I can easily understand the motives behind doing this. However, I really do not like this, or similar, practices. There is a reason behind this, which I call the "intellectual/idealogical echo-chamber". Whenever speech is excluded, for whatever reason, those who are responsible for who is allowed to speak or what is allowed to be said ultimately have control over what information is discussed and what conclusions are drawn from it through the choices they make in allowances of who speaks/what is said.

What this does is create a discussion format where everyone is "preaching to the choir" and everyone agrees with everyone, and no new information is introduced and no alternative views (no matter how constructive to the conversation) are expressed. This, for those who don't know, is a bad thing.

So I ask this to the moderation staff; what is the deal with how people are selected as worthy of posting in this forum? What are the criteria for being included and excluded? Rules for the forum at large exist, yet none do (except in the most ambiguous manner) for the Rebuild sub-forum. Why is this?

Now it seemed that the measure was fairly well thought out and bans were selective based on egregious behavior in the sub-forum in question. However, what happened to me is starting to lead me to believe that it may be entirely arbitrary and that has me concerned.

I was able to post in the Rebuild sub-forum until tonight, when I was alerted that I needed this "special permission" in order to do so. Until now I have received no warnings, bans or other sort of disciplinary action taken against me. I have received no alert that has told me that I am unable to post there. In my mind, if someone can select someone to be banned from a sub-forum, they sure as fuck can take a moment to shoot a PM to that person telling them why.

There are two related reasons that this has me concerned. The first is that if I don't know what I did wrong, there is no measure for which I can use to correct my behavior. The second reason relates to the "echo-chamber I mentioned above. If someone is able to be banned for any reason, then there is nothing restraining a mod from banning someone for expressing a dissenting opinion. That is a very bad thing anywhere that "discussion" is supposedly supported.

So I invite anyone to tell me why I have been excluded from this sub-forum. I know I do not post there often, but it irks me that a ban of any sort can take place without a reason given.

There's been a few cases where a user mysteriously gets removed from a usergroup. Still haven't figured out why this happens. Posting in certain subforums have usergroup-based permissions, and for some unknown reason (and it doesn't seem to happen often enough to be able to reproduce in order to debug) users get removed from usergroups. When the moderation staff does this, it's usually preceeded with warnings via PMs and at the very least a lot of internal discussion between the mods, doesn't seemed to have happened in your case so I assume the forum screwed up somehow. This is maybe the 3rd time this has happened in the last 6 months, and for some reason, always to new users

Moderators can't ban anyone from anything, so an admin would have had to do it. If an admin did it they can speak up and explain, but I personally haven't heard anything about it and it's staff policy to give multiple warnings and PMs before banning anyone from any parts of the site. I'd chalk this up to some kind of error in the permissions. If there were a problem I'd have known about it and you'd have too.

Edit: Xpost, sorry Ornette.

Ornette wrote:There's been a few cases where a user mysteriously gets removed from a usergroup. Still haven't figured out why this happens. Posting in certain subforums have usergroup-based permissions, and for some unknown reason (and it doesn't seem to happen often enough to be able to reproduce in order to debug) users get removed from usergroups. When the moderation staff does this, it's usually preceeded with warnings via PMs and at the very least a lot of internal discussion between the mods, doesn't seemed to have happened in your case so I assume the forum screwed up somehow. This is maybe the 3rd time this has happened in the last 6 months, and for some reason, always to new users

May I ask what you have tried? The only thing I can think of is some posting threshold gets crossed and that triggers something in code.

I apologize for being antagonistic (though I still dislike the ban system, though that is personal opinion), but to explain it, I have been the victim of behavior from moderators and admins before that had all of the symptoms of what happened to me tonight. It's not a pleasant thing to know that one has been singled out for no discernible reason, hence my attitude.

Tribblepoo wrote:May I ask what you have tried? The only thing I can think of is some posting threshold gets crossed and that triggers something in code.

What I have tried, as in debugging? Nothing. This happens so rarely that there's nothing to look at in the server or forum logs to even begin to start looking. I've once had a script monitor the usergorups table for changes, it ran for months and there weren't any changes.

It's unlikely that it's caused by posting, since none of the execution thread of posting a message has anything to do with the usergroup table except for a SELECT. The only places that ever modifies the table is when a user removes themself from a group from the Groups link, or if an admin does it from the control panel. The later, I have logged and the last time someone was in the panel between now and the time you registered was to update someone's superlong sig.

Unlike the rest of the forum which have had a good bit of modifications made to it, the usergroup stuff is untouched and works the same way as an out-of-the-box phpbb2 forum. So maybe there's some inherent bug with phpbb. It happens rarely enough that I'm not willing to spend a ton of time on it, and everyone (before you) who had been mysteriously removed from a posting usergroup simply PMed a mod and we re-added them.