given for Spam, touting, posting pornography with the express purpose of causing offense (or "testing the limits of free speech" or some crap like that) or other cases where someone creates an account, immediately makes a nuisance of themselves, gets banned and has all their posts deleted, and then isn't seen in prison (in the case of those posting pornography I generally ban them from prison immediately anyway).

Really, unless you see one of their posts before we deal with it (or in rare occasions, someone posts something funny in reply and the resultant thread get's moved to CN like [thread=299197]this one[/thread]) most people aren't aware of any of these bans. The few that get any publicity are the tip of the iceberg, and most of these "hidden" bans are so cut-and-dried that they reall are nobrainers that the person should have been banned.

The next most common are people who set up duplicate accounts to get around a ban. They're banned again because otherwise bans would be pretty ineffective (incidentally that includes people using duplicate accounts to get around forum bans, allowing it would remove the moderators' sanction and so be detrimental to the entire site).

They're sometimes noticable when they try to maintain that they aren't duplicates.

Then there are people who are banned for making complete assholes of themselves on so many forums that it's just not worth having them around at all. There's a pattern of behaviour across many forums where the user just keeps making a nuisance of themselves with either no exceptions or a single exception (Kevin_RC_IE and the martial arts forum being an example). A similar case would be their posts being all about a particular feud or grudge and spread over more than one forum (e.g. one guy signed up apparantly just to argue with someone on the martial arts forum - a bit of a stupid thing to do, but fair enough - however bringing his feud into the Parenting forum got him sitebanned).

This last variety* are the people who generally are visible both in terms of their post history and later posts in the Prison forum.

They are more likely to post in Prison either to make a further nuisance of themselves (e.g. polmki), because they think they have some sort of god-given and inalienable right to use boards (e.g. themaverick), or a few cases where it's hard to tell which of the two they are in (e.g. odie).

This is the visible type of sitebanning. Their posts aren't all deleted, they say things in prison, the things they say are stupid and the smods (along with amp and moriarty) make fun of those things.

A consequence of the imbalance between the majority of bans and the few bans that are visible is that in skews the perception of just what sitebans are given out for. These people are the less obvious bans (sometimes you have to ponder the ban for more than 5 seconds, whereas with the porno-spammers they're banned before the image has entirely downloaded) and often follow quite a long sequence of complaints. This gives a false impression on just what sitebans tend to be given for - most aren't given for general muppetry.

They're also those that make prison such an amusing forum to read for some, but more sitebans will not necessarily mean more amusing drama, and besides people aren't just banned to entertain the rest of us (that's strictly a side-effect benefit).

Anyway, my point in all of this is that the reasons for sitebans are quite different to the reasons for forum or even category bans. Just how different may not be apparant from the more visible sitebans. Extending severe forum bans (permanent) into sitebans would not be appropriate.

*There are rarer cases where someone does actually manage to convince the admins or smods to lift their ban (very rare indeed, sitebans are not given lightly and not lifted lightly, and really one needs to come up with a better argument than "the mods are all c*nts, I demand that my ban be lifted. You have been warned!!!!11!!1111!!!ELEVEN!!").

magpie

I'm banned from prison.

Talliesin

Yes, a quirk of the system means that I can't unban you without giving you full posting rights.

And I'm not going to do that.