Fuck it, for old time's sake.
Play it again Sam.
Play it again Sam.
Has Houseman been banned?
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I don't think anybody here is disputing the ban.
Personally I'd just like it if there was some indication a user was banned, and also a link to the offending post and a reason given would be nice. It would head off threads like this. Surely it's possible to automatically replace a user's title with the word BANNED when they are banned, or something to that effect.
I believe it was this one, but the rest of his posts further into the thread didn't do him any favours and compounded the marks against him on top of this example I linked. All a collective whole rather than just a singular post, if that makes sense
Thank you.
Hmmm, as far as offensive posts go, that was really, really tame. There wasn't any explicit racism or sexism. He called a woman on a youtube video fat and said she looked like an scripted unpaid intern. That's nothing. If that sort of thing is too much for the Escapist's delicate sensibilities then I really hope everyone stays away from a really awful show called Zero Punctuation. The creator on that show says all sorts of profane bile on a weekly basis, he even once said he felt that Hitler was right!
I was really hoping that it'd be something shockingly bad that I could grudgingly agree with, but it wasn't at all. It wasn't the nicest thing he could have said, but it was about some random developer in a youtube video. If he'd said it to an Escapist user or contributor then yeah, ban him, but the chances of that developer ever coming to the forums and reading his post is next to zero. That is the way the forum moderation has always worked in the past. Frankly, what I see from that thread is a bunch of people who don't like B-Cell using a slightly non-pc post to put words in his mouth and get him banned. He is clearly and painfully ESL so it's easy for him to say things in a manner he may not have intended and even easier for someone who doesn't like him to twist his words further into something offensive, and he doesn't have a good enough grasp of the language to defend himself.
The things people have said to and about B-Cell in his threads have been far more worthy of mod wrath than anything that B-Cell said in that thread. I would say that I'm surprised at the Escapist community, but I'm not, I'm just disappointed. I've seen this behavior many times over the years. People will pick an acceptable target, and every time they post will pick apart their comment and leave passive aggressive insults until they get fed up, lash out and get banned. Well, B-Cell didn't even do that. The way B-Cell was treated, in general, made me lose respect for a number of users that seem to consider themselves progressive, empathetic, and virtuous.
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Not sure why you're defending him. Dude had some pretty perverse views towards female representation and characters. Those undertones came through in almost all of his threads.
Are you familiar with the concept of 'The straw that broke the camel's back'? Because that's what his ban seemed to be. An accumulation of warnings and other threats of sanction to get his shit together and stop being a prat. He refused, and he was shown the fuckin' door because the house decided he'd outstayed his welcome.
While we're on the subject, did Zontar get banned or did he fuck off back to 8chan or whatever? I haven't seen his happy ass around here for quite a while.
No, not banned. His last posts were a year and a half before the move to v2. I think he just left.
I rather take the view that lots of small offences add up to a big one, and mods can eventually draw a line after so many and say that's enough.
You cannot speak and act without giving something of yourself away, and potentially more than you intended. If someone repeatedly litters their comments with little digs and denigrations, people notice. They can get away with one, two, maybe more, but eventually people will notice these patterns / trends and draw the conclusions: and they're usually right. If you're getting warnings, you need to take a look at the sorts of things you're saying and reflect carefully. Or not give a toss, and accept peer criticism and potentially forum bans.
He was banned, unbanned (with I think a completely clear slate), racked up a load more pips on his health meter, but I think ultimately departed voluntarily.
That's what the old board did, and it came with its own set of problems.
The way the old forum software would fixate on the final post that got someone banned, often meant that it obfuscated the rest of their missteps prior to that.
More times than I could shake a stick at, we had people make the comment "Oh, that's not ban-worthy!" when looking at the final post in complete isolation, and ignoring the established pattern of behavior leading up to that point.
In some cases, not a single infraction (when viewed alone) might be considered "ban-worthy". But the line has to be drawn somewhere, when a clear pattern of underhanded rudeness, inflammatory commentary, or bad-faith posting starts to emerge.
The new forum software takes things to the other extreme when a user is banned. The user in question is notified and informed of the reasoning of course, but from the perspective of 3rd-party onlookers there's little indication that anything has happened at all.
I'm not sure which option is best, as they both have their pros and cons. Perhaps the answer is neither, or something in between.
But with the way V2 is at least, there does seem to be less of a backlash from random users after somebody is banned, and fewer examples of 'armchair moderators' critiquing moderation decisions.
Could there be more transparency? Perhaps. But the argument can also be made that a forum ban is really nobody else's business other than between the ban-ee and the forum staff.
Well there is Resetera and it's infamy for banning people fresh into the forum for not fitting in under an ever shrinking bandwith of acceptable stances. But then again even Resetera's indoctrination can be contagious in my posts.
If people know what gets someone banned, they have a better understanding of what not to do to avoid being banned, though. Sure, the rules are written down, but how rules are applied is often not obvious.
The old forum had a rule about not being a jerk, which evidently didn't exclude calling for the extermination of all people living in Africa, for example, because that was Therumancer's political opinion, presumably.
According to them, they got banned for clogging up the report queue because they went into old B-Cell topics and reported old posts that were hostile against B-Cell.
Hopped over to Arnox' place, see if they showed up there with an explanation, and lo and behold, it was so. Anyway, says it was for spamming reports. The way B-Cell was treated doesn't sit well with them, so they went back through B-Cells history and flagged any post that insulted him.
EDIT: Welp, bluegate ninja'd me
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