Initially I wanted to simply reply in the same thread just like Bagheera did but maybe it's better if I just open another thread about it, in this way the chance of people losing that thread again should diminuish, I suppose that this could be the right section for this discussion considering that I saw similar threads here in the past.

Bagheera wrote:Ah well. No use crying about it now, but I'll try to do better in the future.

In fact it's just an hypocrisy, it's too late for both apologies and second thoughts at this point, you got what you called an acceptable compromise while I got humiliation, frustration, people wishing my death, constant attacks to relevant content that I was legitimately posting and an incomprehensible ban which was probably longer than what you got after you started and re-started this argument at each chance or almost causing continual derailments of that thread (I assume that you got 2 days while I got 3 days of suspension, I really have no bloody idea about what "allocation of responsibility" means for the staff). Luckily I also got sympathy from some members of this board during and after these events and I'm grateful for that.
Anyway, as you said, we can only look at the future and I think that I learnt a quite instructive lesson for the future from this event: whining is a good thing to do. If you don't like something then you shouldn't stay silent and ignore it, only losers do it, you should start whining about it, even if most members just don't care about it while some others think the opposite, and keep doing it until eventually the staff, to prevent further repetitions of this drama, will at least partially satisfy you. They should just put it in the rules so everyone would already know it from the beginning, but at least I know it now, better later than never.
It goes without saying that I'm actually quite amazed by this kind of "moderation", but after all it comes from the same staff that set an ad personam policy that is being already violated by various members, I'm referring to the "labels" that are being used only by people who were already using them before, so much for the general and abstract nature of rules. Mind you, I don't care if people are using them or not, I'm criticising only the punctual and immediate unenforcement of the new policy.

You can't stop people from being intolerant fascists. Given Bagheera and svenge's posting history, I'd expect nothing less.

Just be happy they unlocked the thread. My Zizek thread from two years ago is still lying in anguish.

The problem with the modsquad is that they are too varied in their style, some are professional, others you want to strangle because of their snotty posts, some will cuss you out, change the rules at their whim with no notice, and others will encourage the point and laugh. Maybe we should support ssspider and his Magi OS, that computer would make one kick ass mod.
@Hyper Shinchan: they temped you?

A.D.T.F. approved

ran1 wrote:You can't stop people from being intolerant fascists. Given Bagheera and svenge's posting history, I'd expect nothing less.

I'd be careful with these remarks from now on, apparently I got banned for calling people intolerant, unless I misunderstood something (I didn't receive any detailed explanation besides the banning message). Anyway I have a lot of experience with Bagheera but I didn't expect anything like that from svenge, he mainly makes (interesting, for me) topics about the various video releases of Evangelion and related stuff, topics where it's almost impossible to have flames.

ran1 wrote:Just be happy they unlocked the thread. My Zizek thread from two years ago is still lying in anguish.

I guess that this is another way to look at this matter too.

KnightmareX13 wrote:@Hyper Shinchan: they temped you?

Aye and I think that they temped other people too, NemZ already mentioned it here.

Everyone who was involved got banned, for various lengths depending on severity. There's no need to advertise them, since we rarely do, though when it's more than a couple of people someone is bound to post a thread about it when they come back.

Since we can't post links in ban messages, you can just refer to the exchange on this page. Specifically in the rules you can see under "Flaming":

Posting, Section G wrote:“Stick to the points, not the people.”

While you did apologize (but insisted to push the issue), calling someone out as a racist and bigot is pretty bad, you may not think so but the administration does. You may think directly attacking people is a perfectly natural recourse in civilized discussion, we try to avoid that. Normally a warning's fine. In this case, a moderator didn't get to that thread until it was well over the line, so without playing the kindergarten game of "who started it", everyone got the hammer.

Also, you can view the full history of the changes made to the Rules. There's no way to game it or to make any change not show up in the history. Mediawiki's database makes sure that it's non-trivial to mess with content directly without going through their revision system. Aside from the occasional oversight, most of the changes are formatting and wording.

Ornette wrote:Also, you can view the full history of the changes made to the Rules. There's no way to game it or to make any change not show up in the history. Mediawiki's database makes sure that it's non-trivial to mess with content directly without going through their revision system. Aside from the occasional oversight, most of the changes are formatting and wording.

Yes but it would be a good idea if the modsquad would create a thread and post about any changes that are made so that all forum members would see that unread thread when they log on and be forewarned rather then them getting in trouble and then referring to the rules savvy?

KnightmareX13 wrote:Yes but it would be a good idea if the modsquad would create a thread and post about any changes that are made so that all forum members would see that unread thread when they log on and be forewarned rather then them getting in trouble and then referring to the rules savvy?

Have you looked over the change history? Such a thread would have like 4 posts in it over the course of almost 5 years. Like I said, they're almost all formatting, spelling fixes, or rewording. The most recent change was an oversight that should have been there when OMF proposed the change back when JFaulkner and Jimbo was omnislashing the forums up. The previous (rewording) change was over a year before that. Do you have a certain example of rules being significantly changed that needed forum wide notice?

While having a sticky announcement about rule changes isn't a bad idea, most people don't read the rules and they get changed so infrequently, I'm not sure if the mods would even remember to update the thread.

The update about omnislashing, which was prompted by another exchange between me and Bagheera, actually contains a fairly important information about the number of consecutive messages between two members, it wouldn't be a bad idea to publicise similar innovations, or solidifications of conventions if you prefer to think so.

Well, I'm pretty much satisfied with the explanation about my banning now that I've been given an exact reference to the rules, even though as Ornette said I don't completely agree with some rules in the first place but this is not an issue, actually Bagheera mentioned something about it but unfortunately I didn't remember that part about flaming, anyway I have two final considerations to make:
1) It would have been a good idea to give a warning before things got too hot, it wasn't exactly the first time we had similar exchanges and derailments, something similar but on a lesser scale happened just some days before, then we had the same problem as soon as I re-started posting some Kaworu pics after dumping mostly Rei pics for a while.
2) Personally I would appreciate greater communication from the staff when similar issues arise, a single phrase in the banning message isn't really enough to explain exactly why you've been excluded from the community, especially if you can't link to the relevant rule(s), an e-mail or at least a PM could make things easier to understand and accept.

Hyper Shinchan wrote:1) It would have been a good idea to give a warning before things got too hot, it wasn't exactly the first time we had similar exchanges and derailments, something similar but on a lesser scale happened just some days before, then we had the same problem as soon as I re-started posting some Kaworu pics after dumping mostly Rei pics for a while.

Something would have been said if someone was around to say it. Like I said, by the time a moderator got to it, it was 3 pages deep in shit. Although while hindsight is 20/20, sometimes there's no warning in hopes it just dies down by itself, sometimes there's a warning before things even get heated because we've been down that road before, you'll find people who object to either choice, but this is just one of the times when it happened too fast and at a time when nobody was actively modding.

2) Personally I would appreciate greater communication from the staff when similar issues arise, a single phrase in the banning message isn't really enough to explain exactly why you've been excluded from the community, especially if you can't link to the relevant rule(s), an e-mail or at least a PM could make things easier to understand and accept.

I agree that there probably needs to be a better system for conveying bans. At one point we didn't even have ban messages, so just having a small 256 character, no-bbcode, blurb was better than before. PM's don't exactly work, since you can't read them until you're let back, if the ban was short enough that you remember to do so (you'll have gotten an email notification about it). We used to do emails, at least on some of the occasions where it didn't seem obvious why someone was getting banned (we all thought this instance was pretty blatantly obvious), so many of those ended up badly (at least 2 occasions I had to put a block on the evageeks.org mail server because of the non-stop spamming) that it wasn't worth taking the conversation off the forums. A post-explanation as-needed is usually good enough for minor cases.

Maybe at some point when I'm bored and have time, I'll expand the forum code so that the ban messages contain a couple of more fields aside from the 256 character limit message.

Ornette wrote:While you did apologize (but insisted to push the issue), calling someone out as a racist and bigot is pretty bad, you may not think so but the administration does.

To be fair, some of what went on in there was definately a result of bigotry and such bullshit should be called out when it appears. That isn't a personal attack, it's an observation.

NemZ wrote:To be fair, some of what went on in there was definately a result of bigotry and such bullshit should be called out when it appears. That isn't a personal attack, it's an observation.

Agreed on this one.

NemZ wrote:To be fair, some of what went on in there was definately a result of bigotry and such bullshit should be called out when it appears. That isn't a personal attack, it's an observation.

That's true. But to be fair to the mods Shinchan was also handing out that accusation (or insinuation in some cases) pretty liberally. Sometimes it was on the mark. Other times, not so much.

(In all honesty my own arguments and actions probably abetted such behavior, but they were not motivated by it. The fact that the distinction can be hard to parse in the midst of a heated argument is one of many reasons why the whole enterprise was a bad idea on my part.)

So, I haven't used the site in a few weeks... what happened? What kind of storm did I miss?

About three pages of bad tempered postings in the pictures thread in Chit-Chat from about a week ago.