Oops slipped some words, edited in. A banned user was spamming through PMs (like 300 messages to various users) so albert removed the ability.
Posted under General
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葉月 said:
As a fallout of my last round of bans, I want to discuss the behaviour of Schrobby. S/he was one of the people banned for quoting spoiling comments. However, s/he apparently went directly to albert, who then promptly removed his/her ban, and only then s/he bothered to contact me (complaining that he had no idea why he was banned). The problem with this is that I was the one who knows the reason for the ban, and albert had no way to check the history with the offending comments having been deleted. Thus Schrobby effectively evaded the ban by misrepresenting his situation to albert instead of contacting me.My question here is twofold:
- Should I treat it the same as plain ban evasion and thus give him/her an extended ban? Ordinarily I'd say yes, but s/he did contact me, and I wouldn't have found out otherwise, so in a way it'd be punishing for honesty.
- Could we adopt an official, explicit policy of not interferring with other mods' administrative decisions without contacting the mod in question first (barring an extended leave (more than, say, 24h without reply) when it's otherwise impossible to determine the justification for a dubious decision)? The point is specifically to include albert in this policy, as he simply has no time (and historically, inclination) to consider carefully each individual case, and is thus relatively easy to trick into reverting a deserved punishment.
If he goes over your head and the admin overrules you, I don't think he should be punished because of the admin's decision. Since he seems to legitimately not know why he was banned, his decisions make sense in that context and to slap on "bad evasion" on top of this is absurd. I'm not going to tell the mod who banned me, at least on danbooru, that he was wrong since that will not lead to anything productive.
I'd say that the policy is fine as it is otherwise it creates more bureaucracy to deal with and makes it more confused.
At any rate, I don't see it as ban evasion.
Log said:
Yes it was discussed we agreed that the inability of users to spam messages all over the place was more pressing than the minor inconvenience of not being able to dmail after a temp ban.
That's an incredibly bad decision. It's not a "minor inconvenience", it's permanently silencing the only sensible channel through which a banned user might try to appeal the decision, try to find out more to avoid mistakes in the future, or try to negotate with the banning mod. That changes the game drastically for the worse. A big part of my policy is the assumption that reasonable users who really meant no harm will try to contact me, if only to apologise; that assumption is now completely invalidated by yet another "oh we don't really have an immediate perfect answer, so let's take the ability to do X away from everybody below me" non-solution.
There are a variety of things that could've been done instead:
All of the above would be immensely better than this horrible cop-out.
Anelaid said:
If he goes over your head and the admin overrules you [...]
I'd say that the policy is fine as it is otherwise it creates more bureaucracy to deal with and makes it more confused.
Now look at it from the other side: I've been appointed a steward tasked with keeping the site in order, and to that end I was granted the ability to ban particularly bad offenders. Now when albert overrules my decision without even bothering to contact or notify me in any way, he's effectively saying "fuck the fact I trusted you with being a good moderator, I will assume the guy you just banned is right and thus more trustworthy than an appointed mod". Alternatively he doesn't give a fuck that I might have my reasons and some kind of an outlook on how I might best contribute to the site as a mod, and will interfere arbitrarily and immediately with my decisions, yet Seem continues to be a mod despite the fact he's nothing more than a vandal and he has been notified of that. Neither is an implication I like.
葉月 said:
Why was that not discussed (or was it)?
It happened in forum #52139
葉月 said:
That's an incredibly bad decision. It's not a "minor inconvenience", it's permanently silencing the only sensible channel through which a banned user might try to appeal the decision, try to find out more to avoid mistakes in the future, or try to negotate with the banning mod.
Yeah, there's a trac for that.
Now look at it from the other side: I've been appointed a steward tasked with keeping the site in order, and to that end I was granted the ability to ban particularly bad offenders. Now when albert overrules my decision without even bothering to contact or notify me in any way, he's effectively saying "fuck the fact I trusted you with being a good moderator, I will assume the guy you just banned is right and thus more trustworthy than an appointed mod". Alternatively he doesn't give a fuck that I might have my reasons and some kind of an outlook on how I might best contribute to the site as a mod, and will interfere arbitrarily and immediately with my decisions, yet Seem continues to be a mod despite the fact he's nothing more than a vandal and he has been notified of that. Neither is an implication I like.
And the boss, can at any time and for any reason, override your decision which is his right. You've acted similarly with your decision to nuke an entire artist's work without getting prior consent, so this can't work both ways. My only statement is that the punishing a user for ban evasion if he appeals an admin seems wrong and seems like a breach of authority, to me. Take it up with the admin if you don't like it, but don't punish the user, especially if they can't communicate with you directly. I can't support your idea of listing it as ban evasion since that creates an entirely new mess.
What problems Seem may have is irrelevant to me because he is not the top admin of this site. I don't know why hes a mod but I'm not going to get involved since aside from things here and there, I don't know much about him.
As for not sending PMs, there should be some way for a user, who is banned, to make an appeal separate from the PM system. Both to prevent spam and to streamline the process of appeals.
Anelaid said:
My only statement is that the punishing a user for ban evasion if he appeals an admin seems wrong and seems like a breach of authority, to me.
That hasn't been on the table ever since I learnt banned users can't dmail, which changes everything. That's one thing. The other is that this is exactly why I asked here, because contrary to what many people might think of me, I don't ban people for a hobby.
葉月 said: * Should I treat it the same as plain ban evasion and thus give him/her an extended ban? Ordinarily I'd say yes, but s/he did contact me, and I wouldn't have found out otherwise, so in a way it'd be punishing for honesty.
It's a bad call by albert, but it's not ban evasion. He appealed to a higher authority - it's just unfortunate that said authority acted as he did.
- Could we adopt an official, explicit policy of not interferring with other mods' administrative decisions without contacting the mod in question first (barring an extended leave (more than, say, 24h without reply) when it's otherwise impossible to determine the justification for a dubious decision)?
That's generally the policy I follow.
Changing gears now, are there any spoilers in this post? I'm not sure if there is.
Seems to be the start of some spam. Might be best to kill it before it spreads.
I unbanned him because I think a three week ban for quoting a spoiler he didn't realize was a spoiler is excessive. And I consider Madoka a special case. It's a show that's so absurdly popular and ubiquitous that it's kind of futile to try and shield yourself from 4 week old spoilers (I assume most of the complaints are about episode 3), especially on a site with such a heavy anime presence as this one. Bans are in order, but I consider 3 weeks excessive. Forgive me if the bans are for more recent spoilers. Was Schrobby a repeat offender?
Things I need to do: a way for janitors to edit comment so we leave an accountability trail.
As for Seem, I reviewed his approvals when you sent me that message and I didn't see much worth unjanitoring him for. I'm apathetic to the fake_translation debacle, but maybe it's worse than what I thought it was. If you believe he's done other things that make him unsuitable to be a janitor, then let's discuss those things. I doubt he'll come to defend himself but if there's broad consensus I'll override my personal opinions and drop him.
So I reviewed the wiki article on spoilers and it turned out to be far more developed than I remember it being!
Which is fine.
If everyone believes that the punishment for spoilers needs to be draconian, regardless of the intention of the spoilerer, then let it be so. If you want to reban Schrobby then go ahead.
Did you check the approver:seem status:deleted score:<0, approver:seem score:<-5 and post #744989 ?
edit: and approver:seem user:seem = unapproved and reapproved by the uploader
can't unapprove post #31629 (off-topic).
Actually, I count 14 pages (without pixiv thumbnails and manga samples).
Updated
*pulls up his own*
approver:fencedude status:deleted score:<0
Less than one page, out of 302. Several of which are things I approved so I could delete immediately, a few were pixiv manga samples, and then maybe ~10 were legitimately bad approvals
Maybe I'm just ahead of the curve.
albert said:
Yes, but every janitor has his share of shitty approvals. 7 bad pages out of 517 is overall pretty good.
Quess has 2 such pages of of 528 pages of approvals; 葉月, 1 of 210; スラッシュ, 1 of 267; phane, 1 of 100. The other mods have too few approvals to make this statistic accurate when counting on a page basis, and I don't feel like calculating actual post counts, but rest assured that Seem's approvals are well into the long tail of bad judgement.
And as S1eth pointed out, self-reapproval is an issue; not a huge one, by numbers, but exacerbated by the fact that he doesn't seem to be willing to even consider the possibility that it's a bad idea (see forum #47863).
He's also the only Mod with a negative record overall, and I haven't gone through the Janitors, but I suspect none of them have negative records either.
Check out approver:seem order:id_asc too. There's a lot of ancient off-topic bullshit that he nevertheless reapproved. Differences in taste are one thing, but some of this stuff is just ridiculous. Just look at post #28099. Or post #24785. Or post #66771. What was he thinking?