Hey, folks.
Lately, particularly with the advent of the television show, we've had a number of heated discussions and overexcited members going places with their discussions that we aren't always comfortable with. However, the volume of discussion is such that the moderators themselves can't keep up with all the posts that are happening; we have to rely on posts getting reported to us by the community.
While we aren't guaranteed to take action on every reported post, we will at a minimum take a look at those posts and make a decision about whether or not it's "actionable". If we think it isn't, we're not going to say anything about it. If it is, we're going to do our best to enforce the following policy reasonably consistently. These statements and actions are going to take place semi-publically; sometimes there will be a post made on the thread in which the offense is occurring, sometimes it'll be taken to private message.
First warning: "Hey, cool it". Just a friendly reminder that this is an easygoing community and to help us keep it that way.
Second warning: "Continuing this path of behavior will lead to a temporary ban." Clearly, someone's not doing that "help us keep it that way" thing. So this is us taking out our Moderator Stick and putting it on the table -- a reminder that it can and will be used.
Third warning: "You've been banned for 3 days." The penalty box. We still want you to be part of this community, but you need a break from it, and it needs a break from you, in order to "reset" and get back on an even keel. These actions won't be done with malice; please understand that we're acting to address the health of the jim-butcher.com community as a whole.
Fourth warning: "Please stop coming here." If you come out of the third-warning cool-off period swinging for the fences, you can expect to get permanently banned from the board. It's clear that taking a break isn't enough to get you to reevaluate your priorities for participation in a way that is healthy for the community, so it's time for us moderator-surgeons to cut you out of the system you're poisoning. Dig? -- If it's been a reasonable length of time since your last "third warning", you've got a buffer, however. We may consider your counter reset to an earlier warning-level -- permanent ban is meant to be used as a tool to address chronic abusers, not people who've happened to have more than one bad day over the course of the year.
Finally, beyond this policy for taking action against specific users, there will occasionally be an entire thread that looks to have taken on too much toxicity in order to remain productive and healthy for the board. At times, again for the health of the community, we will shut down such threads, setting them to "locked" and making it clear that the thread/topic has been closed for discussion. In such cases, we strongly encourage you not to go start a new thread that picks up exactly where the closed one left off. If you do, we'll consider you to have already gotten past the "first warning" stage, at the least.
Again: we need your help to keep the community easy-going and pleasant for EVERYONE involved. While I'll certainly grant that we've been inconsistent with enforcement, the sheer volume of traffic we've been seeing lately is the greatest reason for that. We're going to do our best to get consistent from here on out. From you, we need:
* Pleasant cooperation with our judgments when enforcing the above policies, and:
* Helping us to spot problems as they're occurring (use the "report this post" tool!)
Thanks everyone!
